What's missing in SMI-S?

NETWORK WORLD NEWSLETTER: MIKE KARP ON STORAGE IN THE ENTERPRISE
10/04/05
Today's focus: What's missing in SMI-S?

Dear networking.world@gmail.com,

In this issue:

* SMI-S yet to provide a management aspect
* Links related to Storage in the Enterprise
* Featured reader resource
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Today's focus: What's missing in SMI-S?

By Mike Karp

What with all the writing I do on the topic of the SNIA's
software management initiative specification, it might seem to
some of you that SMI-S is all you need to manage your networked
storage hardware. Some day that may be the case, but right now
nothing could be further from the truth.

As it stands today, SMI-S is still in its infancy: it provides
for discovery only, but no actual management. Discovery is of
course the first step on the road to management, but it is only
that.

It is also important to understand that, to date, SMI-enabled
management consoles (these are actually the clients in the SMI
scheme of things) are only certified to discover host bus
adapters (HBAs), storage-area network fabrics, storage switches
and arrays. Tape drives, tape libraries, optical storage and
other assets that might be SAN-attached are all part of the
"master plan," but incorporation of discovery for those storage
elements still lies in the future.

How far off in the future? Hard to tell. The situation
surrounding tape libraries serves as a useful example.

At least one vendor has already made some of its tape libraries
discoverable through SMI-S, although SNIA hasn't yet certified
this discovery on the SAN with any management consoles - and may
not be for some time. ADIC's iPlatform libraries have SMI-S
built in, and therefore any SMI-S conformant client should be
able to discover them. Why no conformance testing then?
Because SNIA apparently requires at least two vendors to submit
products for testing before the test can occur, and right now, a
second vendor has yet to submit products for the tests.

Many tape libraries offer a wide variety of features and so tend
to require a lot of management. Many of these special features
are specific to individual products, and typically provide the
proprietary differentiators that help a product distance itself
from its competitors. None of this is ever likely to fall within
the SMI spec however, nor should it.

What's a poor storage manager to do? It turns out you don't
have to give up standards-based management to get complete
control over your storage. In the case of ADIC, while the
libraries are discoverable through any SMI-S console, ADIC has
allso made them manageable through the ADIC API. EMC, at least,
takes advantage of this. The result is that the availability of
the ADIC libraries appears in real time on the same SAN
topography map as all the other SAN elements, but the libraries
are still fully managed through the API.

Other important management capabilities also lie outside the
spec, a case that becomes increasingly obvious as your
enterprise storage responsibilities expand to include remote
storage. What if you want to manage the whole data path to a
remote installation - a disaster recovery site for example, or
just some remote location on a metropolitan-area network?

Obviously, you can't understand every event that interacts with
data from a remote site if you can't look along the whole of the
data path. Unfortunately, SMI-S will be of no help at all here.
For that kind of management capability you will have to look
beyond standard storage resource management tools to something
like CentrePath's Magellan management software.

The top 5: Today's most-read stories

1. How to solve Windows system crashes in minutes
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2. Nortel faces uphill battle
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3. Cisco pushes new security software
http://www.networkworld.com/nlstorage8129
4. Verizon CTO lays out next-gen network plans
http://www.networkworld.com/nlstoragealert8060
5. Next-gen net seen at a crossroads
http://www.networkworld.com/nlstorage8130

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To contact: Mike Karp

Mike Karp is senior analyst with Enterprise Management
Associates, focusing on storage, storage management and the
methodology that brings these issues into the marketplace. He
has spent more than 20 years in storage, systems management and
telecommunications. Mike can be reached via e-mail
mailto:mkarp@enterprisemanagement.com.
_______________________________________________________________
This newsletter is sponsored by Hitachi

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ARCHIVE LINKS

Archive of the Storage newsletter:
http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/stor/index.html

Breaking storage news and analysis:
http://www.networkworld.com/topics/storage.html
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Extended value chains are here to stay - application
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FEATURED READER RESOURCE

IT PROS SHARE THEIR TALES OF MAKING ITIL WORK

Running an enterprise network is challenging. IT organizational
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Implementing best practices frameworks such as Information
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http://www.networkworld.com/news/2005/092205-itil.html
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