Strategic Alliance Between SNIA, DMTF and NVMe

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), and the NVM Express, Inc. organizations announced at NVM Express Developer Day, the formation of a new alliance to coordinate standards for managing SSD storage devices.

This alliance brings together multiple organizations and standards for managing the issue of scale-out management of SSD’s to help improve the interoperable management of information technologies to enable a holistic management experience.

• SNIA and the DMTF have worked together as part of the DMTF’s Alliance Partner program for many years. Most recently, to extend DMTF’s Redfish API to define the SNIA’s Swordfish standard for management of storage equipment and services.
• NVMe is an open collection of standards and information to expose the benefits of non-volatile memory (NVM) in all types of computing environments from mobile to data center.

The alliance’s collaborative work will include the following standards: 

• By extending the DMTF Redfish API protocol and schema, the SNIA Swordfish customer-centric interface helps provide a unified approach for the management of storage equipment, data services, and servers in converged, hyper-converged, hyperscale and cloud infrastructure environments.
• NVMe is the register interface and command set for PCIe attached storage with industry standard software available for numerous OSs. The NVM Express Management Interface (NVMe-MI) is the command set and architecture for management of NVMe storage (e.g., discovering, monitoring, and updating NVMe devices using a BMC).
• DMTF’s Management Component Transport Protocol (MCTP) is a protocol and Platform Level Data Model (PLDM) is a low-level data model that is defined by the DMTF Platform Management Components Intercommunications (PMCI) Working Group. MCTP is designed to support communications between different intelligent hardware components that make up a platform management subsystem that provides monitoring and control functions inside a managed system.
• DMTF’s PLDM for Redfish Device Enablement (RDE) defines messages and data structures used for enabling PLDM devices to participate in Redfish-based management without needing to support either JavaScript Object Notation (JSON, used for operation data payloads) or the [Secure] Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/HTTPS, used to transport and configure operations).