SNIA Announces Cloud Data Management Interface Standard - Industry's First for Interoperable Cloud Storage

In April, the SNIA’s Cloud Storage Initiative (CSI) announced the formal approval of the Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) as a SNIA Architecture. This milestone marks the first industry-developed open specification for cloud computing, allowing for interoperable cloud storage implementations from cloud service providers and storage vendors.

Produced in record time for an open specification, CDMI 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. The Cloud Storage TWG, which was started at Storage Networking World Spring 2010, completed the specification in less than 12 months.

Applicable to public, private and hybrid storage clouds, CDMI 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.

Based on a RESTful HTTP protocol, the CDMI specification requires adopters to implement strong access controls, and provide for encryption of the data on the underlying storage media to accommodate secure multi-tenant cloud environments. The CDMI also includes a common interoperable data exchange format for securely moving data and its associated data requirements from cloud to cloud.

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.

For more information on the SNIA’s cloud activities, visit http://www.snia.org/cloud.