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A perfect storm hit the storage industry last summer. The result-the Storage Management Interface Specification (SMI-S)-made quite a splash when it was ratified by the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA, www.snia.org) in late 2003.
SMI-S is intended to improve compatibility among different storage vendors' equipment (note that the term "interoperability" isn't used here, for reasons we'll discuss later). During its formative years, SMI-S was known as Bluefin, but lost its seaworthy sobriquet in favor of a moniker more suitable for landlubbers. The spec is currently being formatted for submission to the American National Standards Institute's (ANSI, www.ansi.org) International Committee for IT Standards (INCITS).
One of SMI-S's primary components is the Distributed Management Task Force's (DMTF) Common Information Model (CIM), an object-oriented framework that defines the physical and logical structure of system components. CIM is in turn part of the broader Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) specification. Under WBEM's covers lies an Extensible Markup Language (XML)-based encoding specification, as well as a mechanism for accessing modeled objects using the HTTP protocol. This CIM/WBEM combination is what packs a great deal of SMI-S's punch.