Join the Conversation at the Open Infrastructure Summit

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.”

To kick things off, Richelle Ahlvers, SNIA board member, chair of the Scalable Storage Management TWG, and storage management architect, Broadcom, will provide a brief overview of the SNIA Swordfish storage management specification. Swordfish is an extension to the DMTF Redfish® specification that provides a unified approach for the management of storage equipment and services in converged, hyper-converged, hyperscale and cloud infrastructure environments.  Swordfish is built using a RESTful interface over HTTPS in JSON format, and also provides support for OpenAPI.

Richelle will also discuss the lifecycle of creating consistent open standard interfaces, from definition to implementations, and how the open source ecosystem plays a role in open infrastructure management.

Xing Yang, principal architect at Huawei Technologies, and project and architecture lead in OpenSDS, will explain how the open source community addresses storage integration challenges in scale-out cloud native environments and connects siloed data solutions.

The session will be interactive and attendees will be encouraged to join in the conversation, get their questions answered and share their knowledge while making valuable new connections. Add the BoF to your conference schedule here.

While visiting the summit, stop by to see SNIA in booth #B13 in the Open Infrastructure Marketplace and pick up the latest Swordfish swag!

Join the Conversation at the Open Infrastructure Summit

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

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

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.”

Since it was first defined, SMI-S has been continuously updated with new storage management functionality and is now incorporated into over 1,000 storage products. Version 1.5 of the specification received approval by ISO and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) in 2015 and is designated as ISO/IEC 24775.

SMI-S 1.8 v3 represents a significant effort to update the standard. The new version includes a number of editorial changes, clarifications and corrections. It also contains functional enhancements such as new indications, methods, properties and profiles.

Users of SMI-S are being urged to move directly to SMI-S 1.8 v3 since v1.6.1 was the last version that was officially tested. In preparation for submission to ISO, SMI-S 1.8 v3 has been thoroughly reviewed and a number of corrections have been incorporated.

The SMI-S specification is divided into six books which cover the autonomous profiles and component profiles used to manage storage physical and virtual storage area network equipment.

The main new functions since 1.6.1 are in SMI-S 1.8 v3, summarized as follows:

  • Fabric Book (Fabric and Switch)
    • Peer zoning enhancements
    • Enhancements to port speed
  • Block Book
    • New indications for component health and space management
    • Storage Pool Diagnostics
    • New method in Block Services
    • New methods in Group Masking and Mapping
    • Enhancements to Replication Services
    • New method in Volume Composition
    • Advanced Metrics in Block Server Performance
  • Common Profiles Book
    • New profile for WBEM Server Management
    • New method in iSCSI Target Ports Profile
  • Host Book
    • New profiles for memory configuration
  • Filesystem Book
    • New indications for component health and space management

If you would like to hear more details on the recent changes, I recently covered the topic in-depth in a webcast, available as an archived version on the free BrightTALK platform here.

SNIA SMI also offers a comprehensive SMI-S Conformance Testing Program (CTP) to test adherence to the standard. This program offers independent verification of compliance that customers can view directly on the SNIA website at http://www.snia.org/ctp/. Storage buyers can use this information to make sure they are getting software which complies to the latest version of the specification and contains the latest features such as important security functions.

Don’t delay. Update to SMI-S 1.8 v3 today. The specification can be found here. Your one-stop shop for all SMI-S information is: https://www.snia.org/smis.

Get engaged! You can ask and answer questions on the SMI-S Developers Group here

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

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.”

Since it was first defined, SMI-S has been continuously updated with new storage management functionality and is now incorporated into over 1,000 storage products. Version 1.5 of the specification received approval by ISO and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) in 2015 and is designated as ISO/IEC 24775.

SMI-S 1.8 v3 represents a significant effort to update the standard. The new version includes a number of editorial changes, clarifications and corrections. It also contains functional enhancements such as new indications, methods, properties and profiles.

Users of SMI-S are being urged to move directly to SMI-S 1.8 v3 since v1.6.1 was the last version that was officially tested. In preparation for submission to ISO, SMI-S 1.8 v3 has been thoroughly reviewed and a number of corrections have been incorporated.

The SMI-S specification is divided into six books which cover the autonomous profiles and component profiles used to manage storage physical and virtual storage area network equipment.

