SNIA’S SMI-S standard adopted by ISO and IEC

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) today announced that its Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) has been designated an International Standard by the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) and International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC).  This designation is expected to further accelerate the already widespread adoption of the standard by storage vendors and IT users worldwide.

 “The recognition of SMI-S by ISO and IEC is clear evidence that the specification has become visible among the worldwide storage community as a key to helping increase storage interoperability and decrease management complexity. It is also evidence of SNIA’s growing reputation for producing high quality standards,” said Vincent Franceschini, chair of the SNIA.  “SMI-S was created to develop interoperable storage management technologies, and its ratification as an international standard signifies the impact it can have on a global level to achieve these goals,” he added.

 According to PK Gupta, Chair of SNIA India, “”ISO is a well respected standards body in the India region. Having SMI-S standardised by ISO lends extra authority to the standard and helps in wider acceptance of interoperability standards for storage area networking and systems, which are growing in India at the rate of 70 percent per year. This is a big step for the storage industry in terms of standardisation and solving end users’ pain points of managing heterogeneous storage.”

The SNIA has worked to drive the global adoption of SMI-S through a wide array of activities hosted by SNIA Regional Affiliates in Australia-New Zealand, North America – Canada, China, Europe (EMEA), India, Japan and South-Asia.  The SNIA is also a co-owner of Storage Networking World conferences that take place in China, Germany, Australia and the US where educational activities such as tutorials, Hands-on-Labs, Solution Center demonstrations and plugfests have built an international coalition of vendors and users that are implementing SMI-S.

“Continued progress toward the establishment of standards benefits end users by decreasing their interoperability pain points, and the processing of SMI-S as an ISO/IEC International Standard marks a significant step forward for the future development of storage standards,” said Wendy Betts, Distributed Storage Manager for Hewitt Associates and chair of the SNIA End User Council (EUC).  “Global enterprises are deploying storage networks in increasingly large numbers to support their worldwide infrastructure, and SMI-S is allowing users to centrally manage their multi-vendor, multi-geography networks through a standard interface.” 

The SNIA was supported in the ISO/IEC standardisation effort by partnering with the International Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS), whose T11 Technical Committee assisted with the submission of the specification to the ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee, JTC 1, Information Technology. After processing by the JTC 1 subcommittee SC 25, Interconnection of Information Technology Equipment, SMI-S was successfully voted as an International Standard on 28 November 2006. It is expected to be published before the end of the first quarter of 2007 as ISO/IEC 24775, Information Technology – Storage Management.

 “Adoption of SMI-S as an ISO/IEC International Standard is a key milestone that is likely to increase market confidence. It also demonstrates the flexibility of IEC and ISO in recognizing consortia commitment and contributions to standards.” said Gabriel Barta, Technical Officer for SC 25 in IEC.” 

The SNIA recently announced it is continuing to expand SMI-S with new capabilities in an effort to meet global IT users’ needs and vendor requirements for rapidly evolving storage technology. Support for such storage capabilities as host-based controllers, storage enclosures, support for file system quotas, volume protection and consistency management for snapshot and replication management support are expected to be included in future releases of the SMI-S standard.  So far, SMI-S has been implemented in more than 450 products tested for conformance with the standard.