News
SNIA Europe Participates in the FP7 VISION Cloud Project to Promote Open Standards
December 2010 by Marc Jacob
The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) Europe announces it is actively participating in the VISION Cloud project to help facilitate the adoption of open technology standards to make cloud storage and cloud applications accessible to organisations. Funded in part by the European Union and running until 2013, this project has already gathered the support of several industry innovators among which are France Telecom, IBM Israel, Telefonica I+D, Siemens AG, RAI-Radiotelevisione Italiana, SAP AG, Deutsche Welle, and the Swedish Institute of Computer Science.
The primary deliverables of VISION Cloud will be an architecture and a reference implementation of a cloud-based infrastructure, built on open standards and new technologies, to provide a scalable, flexible and dependable framework for optimised delivery of data-intensive storage services. The intention of this project is to demonstrate how this VISION Cloud infrastructure — where an object data model, computational storage, content-centric access, comprehensive data interoperability, and QoS and security guarantees play a central role — supports new emerging telco/media services and healthcare and business software use cases while achieving significant and quantifiable improvements in service delivery productivity, quality, availability, reliability and cost.
“To have the EU recognise the potential of cloud computing and endorse it to this extent is a very significant step for this technology and as the main source of vendor-neutral education around data storage and related technologies we see our involvement in the VISION Cloud project as key to our strategy,” said Daniel Sazbon, SNIA Europe Board Member and participant to the project. “The cloud approach is revolutionising the industry and has already widened the user base of a number of technologies that were traditionally accessible only to end users with substantial IT budgets. VISION Cloud will further accelerate its adoption.”
SNIA Europe’s cloud activities focus on industry-wide collaboration, and seek to facilitate the adoption of cloud storage environments by promoting standardised interfaces. Storage clouds combine existing technologies and concepts such as on-demand provisioning of services and virtualisation of digital assets to better address business needs. Employing a tiered storage model, they offer maximum flexibility and utilisation of resources for online, backup/restore, disaster recovery, and archiving storage. This helps lower enterprise capital expenditure, streamline internal processes and facilitate IT management.
The tiered approach and concepts like public, private, or hybrid clouds show the multiple facets of the cloud. Due to its inherent complexity, this architecture requires additional industry guidance and a technological and operational change in the way users leverage IT services. SNIA Europe enables this change by offering educational material and evangelising open cloud standards:
– SNIA Cloud Storage Initiative was created to support the growth and success of the cloud storage market by educating the vendor and user communities and by streamlining all cloud-related industry efforts.
– SNIA Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) enables metadata attribution and data portability across different cloud structures while helping cloud service users, providers and brokers define and fulfill cloud-related service levels and is the industry’s first open interface for cloud management.
