The Gold Standard
- Article 2 of 2
- Information Unbound, October 2006
The interoperability standards necessary to manage heterogeneous storage environments are starting to crystallise.
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At the moment, Bunker says, the SMI-S standard offers 80% of the functionality needed for most organisations to monitor and control their SANs during their daily operations. The areas where the standards are lacking are in more advanced configuration, such as partitioning and mirroring. For these tasks, recourse to proprietary tools is necessary.
However, Hamish Macarthur, CEO and co-founder of storage analyst firm Macarthur Stroud International, says that that 80% figure hides other issues. “If it’s just about operating, then 80-90% is about right. If you’re looking at in terms of interchange of data, in practice that figure’s not so high.” In particular, standards are of no use when dealing with older hardware: although some vendors offer shims that enable standards-based management of older systems, few do and firmware updates are singularly lacking in most instances. With SANs lasting four years or more in many enterprises, managing them using proprietary tools is usually the only option.
There can also be issues around interoperability. SNIA provides vendors with a certification suite that runs hardware through its paces using the standards; if the hardware responds as required, the vendors can then declare themselves compliant with the latest standards. However, Matthew Brisse, technology strategist at Dell, points out this testing does not show whether the hardware interoperates with real-world software and hardware. And with various different versions of SMS-I available in the real-world, version 1.0.2 being the most common in shipping products (more than 280 have now been certified) and 1.0 available in many just-shipped products, being sure of exactly what a piece of kit should be capable of doing using the standards can be difficult.
Vendors themselves aren’t necessarily helping. Jon Pavitt, who is responsible for Unisys’s storage offering, says that while virtually all vendors have signed up to the standards, they’re “not readily forthcoming” in providing interested parties with details of what hardware they’ve incorporated them into and which versions of the standards. And Nigel Tozer, consulting manager at CA, says the situation is like “shades of the rainbow. Some vendors try to play the game and apply the letter of the standard – just enough to get certified.”
Nevertheless, vendors are adopting the standards in ever-increasing numbers. While Tozer says SNIA could be doing a better job of marketing SMI-S to end-users, an increasing number of RFPs for storage products are requiring SMI-S support, according to Dell’s Brisse. HP’s Manners argues that some standards are better than no standards at all for many organisations, which may not have any real way to manage their SANs: “It’s almost embarrassing. They might have just a single person managing everything in an Excel spreadsheet. Even if you use the most basic elements of discovery available [in SMI-S], that’s better than nothing.” Knowing what versions of firmware are being used in hardware or whether switches need to be upgraded can make all the difference to some organisations.
With industry momentum behind many of the storage standards, many more are planned. Helmut Beck, VP of storage at Fujitsu Siemens Computers, says his company is one of many supporting work in SNIA to develop standardised interfaces between backup storage systems. SMI-S 1.1, which includes support for health and fault management, storage security policy, copy services, policy management, tape libraries, NAS and iSCSI, has been approved and the first group of products are undergoing conformance testing. John Kelly, SNIA’s storage management forum vice chair, says the aim is to consolidate discovery, access, reporting and control features into a single, standard architecture that will establish a foundation for a broader set of management capabilities in the future. The APERI open source framework started in October last year is an industry-wide initiative to create an SMI-S compliant code library for storage management. Extensible Asset Management (XAM) is another SNIA initiative to bring standards to ILM and to create a standard interface between applications and storage, while the multipath management API specification will allow management applications to discover the multipath devices on the current system.
At the moment, only the first steps have been taken with storage standards. Much more effort will be needed before heterogeneous SANs can be completely managed using a single standards-based console. And with storage developments out-running the slower moving standards-creation and ratification processes, the risk is that the 90-10 split in management methods will be permanent, even if the functions involved keep changing. But standards are here and they’re making interoperability much more than a ‘vision’ on a PowerPoint.
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