Management Monogatari: Tales of Resource Management from Mark A. Carlson

SNIA announced the formation of the new Cloud Storage Technical Work Group. SNIA has a long history of standardizing interoperable interfaces for storage networking, and cloud storage is really just the next step in networked storage.

There are several example use cases for cloud storage, including:

Store my file and give me back a URL (i.e. Amazon S3)

Best Effort Quality of Service?

Provision a filesystem and mount it (i.e. WebDAV)

Quality of Service specification via provisioning interface

Give me Filesystems/LUNs for my Cloud Computing

NAS box in the cloud…

Store my backup files until I need them back

Maybe offer me a local cache as well

Archive my files in the Cloud for Preservation/Compliance

Maybe offer me eDiscovery services, “tape in the mail” retrieval

Store all my files, allowing me to set the Data Requirements, let me cache and distribute geographically

Policy driven Data Services based on Data System Metadata markings

One of the immediate needs that the TWG hopes to address is a reference model and some common terminology just to sort out all the uses of cloud storage. This work is targeted to be available in draft form this summer. Based on that common understanding, the group may also start to develop standard interfaces, but will not likely get out in front of actual deployments. The best standards are driven by requirements derived from actual customer pain points. Only when multiple vendors have a common set of capabilities, does it make sense to standardize the interoperability between them. Sun is one of the foundational members of this new TWG, and I am looking forward to some exciting technical activities in the weeks and months ahead.