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The next phase of the Storage Networking Industry Association’s interoperability demo is expanding beyond Fibre Channel SAN technology to include network attached storage (NAS) and storage over IP.
The SMI-Lab3 Developers Demonstration Program will exhibit “ground-breaking progress in the advancement toward achieving interoperable storage management,” SNIA claims.
Established by SNIA’s Storage Management Forum, the SMI-Lab3 will be showcased at the Fall Storage Networking World 2003 in Orlando, Fl., and will feature the success and progress to date with SNIA’s Storage Management Initiative specification (SMI-S). The first SMI-Lab3 plugfest will be held next week and the second during the week of September 22.
The SMI-Lab, a reference implementation of network storage and management products, uses the SMI specification as the interface to simplify storage management. Formerly labeled CIM-SAN, SMI-Lab3 is the third iteration of this demonstration and began accepting storage vendor participants on July 1. It will operate through December 31 at the SNIA Technology Center in Colorado Springs, Colo.
“SMI represents more than just an initiative for storage management,” says Jerry Duggan, SMI-Lab program manager. “It is going to revolutionize the industry across the board. SMI-Lab3 brings the SNIA even closer to its goal that all new storage networking products will utilize the SMI-S standard in
their management.”
The lab is an extension of the CIM-SAN-2 demonstration conducted earlier this year, where 20 participating companies integrated 35 products, creating 160 points of interoperability.
The SMI-Lab3 includes the newly announced SNIA Interoperability Conformance Testing Program (ICTP), a foundation for validating compliance with the SMI-S v1.0 interface. The testing process will be used to measure vendor product compliance and to test the consistency and maturity of the evolving specification development process.
The SNIA Technology Center will host the SMI-Lab3 program as a permanent and open multi-vendor testing base to accelerate storage management standards development. The Technology Center’s advanced environment gives participating companies the ability to examine and enhance mutual offerings for customers prior to the public demonstration at SNW in October.
The SMI-Lab3 “reaches beyond the Fibre Channel SAN technology and expands the storage network protocol set to include NAS and storage over IP,” according to SNIA. The lab also serves as a platform for the development implementations of SMI-S v1.1, containing health and diagnostics, additional security, performance monitoring, and policy management.
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