Category: DMTF

Scaling Management of Storage and Fabrics

Richelle Ahlvers Leave a comment

Composable disaggregated infrastructures (CDI) provide a promising solution to address the provisioning and computational efficiency limitations, as well as hardware and operating costs, of integrated, siloed, systems. But how do we solve these problems in an open, standards-based way?

DMTF, SNIA, the OFA, and the CXL Consortium are working together to provide elements of the overall solution, with Redfish® and SNIA Swordfish™ manageability providing the standards-based interface.

The OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) is developing an OpenFabrics Management Framework (OFMF) designed for configuring fabric interconnects and managing composable disaggregated resources in dynamic HPC infrastructures using client-friendly abstractions.

Want to learn more? Read More

Using SNIA Swordfish™ to Manage Storage on Your Network

Barry Kittner Leave a comment

Consider how we charge our phones: we can plug them into a computer’s USB port, into a wall outlet using a power adapter, or into an external/portable power bank. We can even place them on top of a Qi-enabled pad for wireless charging. None of these options are complicated, but we routinely charge our phones throughout the day and, thanks to USB and standardized charging interfaces, our decision boils down to what is available and convenient.

Now consider how a storage administrator chooses to add storage capacity to a datacenter.  There are so many ways to do it:  Add one or more physical drives to a single server; add additional storage nodes to a software-defined storage cluster; add additional storage to a dedicated storage network device that provides storage to be used by other (data) servers.

These options all require consideration as to the data protection methods utilized such as RAID or Erasure Coding, and the performance expectations these entail. Complicating matters further are the many different devices and standards to choose from, including traditional spinning HDDs, SSDs, Flash memory, optical drives, and Persistent Memory.

Each storage instance can also be deployed as file, block, or object storage which can affect performance. Selection of the communication protocol such as iSCSI and FC/FCoE can limit scalability options. And finally, with some vendors adding the requirement of using their management paradigm to control these assets, it’s easy to see how these choices can be daunting.

But… it doesn’t need to be so complicated! Read More

How SNIA Swordfish™ Expanded with NVMe® and NVMe-oF™

Richelle Ahlvers Leave a comment

The SNIA Swordfish™ specification and ecosystem are growing in scope to include full enablement and alignment for NVMe® and NVMe-oF client workloads and use cases. By partnering with other industry-standard organizations including DMTF®, NVM Express, and OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA), SNIA’s Scalable Storage Management Technical Work Group has updated the Swordfish bundles from version 1.2.1 and later to cover an expanding range of NVMe and NVMe-oF functionality including NVMe device management and storage fabric technology management and administration.

The Need
Large-scale computing designs are increasingly multi-node and linked together through high-speed networks. These networks may be comprised of different types of technologies, fungible, and morphing. Over time, many different types of high-performance networking devices will evolve to participate in these modern, coupled-computing platforms. New fabric management capabilities, orchestration, and automation will be required to deploy, secure, and optimally maintain these high-speed networks.

The NVMe and NVMe-oF specifications provide comprehensive management for NVMe devices at an individual level, however, when you want to manage these devices at a system or data center level, DMTF Redfish and SNIA Swordfish are the industry’s gold standards. Together, Redfish and Swordfish enable a comprehensive view across the system, data center, and enterprise, with NVMe and NVMe-oF instrumenting the device-level view. This complete approach provides a way to manage your entire environment across technologies with standards-based management, making it more cost-effective and easier to operate.
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An Introduction: What is Swordfish?

Barry Kittner Leave a comment

Barry Kittner, Technology Initiatives Manager, Intel and SNIA Storage Management Initiative Governing Board Member

To understand Swordfish, let’s start with the basics to examine how modern data centers are managed.

A user of a PC/notebook is assumed to be in control of that PC.  What happens when there are two? Or 10? Or 1,000? Today’s modern data centers can have 100,000 computers (servers) or more! That requires the ability to be in control or “manage” them from a central location.  How does one do that?  It is done via a protocol that enables remote management; today that standard is IPMI, an acronym for Intelligent Platform Management Interface, and which has existed for 20 years.  Among issues with IPMI is that the scale of today’s data centers was not fully envisioned 20 years ago, so some of the components of IPMI cannot cover the tens of thousands of servers it is expected to manage.  The developers also did not foresee the stringent security and increased privacy requirements expected in modern data centers. Read More

SNIA Swordfish is Swimming Fast – Catch Up Now!

Richelle Ahlvers Leave a comment

If you haven’t caught the updates on SNIA SwordfishTM lately, please read on because it’s swimming fast! The new SNIA specification offers a unified approach to managing storage and servers in environments like hyperscale and cloud infrastructures. SNIA’s Scalable Storage Management Technical Work Group (SSM TWG) just announced completion of Version 1.0.3. The new version reflects specification enhancements in multiple areas plus a User’s Guide, multiple new use cases and a new document section.

“Because SNIA Swordfish is an extension to DMTF’s (Distributed Management Task Force) open industry Redfish™ standard, it specifies the same RESTful interface and utilizes JavaScript Object Notation and Open Data Protocol to help customers integrate solutions within their existing tool chains,” said Don Deel, Chairman, SNIA Storage Management Initiative. “The SSM TWG members responsible for helping develop SNIA Swordfish represent many of the leading companies in the storage industry today, including Broadcom, Dell EMC, HPE, Intel, Microsoft, NetApp, Nimble Storage and VMware.”

You can also keep up with the latest Swordfish updates by continually visiting the SNIA Swordfish website. If you’re interested in helping shape the future of storage management by getting involved in the development of SNIA Swordfish, please e-mail storagemanagement@snia.org.