Planning for SMI-S providers

SMI-S providers are provided by the vendor of certain types of storage systems and switches. IBM Spectrum® Control communicates with an SMI-S provider to collect information about the resources that the agent manages.

For some storage systems, SMI-S providers are required for collecting storage asset information, provisioning, alerting, and performance monitoring. SMI-S providers must conform to the SNIA SMI-S specification to provide a communication transport between IBM Spectrum Control and storage resources.

Note: For DS8000®, the XIV®, IBM Storage Accelerate™, IBM Storage FlashSystem® devices that run IBM Storage Virtualize™, SAN Volume Controller, Storwize® V7000 Unified, Storwize V7000, IBM Storage Scale™, and IBM® Cloud Object Storage, you do not need an SMI-S provider. IBM Spectrum Control communicates with these storage systems by using the native interface.

The SMI-S providers can be referred to by various names, such as CIM agent, CIMOM (CIM Object Manager) agent, or SMI-S agent. A CIM agent consists of a CIMOM and an SMI-S device provider for the managed resource. The SMI-S provider can be a separate agent installation or can be embedded in the resource itself, as is the case with Cisco fabric switches. In this case, there is no proxy agent to install and IBM Spectrum Control is configured to point to the managed resource itself.

After the SMI-S provider is installed and configured, IBM Spectrum Control can be configured to communicate with it.

SMI-S providers are not required for storage systems that communicate through a native interface. For those resources that require SMI-S providers to be set up, review the SMI-S provider documentation to understand how many resources that the SMI-S provider can be configured to manage. The memory that is consumed by the SMI-S provider includes the memory that is required for IBM Spectrum Control to probe a resource through the SMI-S provider. The SMI-S provider is typically affected by the number of resources that the SMI-S provider manages. If no guidelines are available in the SMI-S provider documentation for the storage system, limit the number of storage systems to three per SMI-S provider.

For information about the latest SMI-S provider support for IBM Spectrum Control, see the External link icon https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/node/388393 site and go to the Switches and Directors and Storage sections.

For information about certified SMI-S devices, see http://www.snia.org/ctp/conforming_providers.