Already 14 companies have more than 100 products that have passed the SNIA-CTP, including HP, Dell, EMC Corporation, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM and Sun Microsystems.
"This is a monumental achievement for the industry and end users," said Ray Dunn, chairman of the SNIA Storage Management Forum. "For the first time ever, end users will be able to select storage management products with SMI-S conformant interfaces, which will help make their storage simpler to implement and manage. We believe SMI-S will ease the day-to-day routines of storage management and that the specification will be widely adopted in all new products by the end of 2005."
The management of conformant storage products by management applications will alleviate some of the inconvenience associated with IT storage operations.
Marty LeFebvre, vice president of Technology Strategy at Nielsen Media Research and member of the SNIA End User Council Governing Board, added, "From this point forward, SMI-S conformance requirements will be an important element in our RFPs (request for proposals) for any new storage product purchases. Knowing the products we plan to purchase have SMI-S in them, coupled with the fact that the implementation has been independently tested, provides us with a level of assurance that the product will perform to our needs and deliver new efficiencies in our storage management solutions."
The SMI-S v1.0.2 was developed and tested by more than 100 of the industry's top engineers at the SNIA Technology Center, the industry's largest vendor-neutral operation of multivendor storage hardware and software. Now to further solidify the broad adoption of SMI-S v1.0.2, the specification has entered the International Committee for Information Technology Standards fast track process. The process, reserved for specifications that have already passed rigorous technical review, is expected to result in SMI-S becoming an American National Standards Institute standard in summer 2004.
Officially badged and tested products are to be listed on the SNIA Web site. End users looking to ensure that a vendor's SMI-S implementation conforms to SNIA standards should look for officially badged and tested products.
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