NetApp Throws Weight Behind Cloud Storage Standard
August 9, 2012
Grazed from ITBusinessEdge. Author: Michael Vizard.
Nobody likes to find themselves locked into a particular vendor, and that’s doubly true when it comes to cloud computing.
The standard that is supposed to prevent that from happening from a storage perspective is the Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) developed by the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA). CDMI addresses the way applications create, retrieve, update and delete data elements from the cloud.
NetApp adds support to CDMI with the 9.0 release of StorageGRID, software that is specifically designed to manage hundreds of petabytes spread out across billions of records stored in hundreds of sites in a single name space…
According to Richard Treadway, director of product marketing at NetApp, one of the nuances of Big Data that most IT organizations don’t appreciate yet is that it comes in multiple forms. The most difficult to manage is massive data sets that are distributed across multiple locations, says Treadway.
As one of the first vendors to formally support CDMI, Treadway says that NetApp has more to gain than lose from supporting open standards. By ensuring that data stored in its systems is accessible via CDMI, IT organizations can more easily switch to NetApp storage systems if they so choose.
The storage wars in the cloud are just beginning. As CDMI matures, IT organizations should find that they will gain a level of control over cloud storage that right now is a critically important capability missing in the cloud.