INTRODUCTION
With fast environment growth, simple and unified management for all environment elements becomes more and more crucial. That’s where SMI-S comes in. SMI-S (Storage Management Initiative Specification) is a standard developed by the Storage Network Industry Association (SNIA), which is intended to facilitate the management of storage devices from multiple vendors in storage area networks.
PROBLEM
The on-site IT teams waste significant time and efforts on managing various cluster components, such as Compute, Network, and Storage. This problem is caused by complicated, non-centralized infrastructure management since every hardware and software vendor provides its own proprietary management instruments to work with its solutions.
Growing money and time spending on managing various solutions. Due to the absence of unified management instruments, the organization is forced to spend money on hiring engineers with the required skills. Alternatively, a company has to dedicate costs and time for training the existing staff to effectively work with different software and hardware.
SOLUTION
With SMI-S, engineers save their time and efforts on the IT infrastructure management. Storage resources with desired performance, resiliency, and availability characteristics can be provisioned easily according to the predefined policies, using single “pane of glass”. This is achieved thanks to StarWind SMI-S provider that seamlessly integrates into System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) or OpenStack. This integration allows administrators to conveniently manage heterogeneous storage infrastructures from a single console.
Companies save costs and time. There is no more need to hire engineers with knowledge of all the different storage solutions or put existing staff through constant trainings. All cluster components can now be managed from a single console by integrating storage management into SCVMM or OpenStack with StarWind SMI-S provider.
CONLUSION
Thanks to StarWind SMI-S provider, routine storage management operations are automated or performed from a single and familiar console. SMI-S eliminates the need for dedicated storage management and significantly simplifies the overall IT infrastructure administration.
