• 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.

• 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.