The move is mostly about making a public show of commitment to the as-yet unratified SMI-S. The majority of storage management software that works with HP’s storage arrays has been developed using HP’s proprietary APIs rather than the standardized APIs of SMI-S, and future development will not cut over to SMI-s for some while yet. The Storage Networking Industry Association says its target is to see 100% adoption of SMI-S by the end of 2005.
An HP spokesman said: Yes, let’s keep in perspective. But it’s important that people know we’ve got the providers [SMI APIs] in our arrays now. HP’s flagship XP array – a rebadged Lightning array originally made by Hitachi Ltd – and its Virtual Array are now shipping with an SMI-S provider, the company said. The company’s EVA and MA arrays will follow suit later this year.
Last year it was the API swaps. That was last year’s story – we don’t think proprietary API swaps are in the customers’ long-term interests, the spokesman said.
A draft version of SMI-S 1.0 was posted by SNIA in April, and is expected to be ratified this summer. SNIA has told ComputerWire it is considering ratifying the standard itself. Version 1.0 will not cover all of the functions defined by proprietary APIs.
Source: Computerwire
