Four storage standards (SMI-S, XAM, encryption key management and FAIS) promise to make it much easier to manage storage and data.

Several storage standards are emerging that will help storage administrators manage data more efficiently. According to Vincent Franceschini, chairman of the board of the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), a "standards ecosystem" is slowly developing that will allow heterogeneous storage products to better communicate with each other, as well as to protect data and more easily find it. They're lofty goals and progress is measured in baby steps. What follows is an update on four important major standards: the Storage Management Initiative-Specification (SMI-S), eXtensible Access Method (XAM), encryption key management and the Fabric Application Interface Standard (FAIS).