WBEM Based Products

WMI to WBEM wrappers

WMI/WBEM wrappers have been developed to mask WMI data as WBEM and the reverse. This is useful for interoperability purposes when there is a mix of WMI providers and WBEM providers in the environment. This becomes essential when a management application needs to access the resources exclusively using either WBEM or WMI.

WMI/WBEM/Bluefin Manageability

WBEM, as defined by the DMTF has three main components including 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 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.

WMI, on the other hand, is a modified version of WBEM, where the data model is still the CIM standard. The transport mechanism is however DCOM. Further, WMI management functionality has to reside on a Microsoft based system because WMI (DCOM) is only supported natively on windows based systems and not on unix based systems.

SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association) has adopted WBEM as the standard interface for SAN Management as part of the Bluefin (SMIS) specification.

Server and Storage Manageability

SNIA has announced that a substantial number of storage vendors intend to provide WBEM/Bluefin/SMIS as their manageability interface in the next year or two.

Several OS (Solaris, HP-UX and Linux ) vendors are also standardizing on WBEM as the main manageability interface. Microsoft based OS's are made manageable via WMI. The advantage of using these interfaces to manage storage and servers is that it allows the management application to leverage standard interfaces and more importantly, leverage the native manageability functionality provided by the OS and server vendors themselves.

In order to make manageability easier across the board, it would be ideal for the management application to have just one cross-platform management interface. WBEM/SMIS would be that choice. ProdexNet has developed technology to allow for WBEM to be used to manage across WBEM and WMI supported resources.

Fig: Cross platform Bluefin/WBEM/WMI manageability

ProdexNet will provide those modules represented by the red boxes.