The SNIA announced that version 0.9 of the Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) is available for download.
This version incorporates comments received from the initial public review back in September, as well as some new features. One feature is the ability to access specific byte ranges of a data object. Another important feature is the ability to access specific metadata elements individually. These features will help reduce the bandwidth required to perform certain operations.
We have also incorporated feedback suggesting better conformance to HTTP and the principles of REST. The document is easier to read and better explains the concept behind the interface. One of those is the notion of tagging the containers and data objects with Data System Metadata. Table 14 in chapter 16 now goes into much more detail on the various metadata tags that are standardized: By tagging a data object or container of data objects with this metadata, specific data requirements are expressed to the cloud. If the cloud provider can deploy data services to meet these requirements, they can charge more as a result, leading to cloud storage that is better than the typical "best effort" services offered today.
For each of these elements, there is a corresponding "billed" value that the cloud provider supplies indicating how well the data requirement has been met. The better the service provided, the more they can charge as a result. This metadata is preserved in the serialized data format that is also standardized by CDMI so that as you move data from one cloud to another (Public<->Public, or Private<->Public), the data requirements can be interpreted interoperably by the new cloud.
There are many other new features in this version of CDMI, including a new security writeup. Please download and review this version and provide feedback over the next month so we can have a robust version 1.0 early next year.

Gary Mazzaferro and I have created a whitepaper that discusses the coordination going on between two early cloud standards. The first is the Open Cloud Computing Interface, or OCCI for short. OCCI is a standard, RESTful interface to control a cloud computing infrastructure in an interoperable manner. It is being developed by the Open Grid Forum (OGF) and early drafts are available on the OCCI Web site. The second standard is called the Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI). CDMI in a similar manner allows for the interoperable access to and control of a cloud storage infrastructure. CDMI is being developed by the Storage Networking Industry Association. CDMI is also RESTful in design and allows for both a data path and a control path to cloud storage. But CDMI can also be used as the control path for cloud computing storage needs if you couple it with a cloud computing standard such as OCCI. 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 whitepaper from one of the following locations: SNIA Site OGF Site

The SNIA has released early drafts of a couple of documents created in the new Cloud Storage TWG. The Cloud Storage Reference Model 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 the 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, the model is used to describe standard interfaces for cloud storage.

The SNIA will create a new interface called the Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) that will serve as both a functional interface to store data in a cloud, and as a management interface for the data that is stored there.

SNIA is soliciting feedback on the model and use cases in order to shape this interface work. If you would like to get involved, there is a Google Group you can join. Update: original Sun Blog post: 6/9/09

Welcome to the SNIA Cloud Weblog. These posts are from members of the SNIA Cloud Storage Initiative. More information on CSI can be found here: http://snia.org/cloud

I spent the past few days wondering what my first post for SNIA on Ethernet Storage should be about, and finally arrived at this - despite the fact that it's old news...

A couple of months ago Ben Hacker posted a great blog on The Server Room section of Intel's communities site, talking about Intel and Microsoft's performance benchmarking work on iSCSI over 10Gb Ethernet. The post is entitled "1,000,000 IOPS with iSCSI - That's Not a Typo..." - check it out, it's very enlightening.

Ben's blog in turn pointed to a joint Microsoft/Intel webcast going into detail about the results. Again, it's good information.

The thing that stuck me here was not so much that you can get wire speed 10Gb/s iSCSI performance today, or that large virtual server environments can require those performance levels - the thing that struck me was that conventional wisdom is continually challenged by commodity Ethernet advances.

Eight years ago, most people believed that special NICs would be required to overcome the overhead imposed by TCP/IP and iSCSI over Gigabit Ethernet. That turned out to be wrong. Standard on-board Ethernet ports and software iSCSI initiators worked just great. The conventional wisdom today is that special NICs and drivers are required to overcome the overhead imposed by TCP/IP and iSCSI over 10 Gigabit Ethernet. That's also wrong. The Intel/Microsoft benchmark used standard on-board ports and software iSCSI initiators.

We seem to keep forgetting that Moore's Law continually delivers more CPU cycles than we expect (exponentials are funny like that), and the huge commodity R&D infrastructure around Ethernet continually finds ways to improve network performance.

Any bets on whether we'll need special NICs to support iSCSI over 40Gb Ethernet on commodity servers when that emerges as a mainstream host port? I think the answer is obvious...

Tags: iSCSI, performance, 10Gb Ethernet, Virtual server environments

Welcome to the new SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum (ESF) blog! You can find even more information about us at our website www.snia.org/forums/esf.