SMI Tutorial > Benefits of SMI for Vendors > Accelerates Development of Storage Management Applications

Accelerates Development of Storage Management Applications

Several features of the CIM and WBEM technologies on which SMI-S is based serve to accelerate the development of SMI-S conformant management applications. These include:

• MOF Files. MOF files can be used to extend standard object models to express vendor-unique component features, enabling programmers to easily augment management applications to support the latest technology available in devices and subsystems.
• Common Discovery Service. A common discovery service allows a new management application to be installed in an SMI-S enabled storage network without manual installation and configuration. Additionally, the service allows a management application to dynamically recognize and utilize new devices and subsystems as they are introduced to a network.
• Durable naming. Durable naming ensures that managed objects retain their identities as new network, storage, and host components are added to a SAN.
• Intrinsic methods for WBEM objects. Intrinsic methods for WBEM objects provide the ability to rigorously examine the feature sets of component object models. These intrinsic methods make it possible for management applications to discover new features in a given vendor’s device dynamically without application reprogramming. The methods can also be used to efficiently automate test programs to “mine” devices (to discover exact feature sets and assess implementation quality). This “mining” accelerates application development and debugging.
• Inherent SMI-S distributed architecture. With the SMI-S inherently distributed architecture, management application developers need to build fewer agents to serve their distributed needs. This is an important benefit that also allows SANs to require fewer agents to be configured and managed by a systems administrator. When an array vendor ships an SMI Agent, multi-vendor management clients in the SAN can attach directly to and use the SMI Agent without deploying a custom agent to provide distributed management for the device. The end result is reduction of agent proliferation.