Across the Ocean: Huawei Successfully Hosts Asia's First SMI-Lab Plugfest

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Chengdu, China & California, U.S., October 31, 2013 – Huawei, a leading global information and communications technology solutions provider, announced today that SMI-Lab's 2013 Plugfest #5 was a huge success for Huawei's Chengdu Research Center and America Research Center. This was the first time this four day event was held in Asia. Storage standards and management experts from major IT vendors, including Huawei, EMC, IBM, Microsoft, Red Hat, HP, NetApp, and Fujitsu, had the opportunity to thoroughly test the interoperability and compatibility of the SMI-S storage management standard.

Experts from China and the U.S. held telepresence video conferences to discuss technical problems and share successful test experiences.

Photo Caption 1: Experts from China and the U.S. participate in a telepresence video conference

SNIA is a nonprofit trade association incorporated in December 1997. Made up of some 400 member companies spanning the global storage market, SNIA is dedicated to "ensuring that storage networks become complete and trusted solutions across the IT community." SMI-Lab is an industry-wide collaborative program initiated by SNIA to help companies accelerate implementation of the SMI-S standard.

Jim Davis, SNIA SMI-Lab Chair, stressed the significance of this event in an October 21st teleconference. "SNIA SMI-S defines the standard communication method between storage appliances and management software. Plugfest provides an opportunity for storage vendors to test the interoperability and compatibility of SMI-S, as well as other heterogeneous storage systems."

SMI-S is a standard that benefits all parties involved in network storage management. For developers, SMI-S is equal to a complete set of object models, which uses a unified language system to describe and manage every aspect of appliances in a storage area network (SAN). SMI-S relieves management system providers of the burden of integration of incompatible interfaces, and enables them to focus on how to reduce costs and enhance functionality of their management systems. Appliance providers can develop and add new functions to appliances with ease. Overall, SMI-S facilitates the implementation of storage network systems and accelerates the popularity of SMI-S-based storage management architectures.

As a Large Vendor Voting Member of SNIA, Huawei actively participates in many SNIA standard initiatives, including the storage management initiative (SMI), cloud storage initiative (CSI), and green storage initiatives (GSI). For SMI-Lab's 2013 Plugfest, the Huawei ISM storage management software development team performed interconnection tests. Sun Yi, architect of Huawei storage software, and Hector Linares, Microsoft SC VMM project manager, gave two presentations on storage management technologies.

In the future, Huawei will continue to cooperate with vendors and experts in SNIA on the promotion of storage standards.

Photo Caption 2: Participants from Huawei's America Research Center

Photo Caption 3: Participants from Huawei's Chengdu Research Center

Participant Comments

Jim Davis

SNIA SMI-Lab Chair

As SMI-Lab chair, I am very excited about this plugfest. This is the first time SMI-Lab has been held outside of the United Stated. It is impressive to see the international interest in the Storage Management Initiative. The plugfest went very well on both sides of the pacific. We will take what we learned form this plugfest to make future ones more interactive between the two locations. I want to thank Huawei for hosting this event both in the US and China. We are considering two more events next year in China, the first being in May in Shanghai sponsored by Microsoft.

Don Deel

Senior Technologist, Office of the CTO, EMC

SNIA Technical Council Chair

SNIA SMI Governing Board Chair

This SMI-Lab Plugfest event was very successful! The SNIA Storage Management Initiative thanks Huawei for hosting the event in both Santa Clara, CA, and in ChengDu, China. The facilities were very good, and provided the participants with what was needed to make good progress. The event was very well attended at both locations, making this not only the first International SMI-Lab Plugfest, but also one of the biggest.

Gris Ge

Redhat Engineer

Red Hat has recently joined SNIA and SMI-S Lab. And this is my first
time to join Plugfest.  I got a very warm and really appreciate SNIA and
Huawei provide this face to face chance with SMI-S developers.

The suggestions and ideas I get from those kind engineers do make
significant improvement to our libstoragemgmt project. Special thanks to
EMC engineer Jay Xu who provide great helps on 'interop' issue and
many others suggestions about our project.

During the plugfest, I am able to run some tests using libstoragemgmt to
IBM, EMC, and Huawei storage arrays. Any problem found, I could
directly go to their developer and work out a good solution. That's most
valuable part of plugfest.

Yiyang Zhang

EMC Engineer

It is very excited to join the first Smis plugfest hosted outside US. We really appreciate Huawei to make it happen. It made China Smis developers more convenient to join, talk and test face to face. Also, with the wonderful vedio meeting, we could see SNIA members and have good feeling of participation. All fantastic!
Thanks again Huawei. Hopefully we will have more plugfest at China with more participants.