Hitachi Data System Corp. and its parent Hitachi Ltd. will join other storage vendors in the Storage Management Initiative (SMI) Forum to deliver products compliant with the Common Information Model (CIM) standard by 2003, Hitachi said in a statement Monday.
The SMI Forum, an initiative of the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), is to help vendors build interoperable storage management applications and create multi-vendor storage networks. The forum has established a goal of having 100 percent of all storage vendors’ products become SMI Specification (SMIS)-compliant by 2005.
SMIS, formerly known as Bluefin, is a set of object-based application programming interfaces (APIs) that enables the discovery, monitoring, and management of storage devices, and is a subset of the CIM and Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) standards.
Hitachi’s support of these open standards for data storage and management is an extension of its own TrueNorth initiative, the company said.
Other companies, which recently announced that they will begin shipping products based on the CIM and WBEM standards include IBM Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc. and Veritas Software Corp.
