Date Posted: September 11, 2008
What is Provider Acceptance Test Suite?
IBM's® System x, p, z, and i® servers are shipped with vender hardware. Vendors provide management instrumentation (providers) to configure and manage their hardware. These standards-based providers play a significant role in systems management. IBM also delivers systems and storage management solutions in storage domains such as SCM, Derector, and DSA. All these management solutions depend heavily on the CIM/SMI-S-based providers developed by respective vendors and within IBM for various storage devices used in IBM servers. This means that quality of service given by these management solutions extensively depends on quality of providers of CIM (Common Information Model) and SMI-S (Storage Management Initiative Specification). Provider Acceptance Test Suite helps to effectively validate vendor providers and help them to improve the quality of their product and, therefore, the quality of IBM's management solutions.
Provider Acceptance Test Suite validates CIM providers against SMI-S profiles and can comprehensively test the providers, including property and associations implemented by the provider. The tool can also be configured to define a set of rules for profile validation. A framework is provided for writing user-defined test cases, including stress testing, performance testing, property testing, profile testing, and indication testing.
IBM teams and IBM vendor (external) teams are actively using Provider Acceptance Test Suite; they have found it useful for end-to-end provider and acceptance testing. This single comprehensive tool allows developers and testers to test the SMIS providers for all the functionality and to generate reports useful to various stakeholders. Provider developers can use the tool for quicker analysis of profile implementation and unit testing.
How does it work?
Provider Acceptance Test Suite validates CIM/SMI-S providers using automation. It uses SBLIM (Standards-Based Linux® Instrumentation for Manageability) to communicate to CIMOM (Common Information Model Object Manager). Provider Acceptance Test Suite helps the user to query various CIM operations on a vendor provider. The tool also provides a framework for writing requirement-specific test cases.
About the technology author(s)
Imranuddin W. Kazi has been working at IBM since 2007. He has nine years of experience in system and storage applications. Mr. Kazi received his Bachelor of Engineering in computer science from Amravati University in India. He currently works on standard-based storage management applications for IBM and IBM vendor hardware. Mr. Kazi""s areas of interest are in systems and storage domains.
Gaurav Chhaunker has been associated with IBM since 2007. He has six years of experience in IT and software development and about four years in system and storage applications. Mr. Chhaunker received his M.S. from Cleveland State University, Ohio, in May 2003. He currently works on standard-based storage management applications for IBM and IBM vendor hardware. Mr. Chhaunker""s areas of interest are in systems and storage management domains.
Vikram B. Sanap has worked at IBM for three years in the distributed computing, systems, and storage management domains. He earned his Post-Graduate Diploma in advanced computing from CDAC Pune and his Bachelor of Engineering in information technology at Shivaji University, India. Mr. Sanap currently works on standard-based storage management applications for IBM and IBM vendor hardware. His areas of interest and expertise are in C, C++, Java™, XML, and CIM/WBEM standards.
