Highlights from the SNIA's Summer Symposium

Recently, the SNIA hosted its Summer Symposium, held July 21-25, 2008, at the historic Sainte Claire Hotel in San Jose. Featuring more than 60 Work Group meetings, Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) sessions, and other unique programs, this year's Summer Symposium also included highly informative keynote addresses from Mark Peters of Enterprise Strategy Group and Robin Harris of StorageMojo.

Each year the SNIA's Summer Symposium helps set the direction for the organization's Committees, Workgroups, Forums, and Initiatives, and this year's symposium continued its long history of bringing together SNIA members in a face-to-face setting to work on technical, educational, and marketing projects. Meetings were held on eXtensible Access Method (XAM), Fixed Content Aware Storage (FCAS), Object-based Storage Device (OSD), Disk Data Format (DDF), Policy-based Storage Management (PSM), Information Lifecycle Mgmt (ILM), File Area Networks (FAN), Security, the SNIA Grid Taskforce, and much more. BOF sessions were held on the Data Integrity Initiative (DII), Green Storage, and Solid State Devices (SSDs). By driving these critical programs and projects, the Symposium helps SNIA members to advance the core strategic goals of the SNIA.

In addition, the 2008 Summer Symposium was the site for the SNIA's announcement that the membership has approved the eXtensible Access Method (XAM) version 1.0 specification and released a working draft of the associated XAM Software Development Kit (SDK). The XAM specification is now being prepared for ANSI and ISO accreditation and is expected to be integrated into storage products by fall 2008, and into applications by early 2009.

This preliminary version of the SNIA's first software suite, the XAM SDK, is providing Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), storage vendors, and operating system vendors a preliminary version of the tools they need to develop and test the latest XAM specification. With reference data expected to account for more than half of all corporate data in the next few years, the XAM specification will help fulfill the market needs for a standard that enables information independence for applications and storage needed for long-term digital information retention requirements.

To review the Symposium's agenda, please visit http://www.snia.org/events/summersymposium. For more information on the XAM Initiative, specification, and SDK, please visit www.snia.org/xam or sign up for the XAM Developers Group at groups.google.com/group/xam-developers-group.