Category: CDMI

Join the Cloud Storage Movement at SNIA’s Winter Symposium 2011

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Every year the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) has a gathering of their members in San Jose to coordinate the work of the various Technical Work Groups, Forums and Initiatives. This year the Symposium will take place January 24th – 27th, 2011 at the Sainte Claire Hotel in San Jose, CA. SNIA opens this Symposium to non-SNIA members who are evaluating membership, so feel free to attend. Please Register for the Symposium if you plan to be there in person.

SNIA Cloud Events

The Cloud Storage Technical Work Group (TWG) kicks off a multi-day face to face session starting at 1:00pm PT on Monday. We will be discussing the submission of CDMI for international standardization and continuing to discuss the scope of the next minor release (1.1) of CDMI. Topics include Federation and NoSQL among others. Bring your own ideas for how to improve CDMI. The full agenda has been posted publicly.

On Wednesday, the Cloud Storage Initiative will give an overview of their activities at a breakfast session starting at 8:30am. Then at noon on Wednesday, be sure and join us for the 2011 Activities Kickoff presentation in the Grande Ballroom. We will be showcasing all of the upcoming activities that you will want to be involved with over the next year. This session will be live streamed if you cannot make it in person. Regardless of whether you will be there in person or remote, please register for this update event (in addition to the Symposium registration above). More information.

Wednesday afternoon is the meeting of the Cloud Storage Initiative from 1-5pm (also in the Grande Ballroom). Be sure and join us and help plan the activities for the upcoming year.

Lastly, on Wednesday night there will be a Birds of Feather (BOF) session on a new group that is forming for the Archive and Preservation in the Cloud.

Whereas with Cloud Backup, the cloud is simply a repository of backup data, with Cloud Archive and Preservation, the Cloud is where the active processes occur that ensure long term retention, preservation and viability of data.
CDMI is uniquely designed to accommodate these needs with the Data System Metadata that it standardizes.
Cloud providers see the ability to offer more than just a best effort storage area with the promise of being the trusted steward of information for the long term.
Additional services such as eDiscovery and automatic format conversion can easily be offloaded to the cloud reducing costs.

Please join us Wednesday evening from 5:30pm – 7:00pm in the Grande Ballroom for a Birds of Feather session to kick off the formation of the CSI Archive/Preservation Special Interest Group (SIG). Light refreshments will be provided. If you would like to participate remotely, please use the following call in information:
Toll Free: 866-244-8528
International:+1-719-457-0816
Passcode: 510843#
Webex: http://snia.webex.com, Meeting Name: Archive and Preservation SIG
Meeting Password: cloud2011

Why not pick one of the “open” APIs instead of CDMI?

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There is a post by Jerry Huang , CEO of Gladinet on the problems with trying to be compatible with Amazon’s S3 API. Jerry suggest you look at OpenStack or a common library instead.

Amazon’s API (as with any cloud vendor’s API) is a moving target for sure, but the main issue is that these APIs are under the change control of a single vendor. Doesn’t matter how “open” the API is (in terms of copyright license) because the vendor can change it to disadvantage a competitor. So if you are a competitor, you would be foolish to use that API as the only interface into your cloud. So what happens? Each cloud vendor releases their own “open” API – similar but slightly different (enough to get around copyright), almost always RESTful and pretty much they all do the same thing.

So, you get the situation we have today with rapid proliferation of many different interfaces all pretty much the same. But that doesn’t help the poor clients. They have to code to N different interfaces to work with N different clouds. And since they are rapidly evolving, they have to keep up with all these API changes over time.

The Cloud Storage standard CDMI does not have this problem. CDMI is under the change control of a standards body (SNIA) and accommodates requirements from all the cloud storage players in it’s standardization process. More importantly, it was developed under the SNIA IP policy to help prevent any of the specification author companies from gaming the spec with their Intellectual Property. Thus cloud vendors can pick up the CDMI specification and implement it with confidence. They don’t need to come up with their own API. CDMI also has a standard way to extend the specification for vendor specific functions that still allows for core compatibility with other vendors. Want to do versioning? There is an example vendor extension in CDMI that shows you how.

From a client side point of view, Jerry also mentions common libraries. Jclouds is a good example of this (for Java). There also common libraries for other languages. While that can insulate a client from the many proliferating APIs, it’s a tough task to keep that library up to date with these APIs (just ask Adrian). The sooner the various cloud providers can implement the CDMI standard (even along-side of their existing ones), the sooner common libraries like Jclouds can just maintain a single adapter to a standard API.

SNIA Cloud Activities for 2010

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Given that it’s the middle of summer it may be hot where you are, but the SNIA Cloud activities are heating up for the remainder of this year, and you don’t want to be left out.

SNIA Summer Symposium

At the end of July every year SNIA hosts a Symposium in San Jose for all the groups. The Cloud Storage TWG will be meeting from Monday afternoon through Thursday morning. The agenda is posted publicly and non-SNIA members are encouraged to attend.

Also at the Symposium Monday night is a Birds of Feather (BOF) session where we will be doing a demo of CDMI and OCCI working together in a common infrastructure. There will be time for details on the implementation and discussion afterward.

Thursday morning will be a special session to update folks on the SNIA Cloud activities for the remainder of the year. Besides the in person session at the Symposium, the session will also be broadcast as an online Webinar for folks who cannot make it in person. More information and a registration link is available on the SNIA Website.

Storage Developer Conference

#alttext#
In September will be the annual Storage Developer Conference (SDC) and this year Cloud is a big part of the agenda. There will be a CDMI Plugfest throughout the week, a Cloud Hands on Lab for developers, and Cloud Tracks all week including some big cloud related keynotes. But *wait* there’s more. Following SDC at the same hotel on Thursday September 23rd will be the…

SNIA Cloud Burst Event

#alttext# This is an event that is squarely focused on Cloud Storage and brings together end users, cloud providers and storage vendors for a unique experience including demos, a showcase and in depth sessions on this part of the overall cloud industry. More information is available on the Cloud Burst page.

Storage Networking World

For the past two SNWs, there has been a Cloud Pavilion with great traffic and interest from the attendees for those that participate. At this fall’s SNW in Dallas, we will repeat this successful program with a limited number of slots. In addition we will again have a hands on lab for cloud that is always well attended (by end users only). If you are looking for a speaking opportunity, please consider being a sponsor of the cloud summit at SNW where end users come to learn about the cloud and the offerings that are available.

SNW Europe

Last year SNW Europe was a huge success for the SNIA Cloud Participants, with a year over year increase in record attendance. This year will see an increasing set of activities around the cloud, including a new Cloud Pavilion and Hands on Labs. There are a limited number of slots for these and they will sell out early. Included is an opportunity for a speaking engagement as well.

“Membership has it’s privileges”

Many of these opportunities are open only to Cloud Storage Initiative (CSI) member companies. The membership fees help to fund these activities for the members and augment the work of the volunteers with paid resources. If you can help get your company involved, please contact Marty Foltyn (marty@bitsprings.com) for more information.