NetApp - Standards Watch

Rapid Progress on Cloud Storage Standards

A couple of months ago, I blogged about the creation of the SNIA Cloud Storage TWG, a technical working group with broad vendor support and an aggressive agenda.  The work items initially defined for the group included:

·      A cloud storage taxonomy

·      Use cases for cloud storage

·      A cloud storage reference model

·      SNIA Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI)

·      A CDMI reference implementation

The group has already made significant progress on the first three items.  A first set of definitions has been submitted for the next update to the SNIA Dictionary; and last week the group released initial drafts of the Use Case and the Reference Model documents for public review.  Non SNIA members can review and comment on the documents on Google Groups.

I’d recommend that anyone interested in cloud storage should check out these documents and get into the discussion.

NFS, VMware and Vendor Collaboration

Back in February I blogged about an awesome post focused on iSCSI in VMware environments

The post was a great example of multivendor co-operation with a view to helping their mutual customers.  In that case the vendors involved included EMC, VMware, NetApp, Dell and HP.

Three of those vendors (EMC, NetApp and VMware) have followed up with another excellent and informative multivendor post to help their mutual NFS customers using VMware.   – which I strongly encouraged you to check out, particularly if you are running an IT shop and are keen to implement a virtual server environment. It's great stuff!

My other motivation for blogging about this, though, is to dispel the overwhelmingly negative perception of vendor-to-vendor interaction that you can easily get from all the attack blogs that seem to infest the blogsphere. I've had lots of IT folks tell me that's the reason they don't read blogs.

In my world of industry standards and industry associations, collaboration is the norm, the only road to success, and something that happens every day. I guess the problem is that it's not quite as entertaining as a good food fight.

T11 Completes Work on FCoE Protocol Spec

At the T11 face-to-face meeting this week in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, the FC-BB5 working group resolved the last few technical issues and voted to approve FC-BB5 (which contains the FCoE specification).  Following the affirmation of the vote by the entire T11 body at their plenary session, the FCoE spec will be forwarded to ANSI/INCITS for publication. 

This marks the completion of a very aggressive development schedule during which the T11 doubled the frequency of its meetings in order to deliver the specification on time.  The other notable  feature of this development effort was a real drive to reach compromises and find the middle ground in deciding between various competing proposals. Kudos to everyone in who participated.

Look for a release from the Fibre Channel Industry Association on the achievement.