Techniques for managing a storage environment. According to an embodiment of the present invention, high-level application programming interfaces (APIs) are provided that can be used by applications such as storage management applications (e.g., ERM applications, SRM applications) to manage a storage environment. Using these APIs, an application can issue simple high-level commands to perform storage management operations without having to worry about the low level storage array-specific commands. Embodiments of the present invention handle the necessary translations between the high-level commands and the low-level storage array-specific commands or protocols.