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Brocade SMI Agent User’s Guide
53-1001778-01
Brocade SMI-S Initiative
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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
.
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.
C I M
Storage
Applications
Mainframes
SMI
Events
Databases
