Open Source software and standards can be used to complement each other, as the SNIA has realized over the last year. Late last year SNIA changed its governance documents to allow the development of software within the organization and to endorse that software with a member vote - as if it were a specification. Now the first Technical Work Group (TWG) has been formed to work on a software project inside this "Gated Community" of the SNIA.

The XAM SDK TWG

This TWG has been chartered with a number of work items that complement the development of a Fixed Content Aware Storage standard called XAM (eXtensible Access Method). XAM is a new type of storage API for applications to use. They can store data objects along with related metadata and control its lifetime through policy. Today there are only vendor specific proprietary interfaces to do this - locking application writers into a specific vendor/system. With this standard, application writers can code to a single, interoperable API and let their customers choose which fixed content system(s) to purchase.

Of course with any new standard there is a chicken and egg situation with respect to implementations. Application vendors don't want to write to an API that no vendors have implemented, and vendors don't want to implement a standard that has no users. This is where the judicious use of software can help. The SDK that this TWG is working on allows Application writers to code to the API prior to vendors having implemented it, and allows vendors to pick up a working piece of code that they can use to interface to their box as shown in the diagram below.

Above: The XAM SDK as part of the environment

I will be giving a talk on SNIA Software and the XAM SDK at Storage Networking World April 2007 with Zoran Cakeljic of EMC. If you will be in San Diego, please come listen to the talk. As shown above, an application developer can pick up the XAM Library and a reference Vendor Interface Module (VIM) that works against an existing file system (say on their laptop) and use it to create applications that use the XAM API. Since the reference VIM implements the behavior of an XSystem (the standard behavior of a fixed content device) using a filesystem, a vendor can use the appropriate pieces that he doesn't already have to interface to his device. The idea is to rapidly accelerate the adoption and maturity of this new standard. We expect most major operating systems will simply incorporate the XAM Library into the OS as yet another type of storage interface, similar to the block and file interfaces available today.