First SMI-S Conformant Products Announced

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) today announced the first round of products to have passed the SNIA Conformance Testing Program (SNIA-CTP) for the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S).

The SNIA-CTP validates that storage products conform to the current version of SMI-S. For end users this means that for the first time products can be purchased that use a tested and standardized management interface to deploy and manage multi-vendor storage environments.

Passing the initial SNIA-CTP are more than 100 products from 14 companies, including Brocade, CNT, Dell, EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, HP, IBM Corporation, LSI Logic Corporation, McDATA, Network Appliance, QLogic Corporation, Silicon Graphics, StorageTek, and Sun Microsystems.

“This is a monumental achievement for the industry and end users,” says Ray Dunn, chairman of the SNIA Storage Management Forum. “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 be widely adopted in all new products by the end of 2005.”

The SNIA-CTP ensures that all vendor product implementations and interpretations conform to a specification — in this case, SMI-S v1.0.2. SMI-S v1.0.2 has been developed and tested by more than one hundred storage industry engineers to deliver a reliable interface that enables storage management systems to identify, classify, monitor, and control physical and logical resources.

According to the SNIA, products that conform to SMI-S deliver simpler configuration and setup procedures, standardized controls for complex operations, and automated provisioning. With products that have completed the SNIA-CTP, end users and integrators are expected to get improved functionality and interoperability.

Marty LeFebvre, vice president of Technology Strategy at Nielsen Media Research and member of the SNIA End User Council Governing Board, comments that SMI-S conformance requirements will be an important element of his company’s future request for proposals for any new storage product purchases.

To ensure a vendor’s claim of conformance to SNIA standards, end users can check the SNIA website at www.snia.org for officially badged and tested products.

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