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.
SNIA is particularly focused on Version 1.1 of SMI-S, which defines interfaces between network-attached storage (NAS) and iSCSI-based devices. That version is currently being reviewed by ANSI. SMI-S v1.1 deals with device descriptions and the services associated with them, such as copying data from one array to another.
SMI-S version 1.02 is being reviewed by SNIA members and will offer support for host based controllers ' bringing SMI-S down to the host storage enclosures. file system quotas, volume protection and the management of data snapshots and replication. Version 1.03 of SMI-S has already been ratified by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and is also being pushed to the International Standards Organization for ratification.