SNIA and OpenFabrics Alliance Formalize Agreement

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), and the OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) announced an agreement to improve and promote the standards-based, open source management of high-performance fabrics and remote network services or devices in data center infrastructures.

As part of the joint effort, a new open source fabric management framework being developed by the OFA – the OpenFabrics Management Framework (OFMF) – will utilize DMTF Redfish and SNIA Swordfish specs for management of servers, storage and fabrics including NVMe and NVMe-oF technology environments.

“The goal of the agreement is to establish reliable and scalable network access to remote, shared computing resources,” said Michael Oros, executive director, SNIA. “The SNIA Swordfish storage management spec is an extension of the DMTF Redfish spec, so this joint work with the OpenFabrics Alliance will provide IT adminstrators the ability to add seamless standards-based management of their fabrics and networks to the same Redfish and SNIA Swordfish ecosystem they are using for their servers and storage.“

New large-scale, computing designs are multi-node and linked together through high-speed networks. Over time, many different types of networking devices have arrived for usage by these modern, coupled-computing platforms. Fabric Management requirements are needed by these high-speed networks to deploy, secure, and maintain optimized networks. This industry collaboration will help usher in the remote and shared access to advanced storage, distributed computation, and memory.

“OFA and SNIA are making a shared investment in universal management of the larger high-performance network ecosystem,” said Michael Aguilar, chair, OFMF Working Group. “The SNIA Swordfish and DMTF Redfish specs will be extended by the OFA to provide a single unified framework for managing fabrics through the creation of OFMF. We anticipate that the OFMF will enable access across multiple types of fabrics, advance development of Remote Persistent Memory products, provide improved security, and accelerate development of new system architectures.“

The agreement also includes marketing collaboration to promote the SNIA and OFA standards through educational content that will include webcasts, social media, email campaigns, newsletters, and inclusion in news and events.