Priorities for storage professionals are changing. With storage capacity increasing by 20 percent or more annually, IT departments are focusing less on purchasing to satisfy capacity demands and more on optimizing their storage management strategies and safeguarding their data. Join this daylong summit as world-class thought leaders share their creative solutions with a combination of different technologies to battle the constant demand for more storage and protect the sensitive data held inside.
The state of cloud standards
Panelists:
Mark Carlson, Principal Cloud Strategist at Oracle & Technical Cloud Working Group Chair at the Storage Networking Industry Association
Mike Fisher, Chief Researcher at BT Research and Technology & ETSI TC CLOUD Chairman
Richard Soley, Chairman of the Object Management Group
Winston Bumpus, Director of Standards Architecture at VMware & President of the Distributed Management Task Force
The Open Data Center Alliance will moderate this practical session on the state of cloud standards. With adoption rates soaring, the time is right for industry bodies to clarify and unify their standards and there is no better person to lead the discussion than an end-user like our moderator Chris Swan.
Tune in to this panel webinar to hear what exists, what's new and how current standards can be used by end-users and vendors alike to push cloud computing forward.
Anatomy of a Cloud Service
Presenting:Glyn Bowden, SNIA, Alex McDonald, SNIA
Cloud Interoperability BOF
There are an increasing number of Cloud Storage offerings available on the market today
with more being added seemingly every week. But how easy is it to move from one cloud
provider to another one? How easy is it to move your data (and the metadata you have created)
between the various providers?
Please plan to join the SNIA Cloud Storage Initiative (CSI) Monday evening (Jan 23rd) at the Sainte Claire Hotel in San Jose for a Birds of Feather (BOF) session on Cloud Storage
Interoperability. The meeting will take place from 6-7:30pm.
Topics include:
Cloud Plugfest plans for 2012
Discussion of Cloud Storage Conformance Programs
Cloud Storage Interoperability Demos (SNW, SDC, others)
CDMI conformance test plans and testing tools
The CSI is considering the creation of an Interoperability Committee to oversee and govern
the operation of these types of activities, and is looking for volunteers to step up and help
lead as well as take on projects in this space. For individuals who can make a commitment,
complimentary individual membership in the CSI can be offered (regardless of whether your
company is a CSI member).
SNIA’s Cloud Storage Technical Work Group (TWG) has wrapped up work on a point release of CDMI (version 1.0.1) and has submitted it to ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 (JTC 1) under SNIA's new status as a Publicly Available Specification (PAS) submitter (granted in September). This update release is a SNIA Architecture standard and includes bug fixes and minor improvements including standard IETF RFC 6208 Media Types. As the CDMI specification makes its way through the JTC 1 approval process, support from National Bodies is needed in order for CDMI to become an international standard.
The Cloud Data Management Interface defines the functional interface that applications will use to create, retrieve, update and delete data elements from the Cloud. As part of this interface the client will be able to discover the capabilities of the cloud storage offering and use this interface to manage containers and the data that is placed in them. In addition, metadata can be set on containers and their contained data elements through this interface. This interface is also used by administrative and management applications to manage data (apply software data services), containers, accounts, security access and monitoring/billing information, even for storage that is accessible by other protocols. The capabilities of the underlying storage and data services are exposed so that clients can understand the offering.
The Cloud Storage TWG is also starting to scope work for a version 1.1 of CDMI that will include a number of extensions as they are implemented by multiple vendors. For more information about this topic click here.
Cloud Storage Standard Readies for Widespread Adoption
SNIA is establishing relationships with National and International Standards Groups; Recent Market Research Reveals CDMI will be Mainstream in RFPs
Santa Clara, Calif. (April 4th, 2011) — The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) Cloud Storage Initiative (CSI), today announced that the Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI), released as an official SNIA Architecture one year ago, continues to make significant steps toward broad acceptance.
