Category: Uncategorized

What’s New with SNIA Swordfish™?

Richelle Ahlvers Leave a comment

If you haven’t caught the new wave in storage management, it’s time to dive in and catch up on the latest developments of the SNIA Swordfish™ specification.

First, a quick recap.

SNIA Swordfish is the storage extension to the DMTF Redfish® specification providing customer-centric, easy integration of scalable storage management solutions. This unified, RESTful approach provides IT administrators, DevOps and others the ability to manage storage equipment, data services and servers in converged, hyperconverged, hyperscale or cloud infrastructure environments as well as traditional data centers. Read More

Take the Leap to SMI-S Version 1.8.0

Don Deel Leave a comment

If you’re a storage equipment or management software vendor that uses SNIA’s Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) as the storage management interface for your solution, you’re not alone.

First introduced in 2004, SMI-S has been used in over 1,350 storage products by some of the largest vendors in the industry. It defines a secure and reliable interface that can be used to discover, monitor, and control the physical and logical devices in enterprise storage area networks. Unlike proprietary management interfaces, SMI-S is a standard interface that allows management applications to reliably support a wider range of storage equipment from multiple vendors.

Read More

Join SNIA at Pure//Accelerate 2019: Austin, September 15-18

Richelle Ahlvers Leave a comment

Equal parts education, information, and inspiration, Pure//Accelerate 2019 is where technology and innovation meet. It’s a place to learn about new products, solutions, and integrations. It is a place for technology enthusiasts to explore industry trends, network with like-minded companies, and map out how to stay ahead as the tech landscape rapidly changes.

SNIA Board Member and Chair of the Scalable Storage Management Technical Work Group Richelle Ahlvers will be joining SNIA Storage Management Initiative Board Member “Barkz” at Pure//Accelerate on Wednesday, September 18, 2019 from 2:00 p.m. – 2:45 p.m. for a presentation titled “Reel It In: SNIA Swordfish™ Scalable Storage Management”

By extending the DMTF Redfish® API protocol and schema, SNIA Swordfish™ helps provide a unified approach for the management of storage equipment, data services, and servers. Learn how Pure Storage is using the Swordfish RESTful interface to support the implementation of fast, efficient storage products.

Take advantage of special pricing for SNIA members. Register here.

Storage Management – Standards Matter

Don Deel Leave a comment
By Don Deel, Senior Standards Technologist, NetApp; SNIA SMI Governing Board Chair, SMI Technical Development Committee Chair

By 2025, IDC says worldwide data will grow 61% to 175 zettabytes, with as much of the data residing in the cloud as in data centers. A zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes. Now multiply that 175 times. It’s mind boggling. And with the explosion in data, IDC states that businesses are looking to centralize data management and delivery, as well as to leverage data to control their businesses and the user experience.

The Storage Management Initiative (SMI) is a SNIA group that helps unify the storage industry to develop and standardize interoperable storage management technologies for today’s IT environments and next generation data centers. It supports the development of storage management solutions based upon standard interfaces instead of proprietary interfaces.  Standard storage interfaces lower costs, make integration efforts easier and provide increased reliability, security and manageability. Read More

Take the Leap to SMI-S 1.8 v3 for Streamlined Storage Management

Mike Walker Leave a comment
Mike Walker, former chair, SNIA SMI TWG; former IBM engineer

Whether you’re a software provider or a hardware vendor, it’s a good time to check out the latest updates to the Storage Networking Industry Association’s (SNIA’s) Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) standard. The latest version SMI-S 1.8 v3 is now a SNIA Technical Position that meets your current needs and offers enticing new enhancements for you and your potential new customers. This version will also be sent to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) for approval, making it a valuable asset worldwide if accepted.

“IT system administrators who demand a choice in storage vendors and infrastructure while ensuring advanced feature enablement through interoperability, have long benefitted from SMI-S,” says Don Deel, chairman, SMI Technical Work Group and SMI Governing Board. “The standard streamlines storage management functions and features into a common set of tools that address the day-to-day tasks of the IT environment.” Read More

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™ – Your Questions Answered

Richelle Ahlvers Leave a comment

The Storage Networking Industry Association’s (SNIA’s) Storage Management Initiative (SMI) took on the topic of SNIA Swordfish™ in a live webcast titled “Introduction to SNIA Swordfish™ – Scalable Storage Management.” The replay is available here. SNIA experts Richelle Ahlvers and Don Deel, responded to questions during the webcast. Here are those questions and responses:

Q. You talked about two different ways to add storage to Redfish – hosted service configuration and integrated service configuration. When would you use one configuration instead of the other?

A. The integrated services configuration was added to clarify support with direct attach configurations using Swordfish constructs. If you have a server that has a RAID card in it, and you want to have it use a more complex storage configuration – storage pools and some notion of class of service, you would use the integrated service configuration. The hosted service configuration is used to model non-direct attach configurations, such as external storage arrays, or file services. Read More

Managing Your Computing Ecosystem Part Two

Kristen Hauser Leave a comment

by George Ericson, Distinguished Engineer, Dell EMC; Member,
SNIA Scalable Storage Management Technical Working Group,
@GEricson

 

Introduction

This blog is part two of a three-part series by George Ericson, a distinguished engineer at Dell EMC. If you missed part one, you can read it here. George is an active participant on the SNIA Scalable Storage Management Technical Working Group which has been developing the SNIA Swordfish™ storage management specification. Read More

Managing Your Computing Ecosystem

Kristen Hauser Leave a comment

  By George Ericson, Distinguished Engineer, Dell EMC; Member, SNIA Scalable Storage Management Technical Working Group, @GEricson

Introduction

This blog is part one of a three-part series recently published on “The Data Cortex”, which represents the thoughts and opinions from members of the CTO Team of Dell EMC’s Data Protection Division.  The author, George Ericson, has been actively participating on the SNIA Scalable Storage Management Technical Working Group which has been developing the SNIA Swordfish™ storage management specification. Read More