The SNIA Swordfish specification and ecosystem are growing in scope to include full enablement and alignment for NVMe® and NVMe-oF client workloads and use cases. By partnering with other industry-standard organizations including DMTF®, NVM Express, and OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA), SNIA’s Scalable Storage Management Technical Work Group has updated the Swordfish bundles from version 1.2.1 and later to cover an expanding range of NVMe and NVMe-oF functionality including NVMe device management and storage fabric technology management and administration. The Need Large-scale computing designs are increasingly multi-node and linked together through high-speed networks. These networks may be comprised of different types of technologies, fungible, and morphing. Over time, many different types of high-performance networking devices will evolve to participate in these modern, coupled-computing platforms. New fabric management capabilities, orchestration, and automation will be required to deploy, secure, and optimally maintain these high-speed networks. The NVMe and NVMe-oF specifications provide comprehensive management for NVMe devices at an individual level, however, when you want to manage these devices at a system or data center level, DMTF Redfish and SNIA Swordfish are the industry’s gold standards. Together, Redfish and Swordfish enable a comprehensive view across the system, data center, and enterprise, with NVMe and NVMe-oF instrumenting the device-level view. This complete approach provides a way to manage your entire environment across technologies with standards-based management, making it more cost-effective and easier to operate. The Approach The expanded NVMe resource management within SNIA Swordfish is comprised of a mapping between the DMTF Redfish, Swordfish, and NVMe specifications, enabling developers to construct a standard implementation within the Redfish and Swordfish service for any NVMe and NVMe-oF managed device. The architectural approach to creating the SNIA Swordfish 1.2.1 version of the standard began with a deep dive into the existing management models of systems and servers for Redfish, storage for Swordfish, and fabrics management within NVM Express. After evaluating each approach, there was a step-by-step walkthrough to map the models. From that, we created mockups and a comprehensive mapping guide using examples of object and property level mapping between the standard ecosystems. In addition, Swordfish profiles were created that provide a comprehensive representation of required properties for implementations. These profiles have been incorporated into the new Swordfish Conformance Test Program (CTP), to support NVMe capabilities. Through its set of test suites, the CTP validates that a company’s products conform to a specified version of the Swordfish specification. CTP supports conformance testing against multiple versions of Swordfish. What’s Next? In 2021, the Swordfish specification will continue to be enhanced to fully capitalize on the fabrics model by extending fabric technology-specific use cases and creating more profiles for additional device types. Want to learn more? Watch SNIA’s on-demand webcast, “Universal Fabric Management for Tomorrow’s Data Centers,” where Phil Cayton, Senior Staff Software Engineer, Intel; and Richelle Ahlvers, storage technology enablement architect, Intel Corporation, Board of Directors, SNIA, provide insights into how standard organizations are working together to improve and promote the vendor-neutral, standards-based management of open source fabrics and remote network services or devices in high-performance data center infrastructures. [contact-form]

Twenty-year SNIA veteran Mike Walker has created a series of videos titled “SMI-S Quick Start Guides” that provides developers using the SMI-S storage management specification instructions on how to find useful information in a SMI-S server using the python-based PyWBEM open source tool. “Using the PyWBEM tool, I created a set of mock SMI-S 1.8 servers which I have shared with the world on GitHub,” said Walker. “I also created a set of PDFs called ‘Quick Start Guides’ and a series of videos demonstrating some of the most recent capabilities of the SMI-S 1.8 specification. Storage equipment vendors and management software vendors seeking to address the day-to-day tasks of the IT environment can use this information to work with SMI-S 1.8.” The first two videos of this series now available on the SNIA Video YouTube channel are listed below. Be sure to check back or subscribe to the SNIA Video YouTube channel for future video installments. • A short trailer explaining the content you can expect to see in the series here. • A SNIA SMI-S Storage Management Spec. Mockups, Installation and Setup video here. The Quick Start Guide PDFs and a set of mock WBEM servers that support SMI-S 1.8 storage management servers can be found on GitHub here. You can also learn more about PyWBEM here. About the SMI-S Storage Management Specification SMI-S was first approved as an ISO standard in 2002. Today, it has been implemented in over 1,350 storage products that provide access to common storage management functions and features. During its lifetime, several versions of the SMI-S standard have been approved by ISO. The current international standard for SMI-S was based on SMI-S v1.5, which was completed in 2011, submitted for ISO approval in 2012, and formally adopted in 2014 as the latest revision of ISO/IEC 24775. SMI-S 1.8 rev 5 was sent to ISO as an update to ISO/IEC 24775 and is expected to become an internationally recognized standard in the first half of 2021. SMI-S 1.8 rev 5 is the recommended and final version of the specification as no further updates are planned. Subscribe to the SNIA Matters Newsletter here to stay up-to-date on all SNIA announcements and be one of the first to learn the ISO approval status of the SMI-S 1.8 rev 5 storage specification.

