Introduction
The Dell PowerVault Modular Disk (MD) storage arrays provide an industry
standard application programming interface (API) called the Storage
Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S). This interface enables third
party SMI-S client applications to manage MD storage arrays in a multi-
vendor Storage Area Network (SAN) environment.
SMI-enabled management applications are known as CIM clients. To allow
clients to manage a storage device, an SMI-S Provider (also referred as SMI-S
Agent or CIM Agent) is required. SMI-S Providers can be implemented as:
•
A proxy interface that translates the existing API of a device to an SMI-S
compliant interface.
•
A native feature of the storage device API. This implementation is
sometimes referred to as an embedded agent.
Dell MD SMI-S Provider is implemented as a proxy interface. This
implementation is the quickest path to SMI-S compliance, but it requires that
the proxy provider and a Common Information Model Object Manager
(CIMOM) are installed on a server. A CIMOM is a CIM/WBEM infrastructure
that receives, validates, and authenticates CIM requests from the client
application. The CIMOM directs the requests to the appropriate device
provider.
The Dell SMI-S Provider, referred to as SMI-S Provider, must run on a server
on the storage network. OpenPegasus CIMOM is installed during the
installation of this SMI-S Provider.
The SMI-S Provider provides the SMI-S interface to the Dell PowerVault
Modular Disk storage array family. The provider uses the proxy CIM Agent
model and is supported on Windows and Linux platforms only. For the actual
versions of the platforms, see the support matrix for the MD storage arrays at
support.dell.com/manuals.
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Introduction
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