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
Cloud data centers are by definition very dynamic. The need for infrastructure availability in the right place at the right time for the right use case is not as predictable, nor as static, as it has been in traditional data centers. These cloud data centers need to rapidly construct virtual pools of compute, network and storage based on the needs of particular customers or applications, then have those resources dynamically and automatically flex as needs change.
To accomplish this, many in the industry espouse composable infrastructure capabilities, which rely on heterogeneous resources with specific capabilities that can be discovered, managed, and automatically provisioned and re-provisioned through data center orchestration tools. The primary benefit of composable infrastructure results in a smaller grained sets of resources that are independently scalable and can be brought together as required. On February 13, 2019, The SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative is going to examine what’s happening with composable infrastructure in our live webcast, Why Composable Infrastructure? In this webcast, SNIA experts will discuss: Read More
In the storage world, NVMe
is arguably the hottest thing going right now. Go to any storage conference – either vendor-related or vendor-neutral, and you’ll see NVMe as the latest and greatest innovation. It stands to reason, then, that when you want to run NVMe over a network, you must understand NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF). Meanwhile, TCP is by far the most popular networking transport protocol both for storage and non-storage traffic.
TCP – the long-standing mainstay of networking – is the newest transport technology to be approved by the 
Unlike traditional local or scale-up storage, scale-out storage imposes different and more intense workloads on the network. That’s why the SNIA Networking Storage Forum (NSF) hosted a live webcast “
If you’re a storage professional you are likely familiar with the many certifications available to prove competency in a given technical area. Many of the certification options are offered by major IT vendors as a natural extension of their product and service offerings. In fact, if you work with any of the major players it is likely that at some point you will be required to prove your technical skills by acquiring specific credentials through certification.