From The Register:
The Storage Network Industry Association (SNIA) defines cloud storage (pdf) as “the delivery of virtualised storage on demand”, or “delivery over a network of appropriately configured virtual storage and related data services, based on a request for a given service level.” Cloud storage is a fast-growing business, estimated to reach $10B by 2014 (pdf).
In addition, organisations are facing growing pressure to store information for long periods of time, generally years. Internal company requirements and compliance regulations introduced by the government such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), require companies to keep “cold” data available all the time, with special considerations for data retention, auditing and validation.
The problem is that long-term retention and archiving can be expensive. For the year 2014 it is calculated that over 1 billion diagnostic imaging procedures will be performed in the US, generating about 100PB of data1. Current backup applications are not suitable for long-term retention and archiving, since they are designed for fast recovery of data and archived data must be retained for years. …
The adoption of an industry standard for cloud storage makes the inter-cloud data migration extremely important. Each provider has its own set of interfaces to store, access, update and delete data and metadata, which means that the end user will have to rewrite the interfaces when migrating between clouds. If customers want to distribute their data across different providers, they need a set of interfaces for each one. A cloud federation approach without a standard interface seems very difficult to follow.
The SNIA’s Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) standardises the access to data in the cloud via a functional interface used by applications to create, retrieve, update and delete elements from the cloud. CDMI can be implemented on top of the provider’s own interface, enabling backwards compatibility with existing interfaces and offering a standardised access to the stored data at the same time.
