McData releases SMI-S
McData releases SMI-S
Oct 31, 2005: Storage networking solution provider McData has announced the availability of its new Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) interface.
The new release delivers a Common Information Model provider for McData Intrepid directors and Sphereon fabric switches, and is certified as SNIA-CTP v1.1 compliant.
It can be utilized by third party management applications with an SMI-S certified client to discover, monitor and configure McDATA devices and will immediately be leveraged by HP's SMI-S client and in future by IBM and others.
"McDATA is among the first switch vendors to release an SMI-S provider, demonstrating our ongoing commitment to delivering open, standards-based products" said Ken Cooper, McDATA's Australia and New Zealand country manager. "End users are the ultimate beneficiaries of SMI-S compliant solutions with improved manageability, security and network reliability,"
And it is the end users who have to part with their budgets for solutions, so being able to provide better management for their moolah is important. "Purchasing decisions today are influenced by interoperability and system manageability, so the majority of organizations prefer to deploy solutions that are based on open standards," said Frank Harbist, vice president, storage software, storageworks division, HP. "HP System Insight Manager and HP Storage Essentials support McDATA's SMI-S standards-based interface to allow customers to seamlessly create and integrate multi-vendor environments and enable switch-level monitoring and configuration."
James Gruener, Tivoli Storage Market Manager, IBM concurs: "We plan to integrate IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center with McDATA environments utilizing SMI-S. Such an integration would be directed at giving customers enhanced ability to manage their SANs from the application to the spindle and everything in between."
The Storage Management Initiative was created to develop and standardize interoperable storage management technologies. SMI-S allows storage vendors to target development efforts on a single standard interface so end-users can lower the total cost of ownership as management, integration of resources and interoperability improve network-wide.
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