SMI Tutorial > The Benefits of SMI for End Users
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The Benefits of SMI for End Users |
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As storage vendors continue to adopt SMI, the End User community is beginning to make SMI support a requirement for future purchases. SMI is defining the standard way in which the entire storage industry delivers interoperable storage management. Management application vendors will no longer have to integrate incompatible, feature-poor interfaces into their products. Storage device vendors will no longer have to expose and support various proprietary management interfaces. Instead, both will be better able to concentrate on developing interoperable management capabilities that bring value to End Users. From an industry standpoint, the storage network component interoperability problem can be considered at four distinct levels:
- Physical interconnect compatibility (e.g., Fibre Channel or TCP/IP)
- Logical protocol (e.g., SCSI) compatibility.
- Basic functional compatibility (e.g., multi-path management).
- Compatibility of management interfaces.
Today’s physical interconnects have reached a level of maturity in which basic compatibility has been achieved. The SMI-S specifies protocols and interfaces at the other three levels, thereby streamlining the development of interoperable components and the deployment of manageable storage networks, thus enabling End Users to reap the full benefit of SANs.
With one set of object models and one protocol stack, the management of network storage will become simpler and less expensive than managing an equivalent amount of storage attached directly to servers. Ultimately, faced with reduced costs for deployment and management, End Users will be able to adopt storage networking technology faster and to build larger more powerful multi-vendor storage networks.
End Users using products that conform to the SMI-S will see benefits that include: increased reliability, security and manageability that will result in lowering the total cost of ownership (TCO). Efficiently managing multi-vendor storage networks and its 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.
End Users will also benefit from the following when they implement products that conform to the SMI-S:
- Clients can manage multi-vendor storage environments (i.e. SAN or NAS)
- No need to purchase individual management clients for each storage device
- Enables active management of multi-vendor storage device
- Manage snaps/replication of multi-vendor storage devices
Reduced Management Costs
- Reduced complexity
- Auto-discovery, topology mapping
- Normalized management of multi-vendor resources
- Single CIM-defined user interface for managing multi-vendor devices
- No need to train administrators on multiple interfaces
- Reduced administration/increased productivity from using one user interface
Reduced Overhead
Faster Implementation Times
Long Term Investment Protection
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