SNIA Updates
April 23, 2014, Data Storage Innovation Conference, Santa Clara, CA—Wayne Adams and David Dale from the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) provided an update on the association’s latest activities. The organization continues to provide leadership and guidance to the storage industry.
Among their latest achievements are a cloud interoperability conformance test program to complement the cloud data management interface (CDMI). A performance test program, which includes SNIA test profiles for storage and data services management tools, is applied to a target system to validate conformance to the IEC/ISO standards. The need for interoperability confirmation is growing very quickly, as companies move more functions to the cloud and need to verify that their data are useable on other platforms.
Certifications for equipment interoperability will be offered through approved testing services. The first provider for testing services is Tata Consultancy Services. SNIA is scheduling plug-fests and other compatibility checks for the interoperability standards. A number of vendors from both commercial and open-source organizations have announced CDMI equipment and others are moving to announce soon.
The conformance test program is modular and open. The license is based on RAND so users are not compelled to provide changes to the code base, although the organization would not object to any participation and inputs to the test suites. The ability to test for cloud interoperability is supported with an SDK and a reference implementation in BSD.
Some of the technical committees are looking at an open stack interface and may include some other de facto interfaces to make the interoperability functions more widely available. One addition will be an LTFS format in the cloud. LTFS recently received ISO accreditation as a file format, so providing that format as an interoperable function to cloud-based users will become more important.
Earlier this year, SNIA and the SSIF (Storage Security Industry Forum) released a KMIP (Key Management Interoperability Protocol) test program. The test suites and protocols provide conformance testing for KMIP usage profiles and interoperable, secure solutions. The KMIP specification is defined by OASIS (The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards). A number of vendors have announced efforts to meet the specifications and the test programs, and expect to deliver first results soon.