The main new functions since 1.6.1 are in SMI-S 1.8 v3, summarized as follows:

  • Fabric Book (Fabric and Switch)
    • Peer zoning enhancements
    • Enhancements to port speed
  • Block Book
    • New indications for component health and space management
    • Storage Pool Diagnostics
    • New method in Block Services
    • New methods in Group Masking and Mapping
    • Enhancements to Replication Services
    • New method in Volume Composition
    • Advanced Metrics in Block Server Performance
  • Common Profiles Book
    • New profile for WBEM Server Management
    • New method in iSCSI Target Ports Profile
  • Host Book
    • New profiles for memory configuration
  • Filesystem Book
    • New indications for component health and space management

If you would like to hear more details on the recent changes, I recently covered the topic in-depth in a webcast, available as an archived version on the free BrightTALK platform here.

SNIA SMI also offers a comprehensive SMI-S Conformance Testing Program (CTP) to test adherence to the standard. This program offers independent verification of compliance that customers can view directly on the SNIA website at http://www.snia.org/ctp/. Storage buyers can use this information to make sure they are getting software which complies to the latest version of the specification and contains the latest features such as important security functions.

Don’t delay. Update to SMI-S 1.8 v3 today. The specification can be found here. Your one-stop shop for all SMI-S information is: https://www.snia.org/smis.

Get engaged! You can ask and answer questions on the SMI-S Developers Group here

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

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, 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.

The DMTF created, and continues to improve upon, a modern alternative standard for remote or centralized management of data centers called Redfish®.  For those familiar with server management, Redfish is referred to as “schema-based,” meaning that engineers have carefully organized many different categories of information as well as the relationships between them.  Schema are structured to manage the millions of bits of information and operating characteristics that data centers create and report on a continuous basis and that managers monitor to understand the status of the datacenter.  In this way, information on the operational parameters of the machines in the data center is provided, when and where needed, in a consistent, organized and reliable way.

Unlike IPMI, the new Redfish standard uses modern tools, allowing it to scale to the size of today’s modern data centers. Redfish has output language readable by datacenter operators, works across the wide variety of servers and datacenter equipment that exists today, and is extensible for the new hardware of tomorrow.

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is a global non-profit organization dedicated to developing standards and education programs to advance storage and information technology. SNIA created the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) currently in use in datacenters to manage interoperable storage. SNIA immediately recognized the value of the new Redfish standard and created SNIA Swordfish™, which is an extension to Redfish that seamlessly manages storage equipment and storage services in addition to the server management of Redfish.  Just as most PC’s have one or more storage devices, so do most servers in datacenters, and Swordfish can manage storage devices and allocation across all of the servers in a datacenter in the same structured and organized fashion.

A summary and additional information for the more technical readers is below. If you want to learn more, all the items underlined and in bold below yield more information. You can click them, or type them into your internet browser for more information on the terms used in this tutorial:

  • For security, Swordfish employs HTTPS, a well-known and well-tested protocol that is used for secure communications over the World Wide Web.
  • JavaScript and ODATA increase the readability, compatibility and integration of RESTful API’s that manage data collected from datacenter devices and covers a range of information useful for beginners through experienced engineers.
  • Interoperability exists due to the use of a common schema definition language (CSDL) and common APIs from eco-system partners including the Open Compute Project (OCP).
  • Redfish and Swordfish were created and are maintained by industry leaders that meet weekly to tune and extend management capabilities. (See DMTF.ORG, SNIA.ORG)
  • These schema work together to allow full network discovery, provisioning, volume mapping and monitoring of block, file and object storage for all the systems in a modern datacenter.

There is so much to learn beyond this brief tutorial.  Start at DMTF.ORG to learn about Redfish.  Then surf over to SNIA.ORG/SWORDFISH to see how Swordfish brings the benefits of schema-based management to all your storage devices.  You will learn how Swordfish works in hyperscale and cloud infrastructure environments and enables a scalable solution that grows as your datacenter requirements grow.

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

An Introduction: What is Swordfish?

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.

The DMTF created, and continues to improve upon, a modern alternative standard for remote or centralized management of data centers called Redfish®.  For those familiar with server management, Redfish is referred to as “schema-based,” meaning that engineers have carefully organized many different categories of information as well as the relationships between them.  Schema are structured to manage the millions of bits of information and operating characteristics that data centers create and report on a continuous basis and that managers monitor to understand the status of the datacenter.  In this way, information on the operational parameters of the machines in the data center is provided, when and where needed, in a consistent, organized and reliable way.

Unlike IPMI, the new Redfish standard uses modern tools, allowing it to scale to the size of today’s modern data centers. Redfish has output language readable by datacenter operators, works across the wide variety of servers and datacenter equipment that exists today, and is extensible for the new hardware of tomorrow.

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is a global non-profit organization dedicated to developing standards and education programs to advance storage and information technology. SNIA created the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) currently in use in datacenters to manage interoperable storage. SNIA immediately recognized the value of the new Redfish standard and created SNIA Swordfish™, which is an extension to Redfish that seamlessly manages storage equipment and storage services in addition to the server management of Redfish.  Just as most PC’s have one or more storage devices, so do most servers in datacenters, and Swordfish can manage storage devices and allocation across all of the servers in a datacenter in the same structured and organized fashion.

