XAM – eXtensible Access Method

Today most data is created ‘fixed’ like photos, videos, emails and many other documents. The bits of this data are not changing any more. Even transactional data becomes ‘fixed’ within a short period of time – often within one week. Fixed Content data is growing by 90% year over year.

To manage this huge amount of data is not easy – especially when it needs to be retained for a long time because of business or compliance reasons. Believe it or not, in a recent SNIA survey about long term archiving requirements, over 80% of organizations reporting have a need to retain their data over 50 years and 68% report a need of over 100 years. With today’s proprietary and incompatible approaches to manage application and archiving metadata, the interpretation of the data content after such a long time would simply not be possible any more.

In order not to preserve dozens of older versions of applications, archiving tools and storage interfaces, the industry needs a way to define standardized metadata that can be understood by all types of storage management applications and the corresponding storage. This is where XAM comes in.

Let’s try to explain the need for a metadata standard with a simple example from our daily life. Without ‘metadata’ on these cans we don’t know what is in them, we don’t know what they cost, we don’t know whether the content is still edible or already expired.

But with metadata, or even better with standardized metadata agreed by all vendors, the cans look like this:

And what works for cans, works for storage – with the help of SNIA XAM. XAM specifies how the metadata are represented. Therefore XAM provides:

• Interoperability: Applications can work with any XAM conformant storage system; information can be migrated and shared
• Compliance: Integrated record retention and disposition metadata
• ILM Practices: Framework for classification, policy, and implementation
• Migration: Ability to automate migration process to maintain long-term readability
• Discovery: Application-independent structured discovery avoids application obsolescence

XAM and Cloud Storage

A major challenge of cloud storage is data classification and data migration between heterogeneous storage and application vendors in the cloud. Due to its metadata management capabilities, the XAM specification has the potential to become the next generation Data Storage Interface for Cloud Storage as well.

Read the article: XAM – the next generation API for Cloud Storage

To learn more about XAM, please go to the SNIA XAM Initiative.