“A critical part of delivering an industry wide standard is building a strong ecosystem of partners, alliances and supporting programs,” said David Slik, Co–Chair of SNIA Cloud Storage Technical Work Group. “As demonstrated by initiating relationships with nationally and internationally recognized standards bodies and our forthcoming CDMI Plugfest, we are making strong progress around delivering not only a strong standard, but a widely accepted and valued one.”
SNIA’s CDMI standard has been refined over the past year and is now being readied for further de jure standardization. The SNIA has joined the DAPS38 Technical Committee (which is responsible for Cloud Computing, among other technology standards) of INCITS – the primary U.S. focus of standardization in the field of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT). The SNIA has also requested a Category A Liaison relationship with the ISO/IEC JTC 1 SC38 subcommittee for Distributed Application Platforms and Services (DAPS).
CDMI has been citied in numerous cloud roadmaps and studies, including those from ITU–T (International Telecommunication Union), TeleManagement Forum, SIENA (the European Standards and Interoperability for eInfrastructure Implementation Initiative), and NIST (the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology). The maturing CDMI Reference Implementation has been through initial testing of the NIST SAJACC (Standards Acceleration to Jumpstart Adoption of Cloud Computing) use cases..
SNIA CSI 2011 sponsored activities include Plugfests , with the first taking place April 19–21, 2011 at the SNIA Technology Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The Cloud Plugfest allows vendors to bring their implementations of CDMI and the Open Grid Forum’s Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI) to test, identify, and fix bugs in a collaborative setting with the goal of providing a forum in which companies can develop interoperable products. For additional details on participating in the Cloud Plugfest, please visit www.snia.org/cloud/cloudplugfest/ .
SNIA CSI will repeat its “SNIA Cloud Burst Summit” in Santa Clara, California, on September 22, 2011 as an extended program with the SNIA Storage Developer Conference (SDC). In 2010, over 100 attendees participated in the Cloud Burst Summit, joining other cloud strategists and deployment professionals in this highly successful inaugural program that featured noted industry luminary Geoffrey Moore as the keynote speaker on the topic of clouds and IT transformation.
SNIA CSI has also partnered with Storage Strategies NOW to help bring to market research that will help inform the industry of the key insights around cloud storage. This information, which can be found in the IT Professionals Cloud Adoption Survey released today, will provide a valuable service to help users, vendors and the industry at–large track how adoption and use of cloud technologies should be considered. To learn more, visit www.ssg–now.com.
Deni Connor, principal analyst, Storage Strategies NOW added, “Our findings include that Email (66%) is the primary application for cloud storage, followed by backup (59%) and front office applications (45%). Additionally, 53% say that SNIA’s CDMI will be part of cloud storage RFPs/proposals; and 30% of respondents say SNIA’s CDMI is very important for public/hybrid cloud standard”.
Deni Connor, principal analyst, Storage Strategies NOW added, “Our findings include that Email (66%) is the primary application for cloud storage, followed by backup (59%) and front office applications (45%). Additionally, 53% say that SNIA’s CDMI will be part of cloud storage RFPs/proposals; and 30% of respondents say SNIA’s CDMI is very important for public/hybrid cloud standard”.
To learn more about SNIA and CSI stop by the SNIA CSI Cloud Pavilion on Tuesday and Wednesday during SNW Expo Hall hours.
About the SNIA Cloud Storage Initiative
The SNIA Cloud Storage Initiative (CSI) fosters the growth and success of the market for cloud storage for vendors, service providers, and users. Members of the CSI work together to advance the adoption of the SNIA Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) standard, educate the IT communities about cloud storage, perform market outreach that highlights the virtues of cloud storage, and collaborate with other industry associations on cloud storage technical work. CSI member companies represent a variety of segments in the IT industry and include Actifio, Asigra, Broadcom, CA Technologies, Cisco, Cleversafe, CoreVault, Desktone, EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, HP, IBM, Iron Mountain, LSI Corporation, Mezeo, NetApp, Oracle, Scality, Sepaton, SpectraLogic, StorSimple, SwiftTest, Terasky, Terremark, and Xiotech. For more information on SNIA’s Cloud Storage activities, visit snia.org/cloud and get involved in the conversation at twitter.com/SNIACloud or http://groups.google.com/group/snia-cloud.
