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Cloud Computing: New Standard for Interoperable Storage
Cloud computing offers benefits of cost and convenience, but one problem frequently cited is the difficultly of being able to interoperate with data stored in the cloud among different cloud service providers and storage vendors. A new specification is now available that tries to solve that problem. It’s called CDMI (Cloud Data Management Interface) and it was developed by the SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association). Cloud Computing is still in its infancy, and CDMI would be the first industry-developed open standard for cloud computing. The guidelines are applicable to public, private or hybrid cloud storage.
CDMI metadata defines things like how long the data should be retained and whether or not multiple copies of the data are needed or whether it should be distributed geographically. The metadata will allow the discovery of cloud data information. The specification does not explicitly address security but it can be used to identify security capabilities of a cloud storage environment.
An unfortunate aspect of CDMI is that a vendor does not need to implement the complete specification to be compliant, vendors can pick and choose. While that may be great for vendors and also is a way to speed up the by-committee agreement of the specification, it can make things confusing for customers. Customers will need to read their contracts carefully.
SNIA said that “the majority of existing cloud storage offerings today will likely be able to implement the interface,” but because CDMI is based around the REST standard for Web services, Amazon’s S3 storage system, for example, which is an example of a cloud storage service using SOAP, would need some work to make it ready for CDMI.
CDMI was architected by the SNIA Cloud Storage Technical Working Group (TWG), a group of about 180 individual members representing about 60 organizations. Discussions around the CDMI standard have been going on for about one year.
