Interoperability in enterprise storage

With a lot of different technology platforms in the storage space, how does everything work together? There are standards available

At the start of this decade, the biggest hurdle in adoption

of new enterprise storage technologies was that of interoperability (or lack

thereof) between various solutions available in the market. Storage Area

Networks (SANs) were hitting mainstream but were plagued by the fact that no

industry wide standard existed. As a result, once you chose a vendor, you were

pretty much stuck with your choice for life, for better or worse, unless of

course you could afford (financially and logistically) a switch.

Enter SNIA or the Storage Networking Industry Association.

The SNIA was setup in an attempt to bring standardization to the storage network

sector and the fact that today you can use switches from different manufacturers

for use in the same fiber channel SAN, is down largely to the good work done

under the umbrella of this organization.

With interoperability of hardware taken care of, the focus

shifted to managing the hardware. Equipments from different manufacturers come

with their own management consoles/ software and, having being built on

proprietary specifications, traditionally, they offered little in terms of

interoperability i.e. using software that shipped with a vendor's equipment to

manage another's equipment or, what was a distant dream, building a central

console that could manage a heterogeneous mix of equipment from different

vendors.

The attempts at providing this interoperability started

with agreements between specific vendors that facilitated sharing of

information, which, in turn, paved the way for consoles that could manage

equipment of all participating vendors. The SNIA paved the way for consolidation

of such agreements under a single umbrella and came up with Storage Management

Interface Specification or SMI-S. The SMI-S standardizes the communication

between the management console and SMI-S compliant hardware. Version 1.0 of the

specification was ratified in July 2003.

At the heart of the SMI-S, is the Bluefin interface.

Bluefin is “an object-oriented, messaging interface that links distributed

management applications (clients) with device management support (agents).”

Without going into too many technical details, it is based on CIM, the Common

Information Model, developed by the Distributed Management Task Force or DMTF,

which provides a logical and physical view of all entities in the system and

whose platform independent nature makes it ideal for use in a multi-platform

environment. Those familiar with the Windows Management Interface (WMI)

technology should be able to relate to most of the concepts.

With a new version of the specification, version 1.1,

ratified in late 2005, the SNIA aims to be more pro-active in terms of pushing

participating vendors towards SMI-S adoption as interoperability between vendor

equipments is nowhere near the levels that the end-users would like, as far as

managing the hardware is concerned (as discussed above). This space is worth

watching over the next year or so as these standards go mainstream and find

higher rate of adoption.