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By Cara Garretson
The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) on Monday announced the completion of its Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) specification, designed to allow interoperability of data stored in various cloud platforms.
The standard was created by a working group within the SNIA called the Cloud Storage Initiative, which includes 180 members from 60 different organizations, and was completed in less than 12 months, officials said. The spec's goal is to enable data stored in public and private clouds to be easier to manage and move. The group hopes the standard will be implemented by both cloud service providers and cloud infrastructure vendors.
"This milestone means that we should soon start to see open cloud interfaces for public and private clouds," said Val Bercovici, a member of NetApp's office of the CTO who also serves as chair of the SNIA Cloud Storage Initiative. "These interfaces will appear side-by-side with the existing proprietary interfaces, but the extensible nature of the CDMI standard means that implementations can expose their entire functionality and will not be limited to a lowest common denominator approach."
Platforms and service providers that implement CDMI will give applications a functional interface to create, retrieve, update and delete data elements from the cloud, according to SNIA, using the interface to manage both data and the containers that hold the data. The interface will also offer a way to set metadata on storage containers and their elements.
The standard not only creates a data path to information stored in the cloud, but also includes facilities for managing the service levels of that data, said SNAI. It also includes a common interoperable data exchange format so that cloud data and its associated requirements can be moved from cloud to cloud. The new specification is based on the RESTful HTTP protocol and requires those that use it to implement strong access controls and provide encryption of the data on the underlying storage media, so that secure multi-tentant cloud environments can be achieved.
By taking advantage of the new interface, cloud infrastructure and service providers can enhance their offerings by creating higher service levels on the data in the cloud. The interface achieves this by marking cloud storage containers and data objects with data system metadata that express service-level requirements, so that storage services such as backup, archive, deduplication and encryption stay with the data.
CDMI is expected to be rolled out Monday at the Storage Networking World conference in Orlando.
SNIA's Cloud Storage Initiative is an industry group working to further the cloud storage market through the development of the CDMI and other projects, as well as to educate IT professionals about cloud storage and provide market outreach, said the organization. Members include representatives from Actifio, Bycast, Cleversafe, CloudOptix, Dell, Desktone, EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, HP, LSI Corp., Mezeo, NetApp, Olocity Corp., Oracle, Symantec Corp., and Xiotech Corp. The SNIA is a non-profit association with more than 400 member companies from around the globe that promote the storage industry by developing standards, technologies and educational services.
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