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Distributed Management Task Force focuses on cloud standards


By David Worthington
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April 29, 2009 —  The Distributed Management Task Force, an industry consortium, is corralling its members into a new working group established to set standards for cloud computing.

On Monday, the DMTF announced the formation of the Open Cloud Standards Incubator group. The group will focus its efforts on the infrastructure as a service cloud category and will have three main goals, said Winston Bumpus, organization’s president.

Its first goal is to complete work on the Open Virtualization Format, which is being drafted by the DMTF under its Virtualization Management Initiative. OVF is a key building block for cloud interoperability, and may require extensions for cloud environments, Bumpus said.

"Standards for cloud computing are an essential part of the cloud computing story, but are not without challenges," said ZapThink principal analyst Jason Bloomberg. "Cloud computing takes virtualization to multiple levels, including data exchange, but also ranging across operating system functionality, application functionality, as well as service interfaces."

Secondly, the working group will create cloud APIs and protocols for resource management so that cloud computing resources may be managed like the rest of an organization's IT infrastructure, Bumpus said. Quality-of-service policy management will be included in this effort.

Security is the final area of interest, but the DMTF does not anticipate the creation of any new standards, said Bumpus. Rather, it intends to make formal recommendations of technologies and best practices for workflow trust and other security issues, he explained.

The technical challenges standing in the way of interoperability in cloud computing are so complex that "no single organization will be likely to straighten out in the next year or two," Bloomberg noted.

The Open Cloud Standards Incubator working group's current members are AMD, Cisco, Citrix, EMC, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Novell, Red Hat, Savvis and Sun Microsystems. More cloud vendors are likely to participate as time goes on, Bumpus noted.

The DMTF permits one vote per company, and spokesperson Rachel Shaver said that the consortium is not aware of any changes in Sun's participation post acquisition. Oracle announced that it was buying Sun on April 20.

"What we're seeing now are some early efforts that predictably suffer from the multiple agendas that the various participants bring to the table. I wouldn't hold my breath that effective cloud computing standards would be available any time soon," said Bloomberg.

The DMTF's one-vote/one-company premise means that companies will come to the table and make pragmatic decisions about what is best for them, Bumpus said. He expects broad input from stakeholders and predicted that a consensus would be reached on a cloud ecosystem that everyone wants to support. Once that is done, companies will compete on functionality, performance and reliability, he noted.

"Historically, the result at the end of the day is better than any one individual company's submission," Bumpus concluded.




Related Search Term(s): cloud computing, DMTF


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