"But this same challenge also becomes a competitive differentiation for these companies as they grow and add new devices," Laliberte declares. "Other independent software companies like Symantec and Tek-Tools that have been around longer and have broader support use this to their advantage."

Smaller vendors weigh in

Rick Clark is president and CEO of Aptare, a private vendor that sells a Web-based storage monitoring tool, says that four or five years ago, many SRM vendors were hoping for technology that would provide homogeneous, centralized management, but even in the wake of SMI-S, "monolithic SRM is dead." Clark blames that situation on the inability of SRM proponents to create anything beyond a very thin veneer over the top of heterogeneous storage systems.

As a result of that situation, the storage industry looked to large vendors in the hopes that they would open up their proprietary APIs. The large vendors were reluctant to comply because doing so would undercut their bottom lines, Clark says. "If you open up and expose the same interfaces that you're using to manage your arrays," he notes, "all of a sudden, your revenue associated with your management software are going to diminish significantly, and all of a sudden, your competitors are going to start managing your arrays."

Bryan Semple, vice president of marketing at Onaro, a software vendor that extends data center automation to storage, says that most customers -- even if they have single-vendor storage environments -- don't want to rely on single-pane provisioning because most of it is still script-based and they don't trust it. That being the case, he says that he doesn't know if SMI-S will get those customers past that point of reluctance.

Nonetheless, Semple states, "We're big fans of SMI-S here because it will make our lives easier." As he explains it, Onaro "interrogates" storage switches and arrays in real time to come up with the most accurate, heterogeneous picture of the services delivered by the storage environment back to an application. Toward that goal, Onaro's products use a variety of interfaces, including command-line interface, HTTP, SNMP and, where possible, SMIS.

"The broader SMI-S gets adopted, and the more robust the standard becomes, the less we will need to maintain these other interface mechanisms into the server and switch arrays," Semple says.

SNIA chief says improvements coming

Vincent Franceschini, chairman of SNIA, says that the problems experienced by smaller SRM vendors who attempt to plug into SMI-S-compliant consoles of larger vendors are well-known to SNIA, adding it is important to note that the leading storage vendors have invested for years in proprietary interface technologies, and when SMI-S is not ready to fulfill all the management requirements, alternatives are developed with those vendors' unique approaches.

"Smaller and/or new storage software players don't have to deal with such issues and would love to see SMI-S fields utilized consistently across all platforms," Franceschini says. "The SNIA Storage Management Initiative is attempting to gradually improve this situation by prioritizing so the SMI-S issues can be fixed with feedback from developers, product managers and IT users. SNIA SMI is also looking at the introduction of vendor-unique elements in SSM-S in future versions -- possibly Version 1.4. This open access to management capabilities across platforms is also an important topic at SNIA."

As a former two-time SNIA chairman, Wayne Adams -- who is currently senior technologist and director of standards at EMC Corp. -- is intimately familiar with SMI-S. According to him, SMI-S is not a magical key to SRM success. "It's just an enabling technology to get your information from the devices, so the value-add or secret sauce of storage management still comes from vendor innovation," he says. Take away that proprietary innovation, he adds, and vendors lose their unique competitive advantages.

According to Adams, part of the problem with SMI-S can be attributed to the gap between the relatively rapid writing of new SMI-S versions and the slower development of the enabling technology. "The development has been working at a conservative level to ensure that whatever has been defined is implemented and tends to be more bug-free than just implementing something because that's what's been written this time around," he says. "So I would say in a rearview-mirror perspective, in some feature sets, it may be two cycles of the standard before there are enough vendors who have implemented it and deem it to be stable."