Dell PowerVault MD3600i 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 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 called 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. This implementation is the quickest path to SMI-S compliance, but a proxy provider and a Common Information Model Object Manager (CIMOM) must be 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. • 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. The Dell SMI-S Provider, referred to as SMI-S Provider, runs 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 Microsoft Windows and Linux platforms only. For more information about the platform versions, see the Support Matrix for the MD storage arrays at support.dell.com/manuals. Introduction 5