Thousands of IT decision makers, operators and the developers will gather April 29 – May 1 at the Open Infrastructure Summit in Denver, Colorado to collaborate across common use cases and solve real problems.
On Monday, April 29, from 2:50 p.m. – 3:30 p.m., members of the OpenSDS project and the Technical Working Group (TWG) which develops SNIA Swordfish™, are holding a Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) session at the summit titled “Open Storage Management.” Read More
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
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
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
The most recent installment of our SNIA ESF webcast series “Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask” took on a broad topic – storage management. Our experts, Richelle Ahlvers, Mark Rogov and Alex McDonald did a great job explaining the basics and have now answered the questions that attendees asked here in this blog. If you missed the live webcast, check it out on-demand and download a copy of the slides if you’d like to take notes. Read More
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
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
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.
A new SNIA specification offers a unified approach to managing storage and servers in environments like hyperscale and cloud infrastructures. SNIA on Storage recently sat down with SNIA member volunteers from the Scalable Storage Management Technical Work Group (SSM TWG), who just announced the completion of Version 1.0 of the SNIA SwordfishTM storage management specification, to learn more. Read More