Brocade Communications Systems 53-1001778-01 manual Brocade SMI-S Initiative, Brocade SMI Agent

1 Brocade SMI-S Initiative

Brocade SMI-S Initiative

Storage Management Initiative (SMI) is a broad-based initiative sponsored by the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) that is standardizing all aspects of storage management for multivendor storage networking products. SMI encompasses the storage aspects of CIM, as shown in Figure 1.

Mainframes

CDatabases

SMI

I MApplications Storage

Events

FIGURE 1 Storage Management Initiative

The Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) defines the interface that allows storage management systems to manage and monitor storage area network (SAN) resources.

SMI-S is the only standard that addresses manageability from the perspective of a logical unit number (LUN) in a storage array, all the way through the data path, to an application running on a host. The standard promises to remove much of the vendor-specific issues associated with managing storage, storage networks, hosts, and applications by providing a common interface and management paradigm across the full scope of application and storage management. This in turn will improve the interoperability of various management products and allow more products to be managed by most management environments. Customers will benefit from a much wider choice of broad-based management applications.

Brocade SMI Agent

The Brocade SMI Agent (SMI-A) is a “proxy” agent to multiple fabrics; it resides on a separate host. The SMI-A does not require any modification or upgrade to deployed fabrics when it is deployed. All the support required in Brocade switches is already in place. Figure 2 on page 3 shows the high-level architecture of the SMI-A.

2	Brocade SMI Agent User’s Guide
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