SNIA’s Technical Council is one of the crown jewels of the organization. Made up of a group of acknowledged storage experts, the Technical Council oversees and manages SNIA Technical Work Groups, reviews architectures submitted by work groups, and is SNIA’s technical liaison to standards organizations. One of the Council’s superpowers is its ISO JTC-1 designation as an ARO and a PAS submitter. What does that actually mean? It’s a very big deal! SNIA is only one of 13 organizations worldwide that have the PAS submission capability, putting it in exclusive company. The list includes:

• DMTF
• GS1
• JDF
• NESMA
• OASIS
• Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF)
• OMG
• Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)
• SMPTE
• SNIA
• The Open Group
• Trusted Computing Group (TCG)
• W3C

“Traditionally, ISO standards can only reference one another. By approving SNIA as an Approved Reference Organization (ARO), JTC1 is acknowledging SNIA’s rigorous development process and technical credibility. This allows the documents that SNIA develops to be used to underpin other ISO standards,” said Arnold Jones, Technical Council Managing Director, SNIA. “In addition, SNIA has satisfied the extensive criteria to become a Publicly Available Standard (PAS) submitter.” ISO is an independent, international organization with a membership of 165 national standards bodies. It is the international standards organization. When a SNIA standard becomes ISO-approved, virtually every country in the world has access to it along with confidence it will work well with solutions in the marketplace. ISO/IEC JTC 1 is a joint technical committee of ISO and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). Its purpose is to develop, maintain and promote standards in the fields of information technology and Information and Communications Technology. Specifications developed by a PAS Submitter can use a streamlined approval process within ISO, assuring that recent, advanced technology moves from industry consensus to international standard as quickly and efficiently as possible. SNIA was reaffirmed as a PAS submitter by ISO in 2018 for another five-year term, with its status in effect until September 2023. SMI-S Storage Management Specification The Storage Management Initiative-Specification (SMI-S) provides a real-world example of how a PAS submission works within SNIA. SMI-S was first approved as an ISO standard in 2002. Today, it has been implemented in over 1,350 storage products that provides access to common storage management functions and features. During its lifetime, the SMI-S standard has been approved by ISO many times. The current international standard for SMI-S was based on SMI-S v1.5, which was completed in 2011, submitted for ISO approval in 2012, and formally adopted in 2014 as the latest revision of ISO/IEC 24775. SMI-S 1.8 was recently sent to ISO as an update to ISO/IEC 24775. SNIA believes SMI-S 1.8 rev 5 is the very best version of the specification and should be adopted worldwide. As a PAS submission, it will become an international standard much more quickly. Published by SNIA as a standard in March, 2020, it was submitted to ISO in May and began a 90-day ballot in August. If all goes as expected, SMI-S v1.8 will be approved as ISO/IEC 24775:2020 by the end of the year – less than a year after its publication as a SNIA architecture. Subscribe to the SNIA Matters Newsletter here to stay up-to-date on all SNIA announcements and be one of the first to learn the status of the SMI-S 1.8 rev 5 storage specification. Want to learn more about ISO and PAS? You might find the following links useful:

• ISO/PAS Publicly Available Specifications
• ISO/IEC JTC 1 PAS Submitters
• ISO/IEC JTC1 About page