Wayne Adams from SNIA
October 17, 2012, Storage Network Industry Association, Santa Clara, CA—We met with Wayne Adams, the chairman of the SNIA, to talk about his organization. In addition to working on standards and training certification programs, they also are the hosts for number of storage-related shows, such as Storage Network World and the Storage Developers Conference.
The changing technologies in areas like nonvolatile memory are shifting system performance bottlenecks from the storage subsystem to the network. The change in the I/O stacks also contributes to changing performance expectations throughout the data center. Part of their charter is to develop standards for object store and metadata, as well as open stack to enhance cloud storage capabilities.
The organization is announcing some new partnerships and greater acceptance of their standards. The Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) specification has been designated an International Standard (IS) by the Joint Technical Committee 1 (JTC 1), a joint effort of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). The joint technical committee is tasked with standardization in the field of Information Technology. This open standard was specifically for data storage as a service as part of cloud computing, The specification has been designated ISO/IEC 17826.
The use of the CDMI standard by cloud computing and cloud storage providers allows interoperability and portability between service providers. Based on a RESTful HTTP protocol, CDMI provides both a data path and control path for cloud storage. It standardizes a common interoperable data exchange format for securely moving data and its associated data requirements from cloud to cloud. The standard is applicable to public, private, and hybrid deployment models for storage clouds.
Also, they announced the availability of the Conformance Testing Program (SNIA-CTP) for the Storage Management Initiative Specification version 1.5 (SMI-S v1.5). The standard introduces enhancements and expanded storage functionality tests, including testing for thin provisioning functionality, component diagnostics, and remote storage replication. The test is designed to validate array, fabric and host SMI-S implementations for interoperability and conformance to the SMI-S.
In another area, the LTFS specification is moving into the SNIA in a new technical working group for eventual national and international accreditation. This initiative will bring one more layer of storage under the SNIA’s umbrella, and will provide coverage for all possible storage types in the data center. The Linear Tape File Structure is still getting attention from its founders and is growing in the marketplace.
For storage requirements that need faster interfaces than those available from SAS or SATA, the organization is working on the NVM specification. This spec takes an interface from the operating system infrastructure and adapts it to storage requirements. The interface uses the PCIe hardware specifications plus some enhancements for storage functions. The new standard is not a part of PCI-SIG or PCI-IF.
