INTRODUCTION
The IT world is growing very fast. Applications require more computing power with every minute we live, and data storage becomes the most growing technology part around the globe. In addition, part of IT businesses in the cloud is increasing significantly. All of this is making IT storage infrastructure management more and more complicated. In this regard, Storage Management Initiative (SMI) decided to create a specification to make the life of IT administrators easier. SNIA Swordfish provides API functionality that simplifies the way storage can be allocated, monitored, and managed. This specification is designed to integrate with technologies used in data center environments and make advanced tasks much simpler.
PROBLEM
In our world, different solutions have different management capabilities, which make the daily routine of IT staff more complicated. To operate a datacenter, engineers should learn a variety of “languages” to be able to successfully maintain different pieces of hardware and software. In order to manage iSCSI storage via SCVMM, SMI-S agent or native Windows Management Infrastructure (WMI) will do the job. Of course, when it comes to Storage, we will talk about SAN and, in a big Datacenter, you will often have different SAN’s from different vendors, which requires knowledge of different APIs and CLIs for management. These big environments do not have an ability for unified storage administration which makes management a hard task.
SOLUTION
StarWind adds support of Swordfish API to StarWind Virtual SAN in order to simplify the job of IT and storage administrators. It becomes easier to manage, monitor, allocate, and scale StarWind Virtual SAN based infrastructures, as well as setups where StarWind VSAN is part of a bigger storage infrastructure.
With StarWind Swordfish Provider you do not need to install or configure any additional software (PowerShell, WMI, SMI-S agent, Web GUI etc.) to manage StarWind Virtual SAN. Swordfish API comes as a part of VSAN installation, which makes StarWind deployment and management process really easy.
СONCLUSION
Swordfish Provider creates a single “language” requiring no specialized APIs and CLIs knowledge to communicate with the environment, where StarWind Virtual SAN and solutions from other vendors are combined. It simplifies the work of IT and Storage administrators and allows them to easily integrate StarWind Virtual SAN into any environments.