Dell PowerVault MD3200 SMI-S Provider Installation Guide - Page 5

1 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 multivendor 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. Introduction 5