CIM standards: how close are we, and what are customers asking for? - Automated Storage Management

Computer Technology Review, Sept, 2002 by Mark Carlson

From a historical perspective, the evolution of new standards for the storage industry is a natural progression and will be a necessity for the industry, moving forward. Just think how complicated a system that manages an electrical grid would be if it were not standardized. There would be increased costs to manage the flow of electricity, inconsistencies in how the electrical grid was managed, and, likely, a heightened number of outages and, possibly, spikes.

From a storage perspective, the rapid growth in the decade-old industry is only elevating the standards issue for customers. Customers are already seeing the clear benefits of increased competition through decreased cost in acquiring new storage technologies and also superior reliability, performance, and availability in new systems that are being offered today.

However, combining these new systems with the evolution and progression of storage networking from a mainframe/monolithic architecture to a networked NAS or SAN architecture, the complexity of managing multiple storage systems from multiple vendors has been multiplied.

Additionally, with storage access methods such as SAN and NAS coming to a head and new, required applications that demand specific and sometimes varying quality of service levels, the solution again grows more complex.

Meeting these availability and performance levels can be done through multiple levels of virtualization throughout the storage infrastructure. With all of these technologies emerging and converging for the customer, how do you deliver this solution in a manner that lowers costs and management complexities?

The solution to dealing with this complexity is straightforward, yet difficult to achieve: Standards, based on industry input that is truly open and allows customers the ability to manage, control, provision, monitor, and fix any vendor's storage system in any configuration.

Today's Standard

Today's IT infrastructures are truly poised to take advantage of the new storage management standards. Customers are already seeing vendors offer new CIM-based storage management software and can expect to see new hardware and additional features based on the standard over the next 12-16 months.

Therefore knowing what is here today and what will be here tomorrow is essential to understanding the longevity of your storage infrastructure, as well as how to best plan to take advantage of these emerging standards.

The tools of today which are based on CIM-compliant technologies are laying the groundwork for more advanced heterogeneous management, provisioning, and control features of tomorrow. Therefore, understanding the different approaches vendors are taking towards reaching standards based storage interoperability may be complicated and needs to be understood by customers.

There are a two primary ways vendors are working to achieve interoperability:

Exchanging proprietary APIs and protocols: Interoperation through exchanging proprietary APIs and protocols only, does not translate into the long-term solution customers are demanding. This only allows customers to perform select functions based on the lowest common areas of interoperability. In addition, the vendors spend time making these point-product to point-product adapters that cannot be reused in a standard way.

Many vendors are engaging in "swapping" proprietary APIs in the effort to develop an immediate, short-term patch for customers demanding interoperability. However, this is not considered true interoperability as it is still based on vendors' proprietary APIs and not on true, open standards. As the products with these proprietary APIs evolve, many engineers are kept busy upgrading these adapters.

For example the practice of API swapping between storage vendors would allow a customer to get an extra device supported with the functions that an application provides, whereas if the application used the open standard, device support will become a non-issue.

Integrating Bluefin's CIM/WBEM for the control APIS of devices: This approach provides the customer with the ultimate in manageability as it combines control over the metadata, configuration, monitoring, and other functions found in the Control APIs. This enables vendors to achieve the end-goal of delivering truly automated storage services. To date, CIM/WBEM is beginning to take hold and will continue to expand as vendors look to empower their customers.

This approach also provides customers with the ability to implement plug-and-play storage devices from multiple vendors, while still controlling and managing from a single, CIM/WEBM-based storage-management platform. In order to do this, vendors need to instrument the native control functions with Bluefin management agents throughout the system so as to make the holy grail of easy storage management and automated provisioning a reality. By integrating Bluefin throughout the management software and hardware systems, customers will fully realize the levels of vendor choice, flexibility, and automation.