Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA)'s, Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) has been designated an International Standard by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). It is expected to further accelerate the already widespread adoption of the standard by storage vendors and IT users in all markets worldwide.
"The recognition of SMI-S by ISO and IEC is clear evidence that the specification has become visible among the worldwide storage community as a key to increase storage interoperability and decrease management complexity," said Vincent Franceschini, chair, SNIA.
SNIA has driven the global adoption of SMI-S through a wide array of activities hosted by its Regional Affiliates in Australia-New Zealand, North America Canada, China, Europe (EMEA), India, Japan and South-Asia. It is also a co-owner of Storage Networking World conferences that take place in China, Germany, Australia and the U.S. where educational activities such as tutorials, Hands-on-Labs, Solution Center demonstrations and plug fests have built an international coalition of vendors and users.
"Continued progress toward the establishment of standards benefits end users by decreasing their interoperability pain points, and the processing of SMI-S as an ISO/IEC International Standard marks a significant step forward for the future development of storage standards," said Wendy Betts, distributed storage manager, Hewitt Associates and chair, SNIA End User Council (EUC). "Global enterprises are deploying storage networks in increasingly large numbers to support their worldwide infrastructure, and SMI-S is allowing users to centrally manage their multi-vendor, multi-geography networks through a standard interface."
SNIA was supported in the ISO/IEC standardization effort by partnering with the International Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS), whose T11 Technical Committee assisted with the submission of the specification to the ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee, JTC 1, Information Technology. After processing by the JTC 1 subcommittee SC 25, Interconnection of Information Technology Equipment, SMI-S was successfully voted as an International Standard on 28 November 2006. It is expected to be published before the end of the first quarter of 2007 as ISO/IEC 24775, Information Technology Storage Management.
"Adoption of SMI-S as an ISO/IEC International Standard is a key milestone that is likely to increase market confidence. It also demonstrates the flexibility of IEC and ISO in recognizing consortia commitment and contributions to standards." said Gabriel Barta, technical officer, SC 25, IEC."
SNIA will expand its SMI-S with new capabilities in an effort to meet the global IT users' needs and vendor requirements for rapidly evolving storage technology. Support for such storage capabilities as host-based controllers, storage enclosures, support for file system quotas, volume protection and consistency management for snapshot and replication management support are expected to be included in future releases of the SMI-S standard. So far, SMI-S has been implemented in more than 450 products tested for conformance with the standard.
SNIA is particularly focused on Version 1.1 of SMI-S, which defines interfaces between network-attached storage (NAS) and iSCSI-based devices. That version is currently being reviewed by ANSI. SMI-S v1.1 deals with device descriptions and the services associated with them, such as copying data from one array to another.
SMI-S version 1.02 is being reviewed by SNIA members and will offer support for host-based controllers - bringing SMI-S down to the host storage enclosures, file system quotas, volume protection and the management of data snapshots and replication. Version 1.03 of SMI-S has already been ratified by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and is also being pushed to the International Standards Organization for ratification.
