Validation of redfish – The scalable platform management standard

Data centers are at the core of modern software technology and play a crucial role in defining capabilities and success of an organization. The massive growth in size and scale of data and computing leads to an enormous growth in the size and complexity of clusters and data centers. Therefore, traditional management methods and standards like Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) are not sufficient to manage these modern scalable data centers. Redfish is a new standard for managing hardware in modern data centers and is anticipated to meet the expectations of end users to provide modern, simple and secure management of scalable platform hardware. It is essential to validate Redfish’s capability regarding the performance, scalability and security aspects as mentioned in the Redfish Specification. To validate Redfish services, we have designed a Redfish Conformance Test Tool (RCTT) in Python which performs compliance testing and confirms if the output matches as per the Redfish specification. The specification is divided into assertions and they are grouped into four divisions - Protocol Details, Data Model and Schema, Service Details and Security. RCTT covers all four divisions and helps users to re-instate their trust on the specification. Additionally, comparing Redfish with other standards will also help us in understanding how well these standards have evolved.