SMI Tutorial > What is SMI? > Why is SMI Important to the Storage Industry?

Why is SMI Important to the Storage Industry?

For Storage Vendors:

The SMI provides storage vendors with the ability to target development efforts on a single standard interface. This results in improved time-to-market, decreased product development cost, and increased quality of solutions by dramatically reducing the need to learn, develop, test and/or integrate disparate and proprietary interfaces.

Click here to enlarge graphic Source: The InfoPro 9/03

For Storage End Users:

End users purchasing products that conform to the SMI-Specification (SMI-S) will see benefits that include increased reliability, security, and manageability which results in lowering the total cost ownership (TCO). Efficiently managing multi-vendor storage networks and their resources is a key concern for both end users and integrators. The central value proposition for networked storage is its ability to integrate multi-vendor, enterprise resources that can be shared and more efficiently utilized.