YOU ARE PROBABLY tired of hearing that the cost of managing storage is significantly higher -- by a factor of seven, according
to some estimates -- than the cost of purchasing the actual storage infrastructure.
Probably even more annoying is realizing that storage management is expensive because much of it is based on human labor.
Unless you have a single-vendor implementation, your storage administrators have to deal with a variety of management consoles,
each having its own "efficient" and "friendly" user interface, all of which are slightly different from the others.
Most storage vendors publish APIs that other vendors can use to create applications to automate monitoring or configuration
activities, but -- despite effort from companies such as EMC, Fujitsu Softek, Hewlett-Packard, StorageTek, and Veritas --
a comprehensive storage management system is still a pipe dream.
The good news is that the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is taking this problem very seriously and has garnered
the attention and support of some 300 storage vendors on its SMI (Storage Management Initiative) to promote a standard called
SMIS (Storage Management Interface Specification).
We first knew this standard as Bluefin; in fact, the core of SMSI remains the Desktop Management Task Force (DMTF)-originated
WBEM/CIM (Web-Based Enterprise Management/Common Information Model) standard.
But in addition to changing the name, SNIA is adding some interesting features, including resource locking and auto-discovery
of storage devices. These come on the recommendation of the Partner Development Program, a group of storage vendors that also
had a hand in defining the soon-to-be-submitted standard.
A common management interface means storage administrators will spend less time jumping between consoles to diagnose problems
or change configurations. Vendors will spend fewer development months trying to manage diversity and will free up a lot of
their engineers to actually create functions that today's users can only dream about. How does an automated provision system
sound? Or a real policy-based management system?
Veritas is already talking about adding the capabilities mentioned above, as well as a predictive failure analysis system.
And Sun is set to bring a storage management application -- dubbed StorEdge Resource Management -- with SMI support by year's
end. Additionally, SNIA will showcase a working SMI-enabled multivendor SAN at its conference in October.
Most of this won't be in customers' hands for at least another year, but the possibilities are exciting. Just think: Customers
might actually see some true storage innovation, and we will have to find something else to write about. Sounds like a win-win-win
situation. Do you believe it?
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