Draft 1.0 Cloud Storage Specification Available

The SNIA has released a final working draft of the Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) version 1.0. The folks that have put this specification together in record time include:

Company – Individual
Bycast Inc. – David Slik
Cisco Systems – Mike Siefer
Hitachi Data Systems – Eric Hibbard
Iron Mountain – Chris Schwarzer
NetApp Inc. – Alan Yoder
NetApp Inc. – Lakshmi N. Bairavasundaram
Olocity – Scott Baker
Oracle – Mark Carlson
QLogic – Hue Nguyen
Individual – Rich Ramos

Thanks as well for the comments from lots of folks outside of the SNIA. These have all been incorporated into this latest public review draft.

The specification is now in front of the SNIA membership for a vote to become a SNIA Architecture industry standard. It will also become both a National (ANSI) and International (ISO) standard down the road.

I have heard lots of FUD around standardization of cloud interfaces, including the notion that standards take “too long” and that they cannot evolve quickly enough to accommodate the rapid evolution of this new industry. The SNIA Cloud Storage TWG that created this specification was formed last April and has produced a robust 1.0 version of a cloud standard in less than a year – record time for a standards body.

The CDMI standard is extensible by vendors to cover the complete functionality of their cloud and can also be “shrink to fit” for clouds that don’t have all the bells and whistles of the full specification. These extensions are expected to be candidates for future version of the specification as multiple vendors implement them.

Storage and Cloud vendors who have putting off implementing CDMI until 1.0 was available, now no longer have an excuse! Customers of public and private clouds can now start asking their vendors to show adoption of the standard in their roadmaps. Tools and common API libraries can now proceed to add support for a standard cloud storage interface.

To get the Draft 1.0 CDMI specification, go here:

http://snia.org/cloud

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