About SNIA
The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is a not–for–profit global organization, made up of some 400 member companies spanning virtually the entire storage industry. SNIA’s mission is to lead the storage industry worldwide in developing and promoting standards, technologies, and educational services to empower organizations in the management of information. To this end, the SNIA is uniquely committed to delivering standards, education, and services that will propel open storage networking solutions into the broader market. For additional information, visit the SNIA web site at www.snia.org.
US Government Driven Cloud Standards
Join NIST, SNIA, DMTF and the CSA for a Brighttalk webcast.
This recorded webcast session looks at the use cases developed by The US National Instititue of Standards and Technology (NIST) in collaboration with the public to drive interoperability, portability and security of cloud computing. A panel of key representatives from NIST as well as several industry standards organizations, including the DMTF, SNIA and the Cloud Security Alliance discuss their work as it relates to these use cases. The discussion covers portable workloads and standardized interfaces for cloud computing. The goal of cloud standards is to improve cloud consumer agility and define a set of architectural semantics that unify the interoperable management of workloads and resources between enterprises of all sizes and cloud computing infrastructures.
New Special Interest Group Forming: Archive and Preservation in the Cloud
We had a jam packed group in San Jose on the 26th of January for a Birds of Feather session to kick off the formation of the CSI Archive/Preservation Special Interest Group (SIG). We had sufficient folks take an active interest that we will be forming the group!
Please Join if you are a SNIA CSI member, or contact Marty to get started.
The SNIA Cloud Storage Initiative (CSI) and Technical Work Group (TWG) have been busy delivering on the promises made in 2010 and are planning several activities for the year 2011. This session was held live at the SNIA Winter Symposium and streamed live and on demand from the SNIA Cloud web site here. The video recording is now available below:
Watch this video to learn about the exciting formation of the Archive and Preservation Special Interest Group. Hear about 2011 cloud education and collaboration activities for end users, the channel, and vendors at the SNW Santa Clara, SNIA Symposium, SNIA Storage Developers Conference/CloudBurst, SNW Fall and SNW Europe. Get involved NOW - plan your sponsorships to save money and increase your cloud exposure.
You can also download this video for offline viewing (select click save as...)
CDMI Reference Implementation Working Draft Available
The first working draft release of the Reference Implementation of CDMI is now available for download. The software is available as source code writtten in the Java language under the open source BSD license. This version implements some basic CDMI functionality, allowing for client developers to get started on their CDMI based applications.
This working draft CDMI Reference Implementation is being released so that developers can get started with integrating CDMI into their products and applications. As the SNIA Cloud Storage Technical Working Group (TWG) continues to create additional functionality, subsequent releases of the CDMI Reference Implementation will be made available.
For more information on the CDMI Reference Implementation and specifications, please join the SNIA Cloud Google Group where the experts are available to answer questions about this release.
Implementing, Serving, and Using Cloud Storage Whitepaper
Organizations of all types are trying to control costs and satisfy increasing demands at the same time— demands created by explosive data growth and ever-changing regulations. To address these challenges, storage industry professionals are turning to cloud computing and cloud storage solutions.
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, produced in record time for an open 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. The Cloud Storage TWG, which was started at Storage Networking World Spring 2010, has completed the specification in less than 12 months.
This paper defines a set of requirements for storage in “multi-tenant” cloud environments in four key areas of concern for cloud adopters: security; quality of service; data protection and availability; and manageability. Where appropriate, these requirements are defined in terms of the Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI).
The members of the Cloud Storage Initiative have created a blog site at sniacloud.com with periodic posts on the activities of CSI and the Cloud Storage TWG. Please follow along or subscribe.
Private Cloud Whitepaper Available
The SNIA Cloud Storage Initiative has released a new whitepaper on Private and Hybrid storage clouds.
