The Storage Management Initiative Specification, commonly called SMI-S, is a computer data storage management standard developed and maintained by the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA). It has also been ratified as an ISO standard. SMI-S is based upon the Common Information Model and the Web-Based Enterprise Management standards defined by the Distributed Management Task Force, which define management functionality via HTTP. The most recent approved version of SMI-S is available on the SNIA website. The main objective of SMI-S is to enable broad interoperable management of heterogeneous storage vendor systems. The current version is SMI-S 1.8.0 Rev 5. Over 1,350 storage products are certified as conformant to SMI-S.

Basic concepts

SMI-S defines CIM management profiles for storage systems. The entire SMI Specification is categorized in profiles and subprofiles. A profile describes the behavioral aspects of an autonomous, self-contained management domain. SMI-S includes profiles for Arrays, Switches, Storage Virtualizers, Volume Management and several other management domains. In DMTF parlance, an SMI-S provider is an implementation for a specific profile or set of profiles. A subprofile describes a part of a management domain, and can be a common part in more than one profile. At a very basic level, SMI-S entities are divided into two categories:

SMI-S timeline

Open source projects