SNIA Starts Conformance Testing

SAN FRANCISCO -- The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) announced today that five vendors are now shipping products that conform to the latest version of the SNIAs Conformance Testing Program (SNIA-CTP) for the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) Provider Test suite. The program was developed to help ensure enterprise and storage management products deliver on the benefits of the fast-evolving SMI-S standard. In the history of the program, the SNIA-CTP has completed provider testing of more than 500 vendor hardware products from 27 companies. The new SMI-S Provider Test suite now adds the capability to test storage products for conformance to the SMI-S version 1.2. The first vendors to pass the SNIA-CTP SMI-S Provider Test suite for version 1.2 storage management include EMC Corporation, Hitachi Data Systems, HP, IBM and NetApp.

“This is yet another confirmation of the steady progress made by the SMI-S program for end users and the greater storage industry,” said Paul von Behren, Chair of the Storage Management Initiative. “IT professionals are always looking for greater flexibility in choosing the right solution as well as the ability to reduce the number of vendor-specific storage management tools required to manage today's heterogeneous data center. The SNIA-CTP encompasses both the management software and hardware infrastructure, bringing the industry closer to providing IT users with trusted storage management solutions that help ease their management complexity.”

Today, the SNIA has expanded its testing of storage products that conform to the recently completed draft of SMI-S version 1.2 that includes functional enhancements to the array and storage virtualizer support. The SNIA will also roll out additional programs to add testing of additional storage products, such as Fabric and NAS, which conform to SMI-S version 1.2 to further its multi-vendor or heterogeneous storage management.

Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA)