SNIA Announces Storage Management Interoperability Progress

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) announced continued progress in its Storage Management Initiative (SMI). According to the organization, the SNIA Technical Work Group has completed its initial review of the specification document and has reached the testing cycle phase. The 6-month long testing cycle, called CIM-SAN-2 Developers Demonstration Program, will include a series of public demonstrations and events called "plugfests," in which storage companies get together to test their technologies' compatibility. The demonstration program is expected to help SNIA reach its goal of delivering a standard specification by the end of 2003.

Last fall's demonstrations resulted in the Storage Management Forum incorporating new discovery, management, and security features into the CIM-SAN 2 standard. The new features include Array volume creation, which enables the creation of logical volumes in arrays and virtualizers, making them available for use by hosts; Array LUN masking, a security function that controls the visibility of logical volumes to hosts; Array snapshot and mirror control, which creates, splits and synchronizes snapshots and mirrored volumes; and Fabric topology and zoning discovery, which facilitates the discovery of how devices are connected to switches and their zoning parameters.

Many companies in the industry are expected to participate in the CIM-SAN-2 Developer Demonstration Program. SNIA's SMI was created to help increase interoperability between multivendor storage products. Interoperability has been a big focus recently for storage and storage management vendors. 
   http://www.snia.org/tech_activities/SMI