Developed by the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) has been ratified by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). SMI-S was ratified last year by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).

"This is the first storage management standard out there that's specific to SAN-based technologies," said Wayne Adams, a SNIA board member. Adams said the international acceptance of SMI-S will further its adoption in the U.S. and over seas.

Two dozen big and small storage vendors -- including EMC, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard Co. -- have so far implemented the SMI-S 1.0 specification in more than 450 products.

SMI-S is a set of common models and interfaces designed to allow storage management applications to communicate and manage multivendor storage devices. SNIA is working on three separate updated versions of the SMI-S.

"We still have a data explosion going on and still need to move data across larger pools of storage and this standard allows this to take place and it offers a common tool set to do that," Adams said.