By 2025, IDC says worldwide data will grow 61% to 175 zettabytes, with as much of the data residing in the cloud as in data centers. A zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes. Now multiply that 175 times. It’s mind boggling. And with the explosion in data, IDC states that businesses are looking to centralize data management and delivery, as well as to leverage data to control their businesses and the user experience. The Storage Management Initiative (SMI) is a SNIA group that helps unify the storage industry to develop and standardize interoperable storage management technologies for today’s IT environments and next generation data centers. It supports the development of storage management solutions based upon standard interfaces instead of proprietary interfaces.  Standard storage interfaces lower costs, make integration efforts easier and provide increased reliability, security and manageability.

 SNIA Swordfish

 The SNIA Scalable Storage Management Technical Work Group (SSM TWG) developed SNIA Swordfish, a standard that defines the management of data storage and services as an extension to the DMTF Redfish® specification, which uses JSON and OData to create an easy-to-use RESTful API.  Swordfish was designed with IT administrators and DevOps engineers in mind, to provide simplified and scalable storage management for data center environments. Unlike proprietary interfaces, Swordfish is an open standard and has been developed with broad industry support, including some of the leading companies in the storage industry.

Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) and pywbem

 For storage equipment vendors, management software vendors and end-users seeking to address the day-to-day tasks of the IT environment, the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) is an ISO-approved international standard. It’s currently implemented in over 1,500 products that provide access to common storage management functions and features. Unlike proprietary management interfaces, using a standard interface allows management applications to support a wider range of storage equipment from multiple vendors. For software developers and system administrators using the SMI-S specification, SMI also supports pywbem. Pywbem is an open source library written in Python that supports the quick and efficient development of higher-level interfaces to storage management services such as discovery, security, monitoring, performance, fault reporting and active management. It’s simple to use, easy to integrate into the SMI-S environment and also compliant with the Common Information Model (CIM) and Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) standards defined by the DMTF.

SNIA Swordfish and SMI-S

Although Swordfish and SMI-S are both supported by the SMI, industry needs are shifting from SMI-S to Swordfish.  SMI-S is a mature standard based upon DMTF CIM and CIM-XML that defines a Client/Server API and favors an equipment-oriented management approach for networked storage.  Swordfish is a newer SNIA standard based upon DMTF Redfish that defines an easy-to-use RESTful API. Swordfish manages block storage, file storage and storage services, supporting unified server, storage and network management in converged, hyper-converged, hyperscale and cloud infrastructure environments that demand a high degree of scalability.

Storage Management Lab

SMI makes the Storage Management Lab (SM Lab) program available to its members. This helps accelerate the implementation of SMI-S- and Swordfish-based client and provider products. Vendors are encouraged to place and maintain equipment in SM Lab at the SNIA Technology Center for both local and remote use by all SM Lab members. Equipment in SM Lab is accessible remotely via VPN, providing shared open access to all SM Lab members for ongoing testing. Plugfest events are held multiple times each year, enabling engineers from SM Lab members to collaborate face-to-face with each other on interoperability testing, and this helps accelerate the development of interoperable implementations. Presentations given at plugfest events cover topics of primary interest to implementers, including product overviews, software tools, Swordfish, Pegasus, pywbem, security, and more.

Conformance Testing Program

The SMI-S Conformance Testing Program (CTP) is also supported by the SMI. Test results shown on the public CTP website provide verification that a vendor’s product has passed basic interoperability hurdles. Vendors can then promote their products as having passed the official SMI-S CTP test suite. This vendor independent, industry-vetted validation of conformance to the SMI-S standard reduces the cost of ownership, improves interoperability, and helps prevent vendor lock-in. A similar SNIA Swordfish CTP offering is being developed in the second half of 2019.

Education

The SMI strives to educate the industry about storage management technologies to help IT administrators and DevOps engineers better address their storage management needs. This is done through Swordfish School videos, presentations at industry conferences, published articles, blogs, ongoing webcasts, social media posts and news items. Online developer groups associated with SMI-S and Swordfish are also supported by the SMI and its members. As the amount of data rapidly grows, the effects of this abundance have become a costly and difficult proposition for organizations worldwide. In order to reduce some of those costs and improve the storage management capabilities of storage solutions, SNIA and the SMI will continue to work towards establishing industry standards that help. Visit https://www.snia.org/technology-focus/storage-management for more information on the important work SNIA is doing in storage management.