EMC fast tracks multi-vendor storage management standards development

EMC, along with other storage players, has announced the joint contribution to the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) of technology targeted at furthering SNIA`s development of industry standards for networked multi-vendor storage environments.

This technology - also known as "Bluefin" - uses the Common Information Model (CIM) and Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) technologies to build a specification of a standard interface for specific tasks common to the management of multi-vendor storage networks.

Alex Robertson, country Systems Engineer and Professional Services Manager at EMC SA, says: "The successful development of open industry standards presents a tremendous opportunity to reduce the time, effort and cost of delivering management tools for heterogeneous networked environments. If accepted by SNIA, the contribution of the Bluefin specification will go a long way in getting vendors and customers well down the road towards the management of heterogeneous storage networks."

The draft specification provides a common blueprint for storage area network (SAN) management that can discover, monitor, report and control physical and logical elements in a storage information infrastructure and also introduces new technology for security, locking and discovery for SAN management. This specification builds on the CIM/WBEM development work led by SNIA for the past two years.

"EMC has been actively involved in both the development of CIM as well as the collaborative development of the Bluefin technology. Upon acceptance by SNIA, together with industry partners, EMC will work with SNIA to create and implement a transition plan that appropriately incorporates this new technology into existing SNIA specifications-making efforts," Robertson says.

In addition to driving the development and future adoption of the CIM specifications, EMC will continue with its stated strategy of incorporating both the agreed-upon CIM specification and the proposed Bluefin technology into the EMC WideSky middleware. WideSky serves as a "universal translator" that enables customers and product developers to take advantage of both API and standards-based interfaces for managing heterogeneous storage environments.