Storage Management

The Storage Resource Manager is a component of two Novell technologies, BCC and ZENworks Orchestrator Services. The Storage Resource Manager is responsible for managing SMI-S-enabled storage arrays.

The Storage Resource Manager acts as an "auto-mounting device" for SAN LUNs, changing the masking and changing zoning to allow the access to storage from nodes in a BCC or ZOS environment. Nodes (or Compute servers) will dynamically access SAN storage with respect to the virtual machines or resources that are scheduled to run on them.

The manager also supports provisioning of SAN LUNs when creating new virtual machines or new Cluster resources.

Until the recently, SAN Management Applications relied on multiple vendors' proprietary management APIs to manage the various elements. It soon became clear that API swapping and licensing between various vendors was not a long-term solution, and the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) started the Storage Management Initiative and has developed the Storage Management Initiative Specification, known as SMI-S.

SMI-S defines a set of standard management APIs that allow a SAN Management Application to manage HBAs, Switches and Storage Arrays in a normalized fashion. The Storage Management Application uses SMI-S management.