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The Storage Management Initiative specification (SMI-S) is gaining ground. The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) lists more than 100 devices from 17 array, switch and host bus adapter vendors that comply with SMI-S 1.0.

"We're pretty amazed," says Jerry Duggan, SNIA SMI committee chair. "This speaks to the exploding combinatorial matrix of what [a vendor] needs to support."

More devices should support SMI-S as the latest version gets ratified. Recently released for vendor review, SMI-S 1.1 adds support for NAS, iSCSI and tape libraries, as well as deeper array integration, and advanced zoning and provisioning services.

In particular, Duggan notes that tape libraries "are finally getting some good momentum." ADIC was the first to announce an SMI-S 1.1-compliant library, its Scalar i2000. With it, Duggan says, SMI-S management apps can see "beneath the surface" of the tape library and recognize the internal drives and media.

All this SMI-S activity pleases storage management software providers like SRM vendor Storability. According to Ed Palmer, Storability's director of product marketing, "SMI-S is starting to be a useful standard."

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This was first published in March 2005

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