Storage Management Initiative Specification

The Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) is a design specification of the Storage Management Initiative (SMI) that is launched by the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA).

The SMI-S specifies a secure and reliable interface that is used by storage management systems to identify, classify, monitor, and control physical and logical resources in a storage area network (SAN). The interface integrates the various devices to be managed in a SAN and the tools that are used to manage them.

SMI-S is based on a number of existing technologies or industry standards that include the following items:

Common Information Model (CIM)

An object model for data storage and management that is developed by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF). CIM makes it possible to organize devices and components of devices in an object-oriented pattern.

Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM)

A tiered enterprise management architecture that is also developed by the DMTF. This architecture provides the management design framework that consists of devices, device providers, the object manager, and the messaging protocol for the communication between client applications and the object manager. The object manager is the CIM Object Manager (CIMOM) and the messaging protocol is the CIM over HTTP technology. The CIM over HTTP approach specifies that the CIM data is encoded in XML and sent in specific messages between the client applications and the CIMOM over the Internet Protocol network in a SAN.

Service Location Protocol (SLP)

A directory service that the client application uses to locate the CIMOM.

Intended to be an industry standard, SMI-S extends the generic capabilities of the CIM, the WBEM, and the SLP to implement storage networking interoperability. For example, the WBEM provides provisions for security, resource-locking management, event notification, and service discovery.

For more information about the SMI-S conforming profiles that are supported by the CIM agent and information about writing standards-based implementations, see the following website.

www.snia.org/forums/smi/tech_programs/smis_home/