ARCHIVED: What is the Data ONTAP SMI-S agent?

Applies to

Data ONTAP 7 and earlier

Answer

Nx series storage systems

What features are supported by the SMI-S agent?

How do partners and customers get SMI-S agent?

Data ONTAP SMI-S agent provides a standards based storage management interface that can be used to discover, monitor, and manage NetApp storage systems. The specifications for SMI-S are developed by the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) and the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF).

The SMI-S agent is implemented as a proxy-based management solution. The agent needs to be installed on an external server rather than being embedded within Data ONTAP. Currently the supported platforms for SMI-S agent installation are Windows and Linux Red Hat and SUSE based hosts.

The following illustration shows SMI-S Architecture and explains how management applications interact with the NetApp storage system through the SMI-S agent interface.

The SMI-S agent covers every platform that runs Data ONTAP. It provides the following functionality:

Standard profiles

• Storage Area Network (SAN) Provisioning:
  • Logical Unit Number (LUN) Reporting, Creation, Mapping and Masking
• Network-Attached Storage (NAS) Functionality:
  • Self-Contained NAS
    • Discover resources disks,aggregates,volumes,RAID groups,etc
    • System Health monitoring
• iSCSI SAN Functionality
  • LUN creation and export
  • Create sessions
  • Create connections
• Support for V-Series filers
• Manage and Monitor the File Exports and File Systems
• Manage and Monitor File System quotas
• Alert indications - Support for all the traps generated by Data ONTAP
• Storage Synchronized Association to provide information about Snapshot/SnapMirror information

NetApp specific extensions

• Capacity utilization (multi-protocol storage system)
• ZAPI tunneling

The SMI-S agent is available free-of-charge through the Support site. To access the SMI-S agent, partners and customers need to sign-up for it. The steps to sign-up and download of SMI-S agent are described on the SMI-S agent access steps webpage.

Additional Information

N/A