The first cloud storage standard released

Recently, the Network Storage Industry Association (SNIA) officially released its first cloud storage standard, which provides access to cloud storage and management cloud Data management Interface (CDMI). This cloud storage is not only defined as a service way to provide virtual storage on demand on the network, but also as a service for data storage. Customers can pay according to the actual storage capacity. This is both simple and practical. However, the definition of cloud storage is not casual, snia that any way to provide storage based on fixed capacity increases is not cloud storage. The Cloud data management interface supports both blocks (logical unit numbers or virtual volumes) and files (through a common Internet file system, a network file system, or a file system accessed by WebDAV) to store clients. The underlying storage space for blocks and files is abstracted into wrappers.

However, it 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.

"Because of the rapid pace of innovation in this field, we'd better wait for this type of cloud storage to develop further, rather than immediately standardize the functional interface of the storage," says SNIa. "

There is also a fourth storage abstraction, which is the abstraction of objects. 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.

The SNIa Storage industry Resource domain model (Sirdm--snia prefers acronyms) 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.

CDMI 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.

SNIa is fast on the development of this standard. We can imagine that many cloud storage products will soon comply with CDMI.

CDMI does not provide a way to measure the quality of cloud storage providers through reliability and quality. It does not prevent the risk of data loss like the Microsoft System.

However, SNIa should help customers switch from cloud storage providers adhering to CDMI to other providers. SNIa does not stipulate how members should provide quality of service to their customers. SNIa is an industry association whose purpose is to facilitate collaboration among members so that customers can use the products of different SNIa members and switch between them as needed.

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