Inside Windows Storage: Server Storage Technologies for Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003 and Beyond

7.9 The Future of SNIA Storage Management: The Storage Management Initiative

Recently the Storage Networking Industry Association has developed a standards specification called the Storage Management Initiative (SMI), which at its inception was code-named Bluefin. This specification provides for storage management of logical and physical resources in a SAN using a vendor-independent API. The areas of storage management covered by SMI include device discovery and operations management, which includes configuration management, alerting, performance, and security management. SMI was first publicly demonstrated in the spring of 2002, and it is supported by several industry vendors .

SMI is designed around existing industry standards:

• The SMI design is based on the SNIA-defined Common Information Model. SMI specifies the use of HTTP for a transport protocol and XML to describe the contents of the messages transported via HTTP. To ensure privacy and data integrity, SMI specifies the use of Transport Layer Security (TLS). Defined in RFC 2246, TLS is a protocol that ensures privacy and data integrity for data communications between two applications. TLS is based on the well-known Secure Sockets Layer protocol.

• To ensure security, SMI specifies the use of HTTP Digest Access Authentication. Defined in RFC 2617, HTTP Digest Access Authentication is basically an extension of HTTP to allow a client to send its identity and password information in an encrypted manner rather than in plain text.

• SMI specifies the use of Service Location Protocol (SLP) for storage resource discovery. Defined in RFC 3224, SLP defines a way to discover network services in a vendor-extensible manner.

• SMI encompasses lock management, which allows multiple applications, possibly from different vendors, to use lock management services to share storage resources.