Standards Portfolio

SNIA develops a wide range of standards to enhance the interoperability of various storage systems.

Common RAID Disk Data Format (DDF)

The Common RAID Disk Data Format specification defines a standard data structure describing how data is formatted across the disks in a RAID group. The Disk Data Format (DDF) structure allows a basic level of interoperability between different suppliers of RAID technology. The Common RAID DDF structure benefits storage users by enabling data-in-place migration among systems from different vendors.

iSCSI Management API (IMA)

 The iSCSI Management API defines a standard interface that applications can use to perform iSCSI management independent of the vendor of the iSCSI HBA. The IMA was designed to be implemented using a combination of a library and plugins.

An IMA library provides the interface that applications use to perform iSCSI management. Among other things, the library is responsible for loading plugins and dispatching requests from a management application to the appropriate plugin(s). Plugins are provided by iSCSI HBA vendors to manage their hardware. Typically, a plugin will take a request in the generic format provided by the library and then translate that request into a vendor specific format and forward the request onto the vendor’s device driver. In practice, a plugin may use a DLL or shared object library to communicate with the device driver. Also, it may communicate with multiple device drivers. Ultimately, the method a plugin uses to accomplish its work is entirely vendor specific.

Multipath Management API (MMA)

The Multipath Management API allows a management application to discover the multipath devices on the current system and to discover the associated local and device ports.  An implementation of the API may optionally include active management (failover, load balancing, manual path overrides). The API uses an architecture that allows multiple MP drivers installed on a system to each provide plugins to a common library. The plugins can support multipath drivers bundled with an OS, or drivers associated with an HBA, target device, or volume manager. This API can be used by host-based management applications and will also be included in the SMI-S Host Discovered Resources Profile for enterprise-wide multipath discovery and management.  A client of the API should be able to move between platforms by simply recompiling.

Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S)

The Storage Management Initiative Specification defines a method for the interoperable management of  heterogeneous networked storage.

eXtensible Access Method (XAM)

The XAM  Interface specification defines a standard access method (API) between "Consumers" (application and management software) and "Providers" (storage systems) to manage fixed content reference information storage services. XAM includes metadata definitions to accompany data to achieve application interoperability, storage transparency, and automation for ILM-based practices, long term records retention, and information security. XAM will be expanded over time to include other data types as well as support additional implementations based on the XAM API to XAM conformant storage systems.

Key Programs