First cloud storage is born, who will be the big winner

The first cloud storage standard--Cloud data Management Interface (CDMI)--was unveiled at the SNW Spring Festival Convention on April 12, 2010 at the official website of the American Network Storage Industry Association (SNIA). The birth of the first ever cloud storage standard, it was born, without a doubt, that the storage vendors and business users are excited by the expectation that cloud storage will solve the current storage dilemma.

Before, SNIa in order to avoid end user confusion, the industry is too dispersed and some of the market growth momentum of some related losses, as early as the first half of 2009 began brewing cloud storage standards, now, just over a year's time. has been released publicly. The SNIa has been very fast in the development of this standard, and it is obvious that members of the association are also in urgent need of cloud storage standards. At the same time, the IDC survey data showed that in 2013, cloud storage services grew more than all other it cloud services. Over the next four years, the market for cloud services will grow from $17.4 billion trillion today to $44.2 billion trillion, with the market share of cloud storage growing from 9% to 14%, meaning that the market for cloud storage will be close to $6.2 billion trillion.

SNIa announces first cloud storage standard CDMI specification

SNIa said the CDMI, just announced, is a direct specification that allows most old non-cloud storage product access to evolve into cloud storage access. It provides a way for the data center to take advantage of cloud storage. Data center access to existing networked storage resources should be able to switch fairly easily and transparently to CDMI cloud storage resources.

The CDMI specification provides a way to access cloud storage and manage cloud storage data, while supporting blocks (logical unit numbers or virtual volumes) and files (file systems accessed through a common Internet File system, network File system, or WebDAV) to store clients. The underlying storage space for blocks and files is abstracted into wrappers.

However, the CDMI specification can also be abstracted into simple table storage space for database operations. The focus here is scalability, not functionality. CDMI is not based on a virtualized association table (RDBMS) instance. Each RDBMS has its own proprietary interface, and CDMI does not even provide access to the virtual RDBMS in the cloud. SNIa explains: "Because of the speed of innovation in this field, we'd better wait for this type of cloud storage to evolve, rather than immediately standardize the functional interface of the storage." ”

In addition, cdmi the object as a unique project that can be accessed through a URI (Uniform Resource ID). SNIa indicates that a data object is considered an independent resource that can be created, searched, updated, and deleted (crud--the acronym for the above operation). With objects, wrappers can encapsulate other wrappers. More precisely, CDMI defines the functional interface that the application will use to create, search, update, and delete data components in the cloud. The client will be able to discover the functionality of the cloud storage service and use CDMI to manage the wrapper and its data. In addition, metadata can be set on wrappers and their data components through the CDMI interface.

CDMI can also be used in administrative and management applications to manage wrappers, accounts, secure access and monitoring/billing information, and even to other stores accessed by other familiar protocols such as SANS (storage lan), NAS (network-attached storage), FTP, WebDAV, and HTTP /rest. Clients can see the functionality of the underlying storage and data services, so clients can understand this cloud service.

The SNIa Storage industry Resource Domain model (SIRDM) also provides a framework for handling cloud metadata. Metadata can be a detailed indication of how the data in the store is managed in the cloud.

At the same time, CDMI also defines the concept of cloud storage, which is a service way to provide virtual storage on-demand on the network, also known as the data store as a service (DaaS), and the customer pays the cost according to the actual storage capacity. SNIa also warns users that any way to provide storage based on fixed capacity increases is not cloud storage.

However, the slight disadvantage of the CDMI specification is that it does not provide a way to measure the quality of the cloud storage provider through reliability and quality, so it cannot absolutely prevent the existence of such risks as data loss. Of course, we can not be too demanding, snia after all is just an industry association, its purpose is to promote collaboration among members, so that customers can use different SNIa members of the product and as needed to switch between these products. It also has no right to stipulate that members must provide service quality assurance to their clients. However, it is foreseeable that SNIa should help customers switch from cloud storage providers adhering to CDMI to other providers.