A standard that leaves out the good stuff

Regarding the frustration of smaller SRM vendors who find it difficult to plug their products into larger vendors' SMI-S-compatible consoles, Adams calls it a "vendor-by-vendor adoption decision," saying he will not try to "sugarcoat" the fact that the smaller vendors lack the installed base necessary to create leverage with their larger counterparts.

Hey, EMC supports it

Adams says that EMC has been a leader in SMI-S implementation, noting that the company has been among the first vendors to implement the most recent versions of the specification. That has included using SMI-S to enable performance metrics and some of the new block interfaces that manage larger devices through block services. As evidence of EMC's proactive attitude toward SMI-S, he pointed to the company's April announcement of v1.2 support for 36 models of its Symmetrix and Clariion storage arrays. "I would say that we've been out there at least at the 95% level saying this is what's ready to be tested and demonstrated, and then we have implemented it."

So far, SMI-S has not been viewed as a direct aid to users, although Laliberte says that on a scale of 1 to 10, he would give it a 5. According to him, many companies are providing SMI-S support, which provides a baseline of support for a variety of different vendors. This, Laliberte says, creates some visibility into heterogeneous devices and accelerates the introduction of more products that can work cohesively in a data center with multivendor storage devices.

Laliberte elaborates by stating, "The ability to leverage SMI-S to accelerate getting products to market will provide more competition and help drive innovation because companies can spend more time developing advanced analytics or automation instead of support for different arrays and switches."

Franceschini acknowledges that SNIA has not gathered a lot of information relating to how SMI-S has helped IT shops in user organizations gain more control of the heterogeneous storage infrastructures. According to him, SNIA intends to improve its industry feedback in this area, adding that SNIA's requirements-gathering process for future SMI-S versions already involves product managers and the SNIA End User Council, a group that meets regularly to provide feedback and direction on storage technology.

"As SMI-S is deployed in production environments, it helps approaching the overall management requirements differently by enabling the setup of a broader framework to discover and manage heterogeneous resources," Franceschini states. "It is particularly true when introducing new resources and for getting support with storage management applications. SMI-S has allowed IT organizations to be more focused on storage management requirements."

Despite his sometimes strident criticism, even Toigo pays a complement to SMI-S, saying, "The specification itself is great. If it was fully implemented in full flower by every vendor, you would have all the information at your fingertips not only to monitor status, but also be able to handle the configuration and management of the capacity of the array or the device in question. It would be a boon to every consumer on the planet."