SNIA Cloud Storage: Standards and Beyond PRESENTATION TITLE GOES HERE Mark A. Carlson mac@sun.com SNIA and Sun Microsystems
Agenda What is Cloud Storage? What are some API examples De facto De jure Characteristics of Cloud Storage SNIA Standards for the Cloud 2
Who is SNIA? SNIA members connect with multiple storage industry constituencies in a collaborative environment and serve as global contributors toward the advancement of standards, education, and innovation in the storage and information management industry SNIA is a community dedicated to advancing storage and information through standards and software 3
Some basic cloud storage attributes Pay as you go Self service provisioning Rich application interfaces No need for consumers to manage their own storage By offloading the Storage Management, data owners can focus more on the management of data requirements... 4
What is Cloud Storage? Cloud Storage can be contrasted with SAN/NAS storage Both are Storage Networking Provisioning may be different (Some interfaces do not require this) How you pay for it may be different But the primary difference is that the management of the storage is done by the Cloud operator, not the storage user Public Storage Clouds Latency may be an issue for most enterprise applications Primarily aimed at web-facing applications that already serve data over the web Private Storage Clouds Can be either web-facing or used for enterprise applications Can be operated by internal IT departments driving costs down and achieving better utilizations 5
Some examples De facto and proprietary interfaces Amazon S3 (http://aws.amazon.com/s3) As simple as possible, but no simpler GoGrid (http://wiki.gogrid.com/wiki/index.php/cloud_storage) Some offer standard data path APIs, but allocation and provisioning are behind storefronts or proprietary APIs SAMBA, RSYNC, SCP standard open source De jure APIs WebDAV (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2518.txt) iscsi (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3720.txt) NFS (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3530.txt) FTP (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc959.txt) But very few of these interfaces support the use of metadata on individual data elements 6
Types of APIs Besides the Data Path APIs (previous slide), there are other interfaces that Cloud Storage may require Storage Provisioning For certain types of data storage interfaces (block, file) from the cloud you will need to provision/allocate storage before you can use it This provisioning can be done via a UI or an API SNIA does have standards already SMI-S Storage Metering Since the cloud storage paradigm is pay as you go, you need to know what your bill will be at the end of the billing cycle What operations affect my bill? UI typical, but an API standard would enable interoperability Telecom Industry Practice every transaction has a Call Detail Record that is aggregated for billing 7
Some example data storage interfaces Block Interfaces SCSI, ATA, IDE Local File Interfaces POSIX, NTFS Network File Interfaces NFS, CIFS, SMB2, Appletalk, Novell, AFS Object Based OSD, XAM Database JDBC, ODBC Not all of these make sense for the Cloud 8
XAM API: an example Data Storage Interface XAM is the first interface to standardize system metadata for retention of data XAM implements the basic capability to Read and Write Data (through Xstreams) XAM has the ability to locate any XSet with a query or by supplying the XUID XAM allows Metadata to be added to the data and keeps both in an XSet object XAM uses and produces system metadata for each XSet For example Access and Commit times (Storage System Metadata) XAM User metadata is uninterpretable by the system, but stored with the other data and is available for use in queries Given this we can see that XAM is a data storage interface that is used by both Storage and Data Services (functions) But it also uniquely specifies Data System Metadata for Retention Data Services 9
Metadata for Data Services Metadata available through the data storage interface may also be managed by data services This data service metadata can be used by data services to provide differentiated value to individual data elements The model or schema for data service metadata may be defined by each data service and may be standardized 10
Metadata and Information Services The role of metadata in information services is as a communication mechanism with the underlying storage services and data services. Information services are primarily concerned with the data service system metadata as a means to convey the data s requirements to the underlying data services. An information service may also interpret user metadata for purposes of data classification. An information service can create its own user metadata that is un-interpreted by the underlying services for its own use. 11
Lining XAM up to the Cloud Pay as you go Billing would be orthogonal to XAM API, but as XSets are created and destroyed, you would be billed accordingly Self service provisioning Just create and destroy XSets Rich application interfaces Metadata, query, import/export, etc. No need for consumers to manage their own storage Focus instead on managing the data (setting it s requirements) 12
Cloud API to the Resource Domain Model XAM and other Data Storage Interfaces that support Metadata can be used for the cloud today Nothing further is needed to be standardized in order to use XAM for a Cloud Storage API today. Applications are written to a local (Java, C, etc.) API and the Cloud vendor s VIM handles the rest. 13
Other Efforts Open Grid Forum (OGF) Object Management Group (OMG) Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) Existing SNIA Standards: SMI-S: snia.org/smi XAM: snia.org/xam 14
SNIA Cloud Storage Efforts Get Involved! http://snia.org/cloud Provisional Technical Work Group created Finalize the TWG in time for Storage Networking World (SNW) Working on Model, Taxonomy, APIs Would like to start delivering value by this summer Coordinating efforts with other groups Google Group for broader community: http://groups.google.com/group/snia-cloud/ snia-cloud@googlegroups.com Join the SNIA and participate in the TWG http://www.snia.org/member_com/join/join_now (members only sites) https://www.snia.org/apps/org/workgroup/procloudtwg/index.php 15