SNIA Blessed Storage Solutions Shipping

By Greg McNevin

December 11, 2007: The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) has announced that five vendors are now shipping products blessed by its Conformance Testing Program (SNIA-CTP) for the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) Provider Test suite.

SNIA says that the new SMI-S Provider Test suite now has the capability to test storage products for conformance to the SMI-S version 1.2, with the first vendors to pass this new storage management evaluation procedure including EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, HP, IBM and NetApp.

The association developed the program to help enterprise and storage management products deliver on the benefits of the fast-evolving SMI-S standard, with upwards of 500 vendor hardware products from 27 companies tested on the original specification to date.

The new version has been expanded to include functional enhancements to the array and storage virtualizer support. SNIA says it will also roll out additional programs to add testing of more storage products, such as Fabric and NAS, to further its multi-vendor heterogeneous storage management.

“This is yet another confirmation of the steady progress made by the SMI-S program for end users and the greater storage industry,” said Paul von Behren, Chair of the Storage Management Initiative. “IT professionals are always looking for greater flexibility in choosing the right solution as well as the ability to reduce the number of vendor-specific storage management tools required to manage today's heterogeneous data centre.

“The SNIA-CTP encompasses both the management software and hardware infrastructure, bringing the industry closer to providing IT users with trusted storage management solutions that help ease their management complexity.”

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