Go fishing at Pure//Accelerate for a Swordfish™

On Wednesday, September 18th @2:00-2:45pm I will be co-presenting with Richelle Ahlvers, Storage Management Software Architect from Broadcom, Inc. If you are interested in understanding how to manage storage systems with new standards, specifically the Swordfish™ Scalable Storage Management (SSM) API Specification (v1.1.0). v1.1.0 is the latest draft of the specification.

Swordfish™ address the needs for a unified approach for managing storage and servers in hyperscale, cloud and SAN platforms. SNIA Swordfish is an extension of the DMTF specification which is based on REST, JSON and OData which allows for management across storage platforms, storage services and server hardware.

Server vendors have been working on integrating DMTF Redfish for management for a while. Swordfish is somewhat new and being adopted by storage vendors to support the unification of management. Pure Storage (me) participates in the SSM Technical Working Group (TWG) along with the existing SNIA SMI-S standard.

In our session “Reel It In: SNIA Swordfish™ Scalable Storage Management” our goal is to provide an overview of how Swordfish is implemented and the different integrations that are possible. The one I will be focused on is with the Swordfish PowerShell Toolkit and some early thinking on integration the Toolkit with Windows Admin Center.

I’ll be demonstrating how the Swordfish PowerShell Toolkit works and what you can do today. The Toolkit is an open source project that can be found at

Some of the basics of the Toolkit are shown below on how you can use it from Windows PowerShell on Windows, Linux or macOS (I’ll be demo’ing on macOS with PowerShell for Linux).

Connecting to a Swordfish Target. In my demo I will be using the Swordfish API Emulator.
Just like connecting to a Swordfish Target on a local development machine or an actual storage system you can also connect to the Swordfish Mockups.
Everything is returned as a PowerShell Object. In the example above we are performing a ConverTo-Json so you can see the JSON payload.

Hope you find time to join us and learn about Swordfish and honestly nerd out on standards. I promise we’ll make it exciting 🙂

Cheers — Barkz

2 comments
  1. Hi Barkz,

    Hope you are doing well!
    We are doing automation in our storage environment. Since we have multiple vendor we are looking for a standard approach and came through this article.
    We are using PURE X50 and X70 arrays, can you help how pure arrays can be accessed through Swordfish powershell kit? Also any other method to integrate with Swordfish would be a great help.

    Thanks,
    Dineshkumar S

    • Hi Dineshkumar — Unfortunately the Swordfish PowerShell Toolkit runs against the Redfish/Swordfish emulator as an example. I assume you saw, https://github.com/SNIA/Swordfish-Powershell-Toolkit, which has details about the toolkit. We do not have support for Redfish/Swordfish at this time. For us to implement support we would need to develop a service similar to SMI-S which we support today. We have this as a futures idea but no commitment. I had plans to create an emulator that acts like a Swordfish supported FlashArray but that was placed on the back burner.

      Thanks — Barkz

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