Many organizations, driven by the opportunities for significant cost-savings, are considering cloud computing and cloud storage solutions, which take advantage of Web-based technologies to allow scalable, virtualized IT resources to be provided as a service over the network. Not a new technology in itself, cloud computing is a new business model wrapped around existing technologies, such as server virtualization, to make the use of information technology resources more efficient.
Latest Cloud Storage Standard Released for Public Review
The SNIA Cloud Storage Technical Work Group has completed the second public draft of the new cloud storage standard: Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI), Version 0.9 is avalable for review and feedback from:
The Cloud Data Management Interface defines the functional interface that applications will use to create, retrieve, update and delete data elements from the Cloud. As part of this interface the client will be able to discover the capabilities of the cloud storage offering and use this interface to manage containers and the data that is placed in them. In addition, metadata can be set on containers and their contained data elements through this interface.
This interface is also used by administrative and management applications to manage containers, accounts, security access and monitoring/billing information, even for storage that is accessible by other protocols. The capabilities of the underlying storage and data services are exposed so that clients can understand the offering.
What: Presentation on Cloud programs for the upcoming year. SlidesWebex Replay:StreamDownload
Agenda: Welcome and Introduction – Vincent Franceschini Cloud Storage TWG Progress and Roadmap - Mark Carlson Cloud Storage Marketing Plans – Marty Foltyn Cloud Storage Whitepapers – Kellye Crane
http://www.snia.org/cloud – (How to get involved) – Val Bercovici CSI opportunities – Education, Industry Alliances – Vincent Franceschini How to Join CSI – Jay Savell Q&A + Wrap-up – Vincent Franceschini and CSI team
Get the whitepaper on Managing Data Storage in the Public Cloud
The Storage Networking Industry Association has published a whitepaper on Managing Data in the Public Cloud.
Public cloud storage can be utilized in many different ways. For example: local data (such as on a laptop) can be backed up to public cloud storage; a virtual disk can be “synched” to the cloud and distributed to other computers; and the cloud can be used as an archive to retain (under policy) data for regulatory or other purposes.
When evaluating cloud implementations, there are three types to be considered: public, private, and hybrid models (many users implement a combination of these). While the Storage Networking Industry Association™ (SNIA) is addressing all three types, this paper discusses public cloud storage solutions and the emerging methods available to best manage these environments.
Get the whitepaper on Cloud Storage for Cloud Computing
The Storage Networking Industry Association in conjunction with the Open Grid Forum have recently published a whitepaper on Cloud Storage for Cloud Computing. The Cloud has become a new vehicle for delivering resources such as computing and storage to customers on demand.
Rather than being a new technology in itself, the cloud is a new business model wrapped around new technologies such as server virtualization that take advantage of economies of scale and multi-tenancy to reduce the cost of using information technology resources.
This paper discusses the business drivers in the Cloud delivery mechanism and business model, what the requirements are in this space, and how standard interfaces, coordinated between different organizations can meet the emerging needs for interoperability and portability of data between clouds.
To learn more about SNIA's Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) standard, and how it works with Cloud Computing standards such as the OGF Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI) please download the new whitepaper from one of the following locations:
The SNIA Cloud Storage TWG two important documents for public review and feedback. Please discuss these documents on the SNIA Cloud Google Group, however, if you have concrete contributions, we request you use the SNIA Feedback Portal unless you are already participating in the TWG.
Cloud Storage Reference Model v0.3 Trial-Use Draft
This paper sets out a model of cloud storage elements that describes a logical view of their functions and capabilities using a descriptive taxonomy. The purpose of this model is to form a basis upon which industry efforts can be organized, needed standards identified and vendor products can be described by vendor independent terminology. In addition, this model is used to describe standard interfaces for cloud storage.
Cloud Storage Reference Model v0.3 Trial-Use Draft
Cloud Storage Use Cases v0.5 Trial-Use Draft
This document summarizes the use cases in various Cloud Storage offerings.
Cloud Storage Use Cases v0.5 Trial-Use Draft
Cloud Storage featured at the Storage Developer Conference
SDC had some great sessions targeted specifically at developers:
