SNIA Announces Cloud Storage Initiative

New Initiative Aimed at Education, Collaboration for Cloud Storage and Standards

PHOENIX (Oct. 12, 2009) — The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) announced today at Storage Networking World Fall 2009, the formation of the Cloud Storage Initiative (CSI), which will serve to foster the growth and success of the emerging cloud storage market for both commercial and consumer environments.

As a collective initiative of industry leaders committed to becoming the recognized authority for cloud storage, the CSI will coordinate and deliver education efforts for the vendor and user communities and perform market outreach highlighting the virtues of cloud storage. The CSI will complement the technical innovation and development from the SNIA Cloud Storage Technical Working Group (TWG) which already has more than 140 members representing over 50 commercial vendors, service providers, and educational institutions. The CSI will aid the TWG in bringing specifications and technical developments to international standards development organizations.

"The industry is closely monitoring the growth of cloud storage offerings as well as making predictions about this technology's future," said Vincent Franceschini, Vice Chair of the SNIA. "Drawing from the experience and expertise of its existing and new SNIA members as well as the work from the Cloud Storage TWG, the new Initiative will set programs to advance the knowledge and acceptance of cloud storage and drive the adoption of the Cloud Data Management Interface standard."

The CSI is responsible for coordinating and driving all activities within the SNIA related to cloud storage, including those for education, technical development, business development, marketing and implementation. As an example, the CSI will promote and extend the draft Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) as well as deliver a new Cloud Storage Tutorial to be unveiled at SNW Fall and a joint white paper with the Open Grid Forum (OGF) focused on cloud storage for cloud computing all developed by the Cloud Storage TWG. In addition, the CSI will collaborate with other organizations and initiatives to further the dialogue on cloud storage as well as leverage SNIA regional affiliates to promote cloud storage on a global scale. The initiative is sponsoring the Cloud Computing Summit at SNW, and has organized a Cloud Storage Pavilion on the show floor.

"It's both encouraging and timely to see this new Initiative from SNIA," said Simon Robinson, Research Director, Storage, for The 451 Group. "With the progress being made from the Cloud Storage TWG and various implementations of cloud technologies poised to make a significant impact on the industry over the next few years, it's gratifying to see this co-operative effort around standards and education, since those are two of the current impediments to fast adoption as technologies mature and become integrated into more vendor offerings."

Founding members of the CSI representing both new and existing SNIA members across a variety of segments of the IT industry include Actifio, Bycast, EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, HP, LSI Corporation, NetApp, Olocity Corporation, Sun Microsystems, Symantec Corp and Xiotech Corporation.

For more information on SNIA’s Cloud Storage activities, please visit www.snia.org/cloud or get involved in the conversation at www.twitter.com/SNIACloud or http://groups.google.com/group/cloudstorage.

About the 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.