White Papers

5 Standards-based storage management for Dell EMC PowerEdge servers
1 Introduction
Since the inception of the x86 server in the late 1980s, IT administrators have sought the means to efficiently
manage a growing number of distributed resources. Industry suppliers have responded by developing
management interface standards to support common methods of monitoring and controlling heterogeneous
systems.
While management interfaces such as SNMP and IPMI have been present in data centers for the past
decade, they have not been able to meet the changing requirements because of security and technical
limitations.
Also, the scale of deployment has grown significantly as IT models have evolved. Today, organizations often
rely on a large number of lower-cost servers with redundancy provided in the software layer, making scalable
management interfaces more critical.
To meet such market requirements, a new, unifying management standard was necessary—the response
from the industry was the creation of the Redfish systems management standard by the DTMF. Redfish is a
next generation management standard using a data model representation inside a hypermedia RESTful
interface. The data model is defined in terms of a standard, machine-readable schema, with the payload of
the messages expressed in JSON and the protocol using OData v4. Because it is a hypermedia API, Redfish
is capable of representing a variety of implementations by using a consistent interface. It has mechanisms for
discovering and managing data center resources, handling events, and managing long-lived tasks. The
Redfish standard, first published in 2015, has been continuously updated, expanding the capabilities in 2016
to provide standard APIs for such mission-critical features as storage management.
Dell EMC is enhancing its leading Systems Management capabilities with Redfish support within the iDRAC
RESTful API. This technical white paper provides an overview and detailed scripted examples of the Redfish
2016 storage management APIs as implemented by the iDRAC RESTful API.