About the XAM Initiative

The SNIA XAM Initiative Addresses the Need for Standardization

Innovation in the storage industry is anything but stagnant. More and more information processing power is being offloaded to the storage device itself. In particular, storage technologies that deal with the handling of fixed content are on the rise. Introduced in early 2000, storage devices known as Content Addressed Storage (CAS) – an object-based, single instance storage system optimized for the storage and retrieval of unstructured, fixed content gained a foothold along side of traditional transactional based storage devices as well as Storage Area Network (SAN) and Network Attached Storage) (NAS).

In 2004, the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) recognized the importance of fixed content storage systems and the need to establish a common interface between the applications that generate fixed content and the storage devices that store fixed content. The eXtensible Access Method (XAM) is both a specification and an architecture which defines a standard access method (API) between "Consumers" (application and management software) and "Providers" (storage systems) to manage fixed content storage services.

XAM includes metadata definitions to accompany data to achieve application interoperability, storage transparency, and automation for ILM-based practices, long term records retention, and information security. XAM will be expanded over time to include other data types as well as support additional implementations based on the XAM API to XAM conformant storage systems.

Through the XAM Initiative the SNIA will advance the XAM Specification to become a SNIA Architecture, then an ANSI standard, and then an ISO standard. The XAM Storage Developer Kit (SDK) will be made available to the public-at-large.

Continue to learn more about our programs...