HP, EMC, Hitachi, Sun Microsystems, Symantec to Expand Industry Standard for Storage Management

Business Wire, June 22, 2006

LONG BEACH, Calif. -- HP (NYSE:HPQ) (Nasdaq:HPQ), EMC (NYSE:EMC), Hitachi Data Systems (NYSE:HIT), Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq:SUNW), and Symantec (Nasdaq:SYMC) today announced a coordinated effort to advance industry-standard storage management.

The five companies, collectively representing more than half the worldwide market share for enterprise storage management software,(1) will work together to ensure that the Storage Networking Industry Association's (SNIA) Storage Management Initiative specification (SMI-S) becomes a common, widely used industry standard.

Announced at Storage World Conference Spring 2006, the collaboration's goals are to enhance SMI-S with new specifications and programming interfaces for a Web services framework for advanced storage management as well as to provide the first reference implementation of SMI-S. IT organizations will benefit from having access to improved storage management software that will further reduce the costs of storage administration and align storage resources more closely with business needs.

In addition, the companies will seek to give independent hardware and software vendors, service providers, system integrators, and enterprise IT organizations a common, standards-built pluggable platform to more quickly and cost-effectively develop high-value storage management services. The companies plan to contribute staff, specifications, and code to expedite the success of this initiative.

"SMI-S has been very successful to date in providing a standard way to discover, model, and provision storage devices, so increased SNIA member commitments to enhance the specification with more advanced management functions and create a reference implementation of the specification will serve all SMI-S developers and implementers," said Wayne M. Adams, chairman, SNIA Board of Directors. "The commitment from these SNIA member companies, and other SNIA members who will join this effort, will further propel SMI-S to meet the needs of ILM, data protection, grid computing, and interoperable storage management applications."

Thus far, the focus of SMI-S has been on the instrumentation of heterogeneous storage devices to facilitate standards-based storage interoperability. It offers a specification for managing devices such as disk arrays, switches, and hosts, defines a common model of device behavior, and provides a common language to read and set control information.

End users, systems integrators, and software developers, however, are calling for the specification to define more advanced management functions such as topology, navigation, policy management, security, and workflow. SNIA constituents also have voiced the need for a reference implementation of the specification to avoid re-writing common functions each time they build a new storage management application.

"A number of storage vendors have already done the work of leveraging SMI-S to deliver SAN management and storage resource management solutions. This initiative takes advantage of their efforts to create a middleware platform for storage that anyone can use to get past all of the basic foundation work, and focus on building more innovative storage management software," said John Webster, founder and senior analyst, Data Mobility Group.

All five companies were leaders of the early SNIA CIM work and the original Bluefin specification that eventually evolved into SMI-S. The companies will actively work over the next few months to make the necessary changes within SNIA to enable the organization to support such an initiative.

"Standards such as SMI-S create a level playing field where vendors compete on innovation and value, and the ultimate winner is the end user, which is why HP has been so supportive of standards across our storage, server, software, printer, and consumer electronics product lines," said Ash Ashutosh, vice president and chief technology officer of the StorageWorks Division at HP. "HP has been committed to SMI-S, CIM, and WBEM since co-authoring the original Bluefin specification, and has backed that up with a wide range of SMI-S-conformant storage solutions, including our HP StorageWorks MSA, EVA, and XP disk arrays and our HP Storage Essentials SRM software. Now it's time for SMI-S to take the next step in its evolution from device management interface to systems management standard and offer the re-usable building blocks needed to deliver advanced, high-value management solutions."

"EMC's longstanding support for SMI-S is evidenced by our continued technical SMI-S contributions to the SNIA, our full participation in SNIA interoperability labs and SNIA SMI-S demonstrations, and our SNIA SMI-S CTP-conformant product implementations for Symmetrix, CLARiiON, and ControlCenter," said Jeff Nick, senior vice president and chief technology officer at EMC. "A full SMI-S reference implementation will expedite CTP programs and interoperability programs, further benefiting IT end-users with deployable multi-vendor storage management solutions. Extending SMI-S with a Web services framework, coupled with SMI-S CIM, will enable existing and future storage applications to plug in to a common model-based infrastructure to share and exchange essential resource and data management information."