SMI-S: Building the Case for a Standard Paul von Behren, Chief Technologist, Symantec This tutorial describes how the SMI-S standard benefits the three primary players in storage management solutions end users, vendors of storage products, and application (such as SRM) vendors. Standards-based solutions help end-users avoid vendor lock-in, provide choices in storage management applications, and eliminating the cost of vendor-specific agent infrastructures. Vendors of storage products benefit by gaining application support with little or no vendor-specific development costs. Application vendors benefit by gaining storage support with little or no vendor-specific development costs. This tutorial also looks at innovative solutions that can exploit a standards-based infrastructure such as SMI-S – for example, Management Frameworks. This tutorial also talks about the past and future evolution of SMI-S; how the standard started by providing basic storage networking management tasks, adding more functionality and increasing the scope to meet the requirements of end-users and storage vendors, and plans for the future.
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