Four storage vendors have announced a new coordinated effort "dedicated to the promotion and progress of SNIA's Common Information Model (CIM), Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) technology, and Storage Management Initiative (SMI) specifications for Storage Area Network (SAN)-based storage management. As part of this effort, the four companies are also announcing their individual plans to roll out CIM/WBEM-based products in calendar year 2003. CIM/WBEM has been endorsed by SNIA as the technology to help enable simplified multi-vendor management of storage networks. Hitachi Data Systems, IBM, Sun, and VERITAS are active members of SNIA and contributed to drafting the SNIA-adopted Bluefin/SMI specifications. These specifications define how CIM technology is used to manage storage environments. The companies are also actively encouraging all other storage vendors to join them in supporting CIM/WBEM standards. Participating companies would be expected to: (1) Ship CIM/WBEM based storage management software commercially in calendar year 2003; (2) Support the emerging SMI specifications endorsed by SNIA; (3) Make their CIM Providers (SMI Agents) available to others for testing; (4) Conduct joint interoperability testing and qualifications; (5) Support the CIM/WBEM interface as specified by SNIA's Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF). The CIM specification is the language and methodology for describing management data; the CIM XML schema includes models for Systems, Applications, Networks (LAN) and Devices."

Planned Delivery Roll Out [from the announcement]

Hitachi: Hitachi's HiCommand Management Framework and suite of software products, announced in May 2002, is expected to ship with its first CIM compliant features and modules by the end of this quarter, and continue to ship with expanded features through 2003.

IBM: IBM has plans to ship new CIM-enabled disk storage products during the first half of 2003. IBM also has plans to CIM enable their Tivoli Software storage products and ship new CIM-enabled products during the first half of 2003. IBM Tivoli Storage software has already demonstrated capability to manage the CIM enabled hardware through the CIM interface.

Sun: In August 2002, Sun Microsystems shipped its CIM compliant Sun StorEdge Enterprise Storage Manager and is committing to enhance and expand ESM's CIM compliance, and introduce CIM providers for more of its hardware products, during the first half of 2003.

VERITAS Software: VERITAS is expected to CIM enable its VERITAS Adaptive Software Architecture through 2003 via the VERITAS Enabled program. Heterogeneous products such as VERITAS SANPoint Control and VERITAS Volume Manager will be among the first deliverables.

About the Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) Initiative:

Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) is a set of management and Internet standard technologies developed to unify the management of enterprise computing environments. WBEM provides the ability for the industry to deliver a well-integrated set of standard-based management tools leveraging the emerging Web technologies. The DMTF has developed a core set of standards that make up WBEM, which includes a data model, the Common Information Model (CIM) standard; an encoding specification, xmlCIM Encoding Specification; and a transport mechanism, CIM Operations over HTTP.

The CIM specification is the language and methodology for describing management data. The CIM schema includes models for Systems, Applications, Networks (LAN) and Devices. The CIM schema will enable applications from different developers on different platforms to describe management data in a standard format so that it can be shared among a variety of management applications. The xmlCIM Encoding Specification defines XML elements, written in Document Type Definition (DTD), which can be used to represent CIM classes and instances. The CIM Operations over HTTP specification defines a mapping of CIM operations onto HTTP that allows implementations of CIM to interoperate in an open, standardized manner and completes the technologies that support WBEM.