Knowledge Center

SNIA Forum and Initiatives produce many white papers and articles every year. Here is a brief overview of some these documents. Click on the links to download the full documents.

Managing Data Storage in the "Cloud"

Organizations driven by opportunities for significant cost-savings consider cloud computing and cloud storage solutions, taking advantage of Web-based technologies to allow scalable, virtualized IT resources to be provided as a service over the network. Cloud storage offers a high degree of scalability and elasticity along with simplified management. When virtualized storage is available on demand over a network, an organization can be freed from the need to purchase - or often even provision - its storage capacity before proceeding with data storage.

SNIA describes cloud deployment models in white papers found at snia.org/cloud:

• Public cloud solutions - organizations access third-party resources (like Amazon S3, Iron Mountain, and Google etc.) on an as-needed basis, without the requirement to invest in additional internal infrastructure
• Private storage clouds - implemented for existing storage behind an organization's firewall and deployed for internal customers
• Hybrid storage clouds - combine both public and private clouds

SNIA addresses all three models with technical standards activities, including development of a cloud data management interface (CDMI).

Value propositions for XAM

XAM now has 12 known adopters with solutions spanning 5 major classes of implementation: applications, middleware, storage, management, and cloud-based services. XAM's value proposition is very strong in verticals needing preservation-class services. Here are three important examples:

Medical Records and XAM
With XAM objects, medical records become portable and secure thereby capable of supporting the vision of the Electronic Health Records initiative over the long-term. XAM supports the requirements to maintain an individual's personal records globally unique over time with integrity and authenticity.

eDiscovery and Litigation Support and XAM
XAM objects with extended metadata enable preservation, litigation review, discovery, security, and automate placement of litigation holds across all protected repositories. With business important information captured in a XAM-enabled repository upon creation, discovery and litigation review practices are more scalable, cost effective, automated, and controlled across time.

Digital Preservation and XAM
In the datacenter, XAM enables preservation to cost-effectively "begin at creation,"enabling achievement of information governance, compliance, and risk management goals. XAM is an open source standard and with XAM, digital preservation services become more scalable, cost effective, automated, and better able to extend the life of digital information.

Solving Digital Preservation in the Business Data Centre

In the last five years, a radical shift has taken place in the data centre. The requirements of the business now dictate that digital information is retained long-term namely periods over 10-15 years. It is the period of time beyond which a data centre storage practices start losing information because their retention and preservation technologies are inadequate. Regulatory compliance risk, legal risk (discovery), security risk (privacy), and digital asset preservation requirements have changed the game.

The time dimension of the business problem is that very few organisations believe that they can actually meet these long-term retention and preservation requirements. The industry lacks a cohesive set of standards and best practices that will allow retention and preservation practices to start small and yet scale to the requirements of the data centre. SNIA Self-contained Information Retention Format (SIRF) standardization effort proposes a logical container format appropriate for the long-term preservation of digital information.