SMI-S
The IntelliMagic Vision solution provides automated, daily visibility into the performance of your enterprise storage, summarizing the results into a dashboard that gives you early warning of performance problems so you can avoid them, and it gives you drill down capability to quickly see the root cause of the constraint.
IntelliMagic Vision for distributed systems environments uses SMI-S to get the I/O performance metrics directly from the storage arrays.
SMI-S is a common, standards-based management interface that permits third party applications the ability to configure and manage a storage array. Using the "provider" (the actual software library), a management application (SMI-S Client) doesn't require knowledge of the specific architecture or infrastructure requirements of the particular storage platform.
The IntelliMagic SMI-S Data Collector communicates with a provider and collects performance and configuration data. The following picture demonstrates the logical flow for collecting SMI-S data using an EMC storage enviornment as an example (other vendors are also supported):
- The SMI-S client sends management requests to the CIM server. In an EMC environment the CIM Server and the SMI-S provider components are both included in the EMC SMI-S Provider 4.1.
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The CIM Server receives these management requests from the client and communicates with the SMI-S provider.
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In turn the provider communicates with the storage device using native commands. The provider translates the CIM-XML protocol originating from the CIM Client/CIM Server into commands understood by the storage platform.
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Upon the completion of a command,
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a confirmation message is returned to the provider,
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then to the server,
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and finally to the client.
For more information on SMI-S please see http://www.snia.org/forums/smi/
