Together with our partner, TATA Consultancy Services, we recently had a great live Webcast to launch the Conformance Test Program (CTP) for the SNIA Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI). CDMI is an ISO/IEC standard that offers end users simplicity and data storage interoperability across a wide range of cloud solutions. Interoperability and portability of data stored in the cloud has become a top IT priority. The CTP tests for conformance against the specification, and provides purchasers of certified cloud storage solutions the assurance that these solutions meet CDMI interoperability standards. Our Webcast is now available on demand. It details the benefits of the CDMI CTP program and explains how any cloud storage vendor or ISV can begin the CTP process. I encourage you to check it out to learn:

• Key benefits of the CDMI standard for vendors and end users
• Growing adoption of the CDMI standard
• The suite of conformance tests required to achieve CDMI CTP certification
• How to begin the CTP process

In addition to the Webcast replay, I encourage you to check out our CDMI CTP Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ). Getting started is easy. Just fill out the CTP form and you’ll be on your way.  

In a number of recent presentations on cloud storage recently, I have started by asking the audience “how many of you use DropBox?” I have seen rooms where more than half of the hands go up. Of course, the next question I ask is “does your corporate IT department know about this?” – sheepish grins abound.

DropBox has been responsible for for a significant fraction of the growth in the number of Amazon S3 objects – that’s where the files end up when you drop them into that icon on your laptop, smartphone or tablet. However, if that file is a corporate document, who is in charge of making sure the data and its storage meets corporate policies for protection, privacy, retention and security? Nobody.

Thus there is now growing interest in bringing that data back in-house and on premise for the enterprise so that business policies for the data can be enforced. This trending meme has been termed “Enterprise Dropbox”. The basic idea is to offer the equivalent service and set of applications to allow corporate IT users to store their corporate documents where the IT department can manage them.

Is this “Private Cloud”? Well, yes in that it uses capitalized corporate storage equipment. But it also sits “at the edge” of the corporate network so as to be accessible by employees wherever they happen to be. In reality, Enterprise DropBox needs to be part of an overall Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) strategy to enable frictionless innovation and collaboration for employees.

Who are likely to be the players in this space? Virtualization vendors such as Citrix (with its ShareFile acquisition) and VMware with its Project Octopus initiative look to be first movers in this space, along with start ups such as Oxygen Cloud. It’s interesting that major storage vendors have not picked up on this as yet.

Digging into how this works, you find that every vendor has a storage cloud with an HTTP based object storage interface that is then exposed to the internet with secure protocols. Each interface is just slightly different enough that there is no interoperability. In addition, each vendor develops, maintains and distributes it own set of client “apps” for operating systems, smartphones and tablets. A key feature is integration of the authentication and authorization with the corporate LDAP directory both for security and to reduce administrative overhead. Support for quotas and department charge back is essential.

Looking down the road, however, this proliferation of proprietary clients and interfaces is already causing headaches for the poor device user, who may have several of these apps on their devices (all maxed out to their “free” limit). The burden on vendors is the development cost of creating and maintaining all those applications on all those different devices and operating systems. We’ve seen this before, however, in the early days of the Windows ecosystem. You used to have to purchase a separate FTP client for early Windows installations. Want NFS? A separate client purchase and install. Of course, now all those standard protocol clients are built into operating systems everywhere. Nobody thinks twice about it.

The same thing will eventual work its way out in the smart device category as well. But not until a standard protocol emerges that all the applications can use (such as FTP or NFS in the Windows case). The SNIA’s Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) is poised to meet this need as it’s adoption continues to accelerate. CDMI offers a RESTful HTTP object storage data path that is highly secure and has the features that corporate IT departments need in order to protect and secure data while meeting business policies. It enables each smart device to have a single embedded client to multiple clouds – both public and private. No more proliferation of little icons all going to separate clouds.

What will drive this evolution? You – the corporate customer of these vendor offerings. You can ask the Enterprise DropBox vendors simply to “show me CDMI support in your roadmap”. Educate your employees about choosing smart devices that support the CDMI standard natively. Only then will the market forces compel the vendors to realize that there is no value in locking in their customers. Instead they can differentiate on the innovation and execution that separates them from their competitors. Adoption of a standard such as CDMI will actually accelerate the growth of the entire market as the existing friction between clouds gets ground down and smoothed out by virtue of this adoption.

