30 April 2013
SNIA Standards and Technology Plugfests Improve Interoperability
Ongoing yearly efforts for SMI–S, CDMI, and SMB/SMB2/SMB3
SNIA has announced a new series of technical plugfests that will take place throughout the rest of this year. These include six Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI–S) plugfests at the SNIA Technology Center, four Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) plugfests at various global event venues, and its annual SMB/SMB2/SMB3
(Server Message Block) plugfest at the SNIA Storage Developers Conference. The multi–day plugfests are cooperative, in–depth engineering testing efforts among multiple vendor and open source software projects. Customers benefit from products and solutions with increased interoperability and demonstrated specification conformance.
“SNIA Plugfests are an essential part of a developer’s engineering work effort to have a robust implementation of an interface standard or specification,” said Wayne M. Adams, SNIA Board of Directors chairman. “Interoperability, bug–fixes, and specification tightening are achieved through cross–vendor collaboration during a plugfest. Typical of a plugfest, participants establish testing objectives between implementations then work together over multiple days. SNIA provides and supports networks and infrastructure, creating a collaborative environment for both local and remote testing.”
Over the past three years, SNIA has evolved its CDMI plugfest efforts into a cross-industry cloud standards program, named as the Cloud Plugfest Series. The goals of the Cloud Plugfest series are to provide a cooperative environment and appropriate testing tools for software developers, projects and vendors to bring their community–based open source or commercial implementations of cloud–related standards such as CDMI, Open Cloud Compute Interface from Open Grid Forum
(OCCI), Cloud Infrastructure Management Interface (CIMI) and Open Virtualization Format (OVF) from DMTF, along with important open–access application programmer interfaces (APIs) used in both commercial products and open-source projects throughout the community.
Previous plugfests have focused on self–consistent simultaneous use of the cloud standards mentioned above, as identified in the US NIST Cloud Standards Inventory and the European Union funded SIENA Cloud Standards Roadmap Project. Upcoming plugfests are scheduled for July 22–24, Portland OR and Sept 16–19, Santa Clara CA. For more details, visit www.cloudplugfest.org.
The SNIA’s Storage Management Initiative (SMI) holds plugfests at the SNIA Technology Center several times a year and at SNIA member sites to test interoperability across SMI-S implementations, validate Conformance Testing Program (CTP) test updates, and to test concept implementations of proposals for future releases of the SMI–S standard. The work in each SMI plugfest — also known as SMI–Lab — is guided by a few testing themes that have been agreed upon ahead of time such as replication and mirroring, NAS, indications, and security.
There are 20 companies participating in SMI–Labs, and several have placed SMI–S enabled, enterprise–class arrays, switches and servers in the SNIA Technology Center in support of SMI–Labs. Upcoming SMI–Labs are scheduled for May 20–23 and August 19–22 at the SNIA Colorado Springs Technology Center. For more details and the full schedule of plugfests, visit the SNIA SMI-Lab page.
The annual SNIA–hosted SMB/SMB2/SMB3 Plugfest will be held at SDC
in Santa Clara, September 16–19. In previous years, 20–25 companies and open-source projects participate, with 80–100+ engineers working side–by–side to test their latest implementations with shared test suites. In computer networking, Server Message Block (SMB), formerly known as Common Internet File System (CIFS), operates as an application–layer network protocol providing for shared access to files and printers. For more details, visit www.snia.org/events/storage-developer2013/plugfest.
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