The Data ONTAP SMI-S agent provides a standards-based storage management interface to discover, monitor, and manage NetApp storage systems. The specifications for SMI-S are developed by the standards organizations SNIA and DMTF.
The SMI-S agent is implemented as a proxy-based management solution. You install the agent on an external server (which is not 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 how the management applications interact with the NetApp storage system through the SMI-S agent interface.
NetApp SMI-S agent supports every platform that runs Data ONTAP. The functionality provided by the SMI-S agent is as follows:
Standard profiles
Fibre Channel SAN functionality, including LUN creation, mapping and masking, and reporting
iSCSI SAN functionality, including LUN creation and export, and session and connection creation
NAS functionality, including resource discovery (aggregates, volumes, RAID groups, and so on)
System health monitoring
NetApp-specific extensions
Capacity utilization (multiprotocol storage system)
Data ONTAP API tunneling
SMI-S agent is available free of charge to the partners and customers on NOW NetApp on the Web. To access the SMI-S agent, you must sign-up for it. The steps for sign up and download of the SMI-S agent is described at SMI-S agent access steps.
For more information and queries about the SMI-S agent, go to NetApp Technology Network.