SNIA sets standard for interoperable clouds

ORLANDO, USA: The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) released Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) as a SNIA Architecture standard, at SNW Spring 2010.

This marks the first industry-developed open standard for cloud computing and will allow for interoperable cloud storage implementations from cloud service providers and storage vendors.

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The standard is applicable to public, private and hybrid storage clouds and is expected to be implemented by service providers and cloud infrastructure vendors for all cloud deployment models.

More than just a data path to the cloud, the CDMI also includes the ability to manage service levels that data receives when it is stored in the cloud. The CDMI also includes a common interoperable data exchange format for securely moving data and its associated data requirements from cloud to cloud.

The new standard was created by the SNIA Cloud Storage Technical Work Group (TWG) which consists of more than 180 members from more than 60 different organizations around the world.

NetApp's Val Bercovici, who serves as Chair of the SNIA Cloud Storage Initiative, said: "This milestone means that we should soon start to see open cloud interfaces for public and private clouds. These interfaces will appear side-by-side with the existing proprietary interfaces, but the extensible nature of the CDMI standard means that implementations can expose their entire functionality and will not be limited to a lowest common denominator approach."

Based on a RESTful HTTP protocol, the CDMI standard requires adopters to implement strong access controls as well as providing for encryption of the data on the underlying storage media to accomodate secure multi-tenant cloud environments.

The use of CDMI by cloud computing and storage providers enhances the types of storage services they can offer their customers, addressing enterprise computing and storage needs for higher service levels on their data.

CDMI takes the novel approach of marking cloud storage containers and data objects with Data System Metadata to express service-level requirements, allowing data services such as backup, archive, deduplication, encryption and others to meet these needs automatically.