SNIA hails vendor unification
SNIA hails vendor unification
SNIA claimed at this week's Storage World event, held in Sydney, that the challenges and complexities of managing multi-vendor storage environments should be a concern of the past thanks to its efforts to create standards throughout the industry.
Ray Dunn, the chairman of the storage management form for the SNIA, explained how the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) has created a uniform standard interface for managing storage devices.
Dunn believes that SMI-S is making storage much easier for end-users and will lead to the rise in popularity of Storage Area Networks, combined systems and lower costs.
"Independent research, users and even the attendees at the conference today are telling us that SAN implementation is being held up by the lack of interoperability between different vendors' equipment and the huge costs involved with trying to manage the storage infrastructure.
"The overhead and complexity of storage has created agent proliferation and islands of data, just what a SAN is supposed to fix.
"Now that we've reached the desired stage where vendors are incorporating the SMI-S standard into their products, a user can begin to select SAN components using standardised features for discovery, LUN mapping and masking and creating storage pools. This will help end users in their day to day operations."
SMI-S v1.02 now works in over 100 different storage devices from 14 top companies in the industry, including Brocade, EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, HP, IBM and Sun.
Andrew Manners, SNIA ANZ vice chairman added: "The value of the SMI-S is huge. For the first time in the industry, 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. We urge users to seriously consider SMI-S as a requirement in current and future SAN purchases."
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