A summary and additional information for the more technical readers is below. If you want to learn more, all the items underlined and in bold below yield more information. You can click them, or type them into your internet browser for more information on the terms used in this tutorial:

  • For security, Swordfish employs HTTPS, a well-known and well-tested protocol that is used for secure communications over the World Wide Web.
  • JavaScript and ODATA increase the readability, compatibility and integration of RESTful API’s that manage data collected from datacenter devices and covers a range of information useful for beginners through experienced engineers.
  • Interoperability exists due to the use of a common schema definition language (CSDL) and common APIs from eco-system partners including the Open Compute Project (OCP).
  • Redfish and Swordfish were created and are maintained by industry leaders that meet weekly to tune and extend management capabilities. (See DMTF.ORG, SNIA.ORG)
  • These schema work together to allow full network discovery, provisioning, volume mapping and monitoring of block, file and object storage for all the systems in a modern datacenter.

There is so much to learn beyond this brief tutorial.  Start at DMTF.ORG to learn about Redfish.  Then surf over to SNIA.ORG/SWORDFISH to see how Swordfish brings the benefits of schema-based management to all your storage devices.  You will learn how Swordfish works in hyperscale and cloud infrastructure environments and enables a scalable solution that grows as your datacenter requirements grow.

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

An Introduction: What is Swordfish?

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

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.

Q. Another service configuration question. For a pure JBOD, which would be the preferred approach?

A. A JBOD configuration configuration could start with either configuration depending on whether it is a standalone system (HSC) or server-attached. If the JBOD has an embedded controller in an enclosure, it could be modeled using the HSC configuration.

Q. Are there provisions for adding custom data in the payloads that Swordfish support. Is there a method to add vendor specific parameters in the payload?

A. Previous standards did not have a good model for adding OEM specific data.

As a result, Redfish, and its extensions such as Swordfish, have ensured that there is a very clean place to add OEM data. Every schema supports OEM extensions in two places. There are OEM extensions for properties and also for OEM actions – a way to support functions that don’t map to REST.

Q. Is there any work related to NVMe over Fabric in development?

A. Both SNIA and the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF – which developed Redfish) have been working on this. The DMTF’s Redfish Forum developed the base model for SAS/SATA and PCIe fabrics, which is being extended to include NVMe over Fabric. SNIA is also working on adding NVMe over Fabric device connections to their basic models to integrate the storage elements.

Q. I think of Redfish as talking to the Baseboard Management Controller (BMC). Where is Swordfish functionality located? Is it on the CPU running the OS or is it also out of band?

A. Where Swordfish is running will be determined by the implementation. An implementation can choose to run either in band or out of band. In most cases this will be consistent with implementations. If a vendor’s existing architecture supports out of band management, then their Swordfish implementation will also likely be out of band. Note that the Swordfish implementation may leverage existing Redfish instrumentation on integrated components in either case, but this is a completely vendor-specific choice.

Q. What is meant by endpoint?

A. Endpoints are an abstraction of a connection. They describe the connections without needing to define everything about the underlying hardware.

Q. Since JBODs fall within the domain of server hardware, can software RAID solutions take full advantage of Swordfish?

A. The software RAID solutions can absolutely take full advantage of Swordfish. Remember that Swordfish is a schema extension to Redfish for storage functionality; therefore, it doesn’t care what underlying hardware it is running on. Note that many different types of storage solutions today run on “server hardware” – SDS solutions, for example, have no custom hardware, and fall exclusively in this domain, yet are clearly storage solutions.

Q. Is Swordfish planning on staying an extension to Redfish? Does it have a goal of being integrated into Redfish specification at some point?

A. Yes, Swordfish plans to remain an extension to Redfish. There isn’t a reason to integrate it into Redfish, as it is already tightly coupled with Redfish; the schema are delivered publicly on the same site. The SNIA will continue to own Swordfish content separately from DMTF in order to take advantage of the focused attention of the large body of storage domain experts in SNIA. In order to allow the Redfish ecosystem to grow to its maximum potential as quickly as possible, DMTF is partnering with other organizations to add features such as storage and networking to the standard.

Q. Do you have to be a SNIA member to contribute to the open source work?

A. No. You do not have to be a SNIA member to contribute to the open source projects. You will, however, need to sign the SNIA Contributor License Agreement, available at snia.org/cla in order to release any contributions you make to the open source projects to SNIA to allow us to incorporate them back into the open source projects.

