SNIA Europe

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About CDMI

Cloud Data Management Interface

The new Cloud Storage standard called CDMI (Cloud Data Management Interface). CDMI lets you tag your data with special metadata (data system metadata) that tells the cloud storage provider what data services to provide that data (backup, archive, encryption, etc).

These data services all add value to the data you store in the cloud and by implementing a standard interface such as CDMI, you are free to move your data from cloud vendor to cloud vendor without the pain of recoding to different interfaces.

For the latest news on SNIA Cloud activities http://www.snia.org/cloud/

Current Status: New Version of CDMI Submitted to ISO

November 2011

SNIA’s Cloud Storage Technical Work Group (TWG) has wrapped up work on a point release of CDMI (version 1.0.1) and has submitted it to ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 (JTC 1) under SNIA's new status as a Publicly Available Specification (PAS) submitter (granted in September). This update release is a SNIA Architecture standard and includes bug fixes and minor improvements including standard IETF RFC 6208 Media Types. As the CDMI specification makes its way through the JTC 1 approval process, support from European National Bodies is needed in order for CDMI to become an international standard.

The Cloud Data Management Interface defines the functional interface that applications will use to create, retrieve, update and delete data elements from the Cloud. As part of this interface the client will be able to discover the capabilities of the cloud storage offering and use this interface to manage containers and the data that is placed in them. In addition, metadata can be set on containers and their contained data elements through this interface. This interface is also used by administrative and management applications to manage data (apply software data services), containers, accounts, security access and monitoring/billing information, even for storage that is accessible by other protocols. The capabilities of the underlying storage and data services are exposed so that clients can understand the offering.

The Cloud Storage TWG is also starting to scope work for a version 1.1 of CDMI that will include a number of extensions as they are implemented by multiple vendors. For more information about this topic go to http://www.snia.org/cloud/newcontent.

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