New standards hailed as turning point for storage industry
New standards hailed as turning point for storage industry
The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) has described the introduction of the first Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) conformant products as a landmark moment and a turning point for the storage industry as a whole.
The products have passed the stringent SNIA Conformance Testing Program (SNIA-CTP) for the specification. This marks the first time in the industry that customers can purchase products built using a tested and standardised management interface, which will aid in the deployment and management of multi-vendor storage environments.
The 14 companies have more than 100 products that have passed the SNIA-CTP. The companies are Brocade, CNT, Dell, EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, HP, IBM, LSI Logic Storage Systems, McDATA, Network Appliance, QLogic, Silicon Graphics, StorageTek, and Sun Microsystems.
"This is a monumental achievement for the industry and end users," said Ray Dunn, chairman of the SNIA Storage Management Forum. "For the first time ever, end users will be able to select storage management products with SMI-S conformant interfaces, which will help make their storage simpler to implement and manage. We believe SMI-S will ease the day-to-day routines of storage management and that the specification will be widely adopted in all new products by the end of 2005."
The management of conformant storage products by management applications will alleviate some of the pain points associated with IT storage operations. For example, SMI-S will ease the complexity of activities such as discovery and provisioning, as well as lay the foundation for policy management.
Meanwhile, the SNIA IP Storage Forum's newly elected board of directors has pledged to drive the widespread adoption of IP-Based SAN storage systems on a global basis during 2004.
"During 2003, IP Storage made the transition from emerging technology to mainstream SAN storage solution with a rapidly growing number of deployments in production IT environments," said David Dale, SNIA IPS Forum chair. "This success speaks directly to the huge increase in storage and data management complexity, which is driving customers to complement and extend their implementation of networked storage into more environments, for more applications, supporting more classes of servers. Customer education - on a global basis - is now job one for the IP Storage Forum."
Sheila Childs, chair of the SNIA, added, "The Storage Networking Industry Association is established as the point of cohesion for developers of storage and networking products, as well as users of storage solutions. The accomplishments of the SNIA IP Storage Forum epitomise the overall goals of our association. By providing education, training and real-life demonstrations, the forum is poised to build on its success throughout the year ahead."
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