Q. Going through the specs for Redfish /Swordfish, I can see that only a few parameters of the schema are really mandatory to be supported by the vendor. Does that not break functionality where a client would be expecting data as per the entire schema?

A. The SSM TWG is working on the development of feature profiles, which will help clarify which functionality is required to be implemented for specific clients, applications, and use cases. In addition to the functionality requirements in the Swordfish specification, the profile definitions will help clarify to both clients and service implementations much more clearly what functionality is required to implement for their specific configurations.

Additional information on SNIA Swordfish is available at: www.snia.org/swordfish. This site contains resources including the latest specification, a Swordfish User Guide, a Swordfish Practical Guide, Swordfish mockups and more.

You can also join the Redfish Specification Forum to ask and answer questions about Swordfish!

SNIA Swordfish™ – Your Questions Answered

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.

Q. Another service configuration question. For a pure JBOD, which would be the preferred approach?

A. A JBOD configuration configuration could start with either configuration depending on whether it is a standalone system (HSC) or server-attached. If the JBOD has an embedded controller in an enclosure, it could be modeled using the HSC configuration.

Q. Are there provisions for adding custom data in the payloads that Swordfish support. Is there a method to add vendor specific parameters in the payload?

A. Previous standards did not have a good model for adding OEM specific data.

As a result, Redfish, and its extensions such as Swordfish, have ensured that there is a very clean place to add OEM data. Every schema supports OEM extensions in two places. There are OEM extensions for properties and also for OEM actions – a way to support functions that don’t map to REST.

Q. Is there any work related to NVMe over Fabric in development?

A. Both SNIA and the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF – which developed Redfish) have been working on this. The DMTF’s Redfish Forum developed the base model for SAS/SATA and PCIe fabrics, which is being extended to include NVMe over Fabric. SNIA is also working on adding NVMe over Fabric device connections to their basic models to integrate the storage elements.

Q. I think of Redfish as talking to the Baseboard Management Controller (BMC). Where is Swordfish functionality located? Is it on the CPU running the OS or is it also out of band?

A. Where Swordfish is running will be determined by the implementation. An implementation can choose to run either in band or out of band. In most cases this will be consistent with implementations. If a vendor’s existing architecture supports out of band management, then their Swordfish implementation will also likely be out of band. Note that the Swordfish implementation may leverage existing Redfish instrumentation on integrated components in either case, but this is a completely vendor-specific choice.

Q. What is meant by endpoint?

A. Endpoints are an abstraction of a connection. They describe the connections without needing to define everything about the underlying hardware.

Q. Since JBODs fall within the domain of server hardware, can software RAID solutions take full advantage of Swordfish?

A. The software RAID solutions can absolutely take full advantage of Swordfish. Remember that Swordfish is a schema extension to Redfish for storage functionality; therefore, it doesn’t care what underlying hardware it is running on. Note that many different types of storage solutions today run on “server hardware” – SDS solutions, for example, have no custom hardware, and fall exclusively in this domain, yet are clearly storage solutions.

Q. Is Swordfish planning on staying an extension to Redfish? Does it have a goal of being integrated into Redfish specification at some point?

A. Yes, Swordfish plans to remain an extension to Redfish. There isn’t a reason to integrate it into Redfish, as it is already tightly coupled with Redfish; the schema are delivered publicly on the same site. The SNIA will continue to own Swordfish content separately from DMTF in order to take advantage of the focused attention of the large body of storage domain experts in SNIA. In order to allow the Redfish ecosystem to grow to its maximum potential as quickly as possible, DMTF is partnering with other organizations to add features such as storage and networking to the standard.

Q. Do you have to be a SNIA member to contribute to the open source work?

A. No. You do not have to be a SNIA member to contribute to the open source projects. You will, however, need to sign the SNIA Contributor License Agreement, available at snia.org/cla in order to release any contributions you make to the open source projects to SNIA to allow us to incorporate them back into the open source projects.

Q. Going through the specs for Redfish /Swordfish, I can see that only a few parameters of the schema are really mandatory to be supported by the vendor. Does that not break functionality where a client would be expecting data as per the entire schema?

A. The SSM TWG is working on the development of feature profiles, which will help clarify which functionality is required to be implemented for specific clients, applications, and use cases. In addition to the functionality requirements in the Swordfish specification, the profile definitions will help clarify to both clients and service implementations much more clearly what functionality is required to implement for their specific configurations.

Additional information on SNIA Swordfish is available at: www.snia.org/swordfish. This site contains resources including the latest specification, a Swordfish User Guide, a Swordfish Practical Guide, Swordfish mockups and more.

You can also join the Redfish Specification Forum to ask and answer questions about Swordfish!