SMI Tutorial > Benefits of SMI for Vendors > Creates New Opportunities for Storage Vendors

Creates New Opportunities for Storage Vendors

In addition to simplifying development and testing, and thereby improving time-to-market, the SMI creates additional usage modes for managing network storage, and thereby creates new opportunities for the storage hardware and software industry segments.

Holistic System Management. Today, system management consists of “stovepipes”—processor complex management, network management, database management, application management, grid and storage management—that are minimally integrated or not at all. System administrators must be skilled in multiple independent management applications, and worse, in the inter-relationships of the hardware and software components. 

Envision a system administrator faced with the task of identifying the cause of performance degradation - a potential violation of a service level agreement (SLA) - in a network transaction processing system based on a relational database system, which resides on a disaster tolerant RAID subsystem in a SAN. The administrator must tread through the management application “stovepipes” to identify and resolve the issue. The Common Information Model (CIM) provides the basis for application developers to integrate these “stovepipes” into a coordinated whole. Using CIM technology, a single management application can traverse relationships between systems management stovepipes ultimately identifying the precise physical disk drive that may be causing the performance degradation and violation of the SLA.

Accommodation of Legacy Systems. Recognizing that adoption of such a sweeping storage standard will take place over multiple product generations, the SMI-S incorporates mechanisms for standards-based management of legacy devices with proprietary interfaces. The SMI-S Reference Model is flexible. It can accommodate three different approaches to extract data from the storage devices:

• Directly from the information embedded in the device itself,
• Through an Object Manager resident on a server and provider of the interface to the device, or
• Via a proprietary agent gathering and translating the information needed.

Multi-Layer Resource Management. Often in large storage networks similar services are provided at multiple levels. For example, virtualization services may be provided by server-based volume managers, by RAID systems and by network storage appliances. By instituting a common standard across the storage network, the SMI-S makes it possible for management applications to intelligently combine these similar capabilities optimally to meet an abstractly specified policy.

Policy-Based Management.  Because they must be applicable across entire device classes, SMI-S object models are necessarily higher-level abstractions than models developed specifically for individual components. Common high-level abstractions enable software developers to implement policy-based management for entire storage networks. Examples of policy-based management services include storage provisioning, disaster recovery automation, and policy-driven event handling.

Interconnect Independence. The SMI-S specifies a protocol stack consisting of CIM-XML (object descriptions and management actions) over HTTP (session), over TCP (transport), over IP (interconnect). The ubiquity of the lower layers of this stack makes it possible to manage components using in-band communications, out-of-band communications, or a mix of the two. Integrators can select devices and management applications independent of physical network implementation.

Seamless Storage Network Integration. The SMI-S includes procedures for discovery, installation and initialization of multiple vendors’ devices, making feasible the dynamic construction of large heterogeneous SANs. More importantly, the SMI-S makes it easy to respond to the reconfigurations that are inevitable consequences of growth and changing requirements.

Secure Centralized Administration. The WBEM transport specified by the SMI-S provides for encryption and authentication. Thus, a single console can be used for secure administration of resources that span large geographies or even public networks.

Flexible Administration Authority. The CIM model upon which the SMI-S is based is designed for future addition of Access Control List (ACL) authorization capability. ACLs will allow assignment of specific sets of management privileges to individuals or groups that require them. Similarly, a proposed Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) model is defined in the SMI-S 1.1.0.