INCITS 388.1, Information Technology – Storage Management Technical Specification – Part 1: Common Architecture defines the core architecture and protocols in SMI-S. The components of SMI-S architecture include:

• Transport - communicating management information between constituents of the management system

• Health and fault management - detecting failures through monitoring the state of storage components

• General information about the object model

• Names - how SMI-S uses names to allow applications to correlate across SMI-S and to other standards

• Policy - the expression of management behavior such that administrators and other management software can control that behavior, tailoring it to accomplish specific goals.

• Standard messages - how exceptions are presented to client applications

• Service discovery - techniques clients use to discover SMI-S services

• Installation and upgrade - recommendations for implementations

• Compliance - requirement for compliance to the standard