Storage Management

SNIA's Storage Management community develops and standardizes interoperable storage management technologies and aggressively promotes them to the storage, networking, and end user communities.

What We Do

Storage Management drives SNIA activities in the following areas:

Technical Work Group Support – provides funding and technical writing resources to Technical Work Groups (TWGs) including the Swordfish TWG, which is responsible for developing the SNIA Swordfish® specification, and the recently dissolved SMI TWG, which saw the SMI-S technical specification through to its final designation as an ISO/IEC standard in 2021

Storage Management Lab Program (SM Lab) – accelerates the development and implementation of standards-based products from SNIA member companies in a collaborative environment. It also provides important feedback for specification authors. SM Lab plugfests are held on demand to ensure interoperability of implementations.

SNIA Swordfish Conformance Test Program (Swordfish CTP) – provides conformance testing built on an open source framework for Swordfish service implementations, which manage components of the storage environment using the Swordfish Scalable Storage Management API Specification.

Education – Storage Management educates the industry about storage management technologies through published articles, blogs, webinars, Wikipedia pages, social media posts and news items and by supporting developer groups.

Our Mission

The SNIA Storage Management Community is dedicated to fostering the creation of implementable, deployable and verifiable end user storage management solutions based on industry and SNIA standards that can be adopted industry wide.

Our scope

The Storage Management Community is responsible for coordinating and managing all Storage Management related activities within the SNIA, including those for education, technical development, business development, marketing, implementation, and conformance testing.

Technical Work

The Storage Management community provides funding, technical writing resources, education, promotion, and additional support and resources to Technical Work Groups (TWGs) developing manageability standards and manageability content.

Swordfish Technical Work Group

Storage Management programs include:

Storage Management Governing Board

Richelle Ahlvers

Director of Technology Initiatives and Ecosystem Enabling, Intel Corporation, SM Chair, SNIA Vice Chair, and Swordfish TWG Chair

Richelle Ahlvers runs Technology Initiatives and Ecosystem Enabling for the Datacenter / AI business for Intel, promoting and driving enablement of new technologies and standards strategies. Richelle has spent over 30 years in Enterprise R&D teams in a variety of technical roles, spanning architecture, design and development of software, firmware, and hardware, for everything from enterprise storage solutions to CPUs.

Richelle has been engaged with industry standards initiatives for many years and is actively engaged with many groups including SNIA, DMTF, NVMe, OFA and UCIe. She is Vice-Chair of the SNIA Board of Directors, Chair of the Storage Management Initiative, leads the SSM Technical Work Group developing the Swordfish Scalable Storage Management API, and is a former SNIA Technical Council Chair. She serves on the DMTF Board of Directors as the VP of Finance and Treasurer.

Krishnakumar Gowravaram

Senior Principal Engineer, Celestica, SM GB Member

Krishnakumar Gowravaram is an experienced technologist who has spent over 20+ years in data center technologies. He has worked in defining architectures and building Server, Storage & Networking products. He is an active participant in industry standards and contributes towards standardization of storage protocols - data & management plane. He currently works at Celestica as a Senior Principal Engineer leading architecture, design and roadmaps for server and storage products.

Earlier in his career he has worked at HPE, Brocade, EMC, Cisco etc in various software engineering roles.

Prashanth Chennagiri

Cisco Systems, SM GB Member

Prashanth Chennagiri is a seasoned technologist with over 20 years of experience in data center infrastructure, specializing in the architecture, design and development of server, storage and networking solutions. As a Senior Engineering Technical Leader at Cisco, he drives the design and roadmap for next-generation infrastructure technologies. He is an active contributor to industry standards, focusing on the standardization of storage protocols across data and management planes. His expertise in platform software, storage infrastructure and networking technologies has played a key role in advancing industry best practices. Prior to his current role at Cisco, he held key engineering positions at Oracle, Pillar Data Systems, NetApp, HP and other leading technology companies, where he contributed to the design and development of embedded software solutions for high-availability, mission-critical enterprise environments.

Chris Lionetti

Senior Technical Marketing Engineer, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, SNIA Secretary, Executive Committee and SM GB Vice-Chair

Chris Lionetti is a veteran of the storage industry who has been building complex systems and SANs for over 25 years. Chris has long been actively involved with the Storage Network Industry Association, SNIA. He is currently a reference architect on the HPE Nimble Storage team. Earlier in his career, he worked as an engineer for HP, Dell, Microsoft, and NetApp. Chris holds 9 patents on topics related to data centers, networking, and storage.

Barry Kittner

SM GB Member-at-Large

An industry veteran with over 40 years of experience, Barry brought early industry sales and support knowledge to Intel Corporation where he led a young team to Intel’s first major milestone in networking sales. Barry has experience in corporate sales, technical team management and server platform marketing. Barry led several activities within Intel’s Industry Initiative team, working to align Intel’s standards definition and compliance efforts with that of the broader industry. Barry also led a team that defined a new and modern data center storage form factor. Barry retired from Intel in 2022 but continues his involvement with emerging industry initiatives.

Don Deel

SM GB Member-at-Large

Don Deel has been actively involved with the Storage Networking Industry Association in several different volunteer roles since the year 2000. He participated in the development of the original Bluefin specification which later became SMI-S when it was contributed to the SNIA, and he continues to play an active role in the ongoing development of SMI-S today. He is also currently involved in the development of the SNIA Swordfish specification, which handles the management of storage and servers in hyperscale and cloud infrastructure environments. His standards development experience stretches back into the mid-1980s, and includes work on the Fibre Channel and HIPPI standards.

Key Objectives

In order to support the adoption of this initiative within the Storage and Networking industry, key objectives are:

Enable and streamline the integration of multi-vendor storage networks
Leverage the development of powerful management application
Encourage management consolation
Provide a common interface for storage vendors to incorporate in the development of new product for the industry

Why is the Storage Management Community important for the Storage Industry?

For Storage Equipment Vendors:

The Storage Management community helps implement products that conform to SNIA Storage Management supported standards, providing increased reliability, security and manageability. The SM Lab program supports interoperability testing with equipment from multiple vendors, and this assists in reducing time-to-market.

For Storage Management Software Vendors:

MI-supported standards speed deployment of interoperable storage networks, expanding addressable markets. It allows focus on developing value-added functionality at a level higher than simple interconnectivity. Equipment from multiple vendors can be quickly and reliably managed because the SNIA Storage Management supported standards make them look and behave alike, resulting in lower development and testing costs, shorter time to market, and higher satisfaction for both IT and end users. The SM Lab program promotes interoperability testing with storage equipment from multiple vendors, helping reduce time-to-market.

For Storage End Users:

The use of SNIA Storage Management supported standards results in lower total cost of ownership and the ability to integrate multi-vendor enterprise resources so they can be shared and more efficiently used. Storage equipment from multiple vendors are quickly and reliably managed because they look and behave alike. Conformance Test Program results on the SNIA website provide verification that an implementation has passed basic interoperability hurdles.