Validating yet another feature of the CDMI standard (see previous post for an earlier one), Amazon announced their Object Expiration feature for S3. While not a new concept for storage interfaces, it is the first cloud implementation of this capability that I know of. The idea is simply to have the server side of the cloud do object deletion on your behalf automatically, once the lifecycle of that data has completed.

As part of overall Data Lifecycle Management, object deletion is the most common terminal state for data. CDMI has standardized the interface for this capability in cloud storage with a comprehensive Retention and Hold Management feature (Chapter 17). The granularity of the standard CDMI feature is finer than that of the S3 feature in that it allows for retention and deletion on individual objects (although you could accomplish this in S3 with prefix = object name, it doesn’t scale using the header fields that Amazon uses). The S3 prefix mechanism can be used to scope the expiration policy down to individual “directories” (forward slash terminated parts of object names), and CDMI allows this also for the semantically equivalent CDMI sub-containers.

Complying with Regulations

Although the ability to delete objects when their lifecycle completes is useful, it is insufficient for complying with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, or for eDiscovery needs during litigation. For most enterprises, they need to show that the data has not been modified during its lifecycle. In addition, if a subpoena is issued for the data – you DO NOT want the object deleted, even if it’s retention period has expired – this can cost you millions of dollars in a pending court case…

The CDMI standard anticipates that storage clouds will want to offer a more robust, full featured retention and hold management for corporate data, and that a standard means of achieving it will be needed. Take a quick look at Chapter 17 (it’s quite compact while being comprehensive) and investigate using the standard way to achieve this function. If you are a cloud vendor trying to emulate the S3 interface, good luck to you – Amazon will continue to expand the definition of what “S3” means (like adding this feature), forcing you to constantly modify your cloud’s storage interface to keep up (as well as requiring you to reverse engineer any bugs that exist).

One of the features of many storage systems and even disk drives is the ability to encrypt the data at rest. This protects against a specific threat – the disk drive going out the back door for replacement or repair. So it was only a matter of time before we would see this important feature start to be offered for Cloud Storage as well. Well, today Amazon announced their Server Side Encryption capability for their S3 cloud offering. This feature was anticipated by the CDMI standard interface when it was finalized as a standard back in April 2010.

Standard Server Side Encryption

So, how does CDMI standardize this feature? Well, as usual, it starts with finding out if the cloud actually supports the feature and what choices are available. In CDMI, this is done through the capabilities resource – a kind of catalog or discovery mechanism. By fetching the capabilities resource for objects, containers, domain or queues, you can tell whether server side encryption of data at rest if available from the cloud offering (yes this is granular for a reason). The actual capability name is: cdmi_encryption (see section 12.1.3). This indicates that the cloud can do encryption for the data at rest, but also indicates what algorithms are available to do this encryption. The algorithms are expressed in the form of: ALGORITHM_MODE_KEYLENGTH, where:

• “ALGORITHM” is the encryption algorithm (e.g., “AES” or “3DES”).

• “MODE” is the mode of operation (e.g.,”XTS”, “CBC”, or “CTR”).

• “KEYLENGTH” is the key size (e.g.,”128″,”192″, “256”).

So the cloud can offer the user several different algorithms of different strengths and types, or if it only offers a single algorithm (such as the Amazon offering), the cloud storage client can at least understand what that algorithm is.

So how does the user tell the cloud that she wants her data encrypted? Amazon does this with a proprietary header of course, but CDMI does it with standard Data System Metadata that can be placed on any object, container of objects, queue or domain. This metadata is called cdmi_encryption (see section 16.4), and contains merely a string with a value chosen from the list of available algorithms in the corresponding capability. There is also a cdmi_encryption_provided metadata value to tell the client whether their data is being encrypted or not by the cloud.

Lastly, there is a system-wide capability called cdmi_security_encryption (section 12.1.1) that tells the user whether the cloud does server side encryption at all.

Server side encryption is an important capability for cloud storage offerings to provide, which is why CDMI standardized this in advance of having cloud offerings available. We expect more clouds to offer this in the future, and customers to soon realize that – without CDMI implementations, these offerings are locking them in and causing a high cost of exiting that vendor.