SNIA’s Storage Management Community is gearing up to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the SNIA Swordfish® specification in September. Swordfish provides a unified approach for the management of storage and servers in hyperscale, cloud and AI infrastructure environments, making it easier for IT administrators to integrate scalable solutions into their data centers.

The Swordfish API was first released in 2016 to extend the DMTF Redfish® protocol and schema to handle the management of storage equipment and services in modern data centers. The initial version of Swordfish focused on providing a service-based interface. Incremental revisions added support for traditional storage system modeling, NVM Express® and NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF™) technologies and enhancing the Redfish functionality in multiple areas including modeling for storage fabrics with the OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) Sunfish™. Swordfish partners with DMTF, NVM Express, SODA, UEC, OCP and OFA. Strategic partnerships like these are crucial to enable quick response to enhancement requests to drive Swordfish functionality. Additionally, Swordfish has worked internally with other SNIA Technical Work Groups resulting in cross group collaboration to develop additional Swordfish functionality. 

The Swordfish Conformance Test Program (CTP) provides companies with the tools to test their products with a vendor-neutral, open source test suite to validate conformance to a particular version of the Swordfish Storage Management API Specification. Early adopters and implementers include Cisco, HPE and Intel.

Over the past decade, Swordfish has evolved to meet the needs of enterprise storage, cloud, HPC, and AI environments. Following is a timeline of Swordfish milestones and major releases:

  • September 2016: SNIA Swordfish® storage management specification, Version 1.0 is working draft is released.
  • January 2017: Version 1.0.3 is released as a SNIA Standard; adds new use cases and a section for client considerations.
  • May 2018: Version 1.0.6 is released as a SNIA Standard; adds on-demand replication use cases, updated storage systems model and additional alignments with Redfish.
  • November 2019: Version 1.1.0a adds features and profiles, introduces non class of service models, enhancements to volume, storage pools and replication, with volume/pool creation scenarios added to users guide.
  • September 2020: Version 1.1.0d aligns to ISO/IEC formatting for international standard submission.
  • October 2020: Version 1.2.1 is released; introduces NVMe functionality to ensure NVMe and NVMe-oF technology environments can be managed entirely by Redfish and Swordfish.
  • September 2021: Version 1.1.0d is published as an ISO/IEC Standard to drive global adoption and implementation for the management of storage and services.
  • December 2021: Version 1.2.3 is released as a SNIA Standard, adding enhanced support for NVMe advanced devices.
  • July 2022: Version 1.2.4a is released as a SNIA Standard; adds enhancements to the Swordfish models and schema to support the management of NVMe and NVMe-oF devices and systems, such as JBOF and EBOF.
  • June 2023: Version 1.2.5a is released as a SNIA Standard, adding expanded support for Swordfish profiles and updates mappings for NVMe to align with NVMe 2.0 specification.
  • July 2023: Version 1.2.4a is published as ISO/IEC Standard; adds functionality to manage NVMe and NVMe-oF.
  • April 2024: Version 1.2.6 is released; includes a new white paper on how Swordfish helps manage NVMe technology and introduces the NVMe Model Overview and Mapping Guide.
  • August 2024: Version 1.2.7 is released as a SNIA Standard; introduces NVMe SMART Metrics for health monitoring, introduces NVMe functionality to support commend and feature lockdown, and contains new Swordfish interoperability guide.
  • May 2025: Version 1.2.8 is released as a SNIA Standard; updates NVMe functionality and mapping guide for namespace management, updates storage pool metrics, enhancement to the NVMe-oF white paper and NVMe mapping guide.
  • June 2025: Version 1.2.8 enters the ISO publication process to advance global adoption.
  • January 2026: Version 1.2.9 is released as a Working Draft; focuses on metrics and telemetry. 
  • January 2026: DNA Data Storage in Swordfish model and mockups released as a Working Draft.

Join the celebration at SDC 2026

Join us to celebrate 10 years of Swordfish at SNIA Developer Conference (SDC) 2026 on Sept. 28-30 in Santa Clara, CA. Watch for additional details coming soon at snia.org/swordfish