Storage Management Initiative – Specification

The Storage Management Initiative Specification, commonly called SMI-S, is a storage standard developed and maintained by the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA). It has also been ratified as an ISO standard. SMI is based upon the Common Information Model and the Web-Based Enterprise Management standards defined by the Distributed Management Task Force, which define management functionality via HTTP. The most recent approved version of SMI is available at the SNIA.

The main objective of SMI-S is to enable broad interoperable management of heterogeneous storage vendor systems. The current version is SMI-S V1.6.0. Over 75 software products and over 800 hardware products are certified as conformant to SMI-S.

Basic concepts

SMI-S defines CIM management profiles for storage systems. The complete SMI Specification is categorized in profiles and subprofiles. A profile describes the behavioral aspects of an autonomous, self-contained management domain. SMI includes profiles for Arrays, Switches, Storage Virtualizers, Volume Management and many other domains. In DMTF parlance, a provider is an implementation for a specific profile. A subprofile describes part of the domain, which can be a common part in many profiles.