SNIA NDMP Software Approved

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), announced the effort to produce Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP) Software has culminated in the membership approval for its public release. At the 2009 Storage Developer Conference, the Association has also detailed its significant progress with the eXtensible Access Method (XAM) Software Development Kit (SDK) and the new Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) software effort for cloud storage.

"Over the past year, we have made great progress across each of our software development efforts and we now have sustained momentum from our global membership to contribute to and use the software from these technical programs," said Mark Carlson, SNIA Technical Council Member. "SNIA Technical Work Groups and the software development processes encompass continuous testing, implementation plugfests, hands-on demonstrations and in-depth code reviews to achieve adoption and quality of the standards and software. The combination of these software activities and the public availability of the software contributes to consistent implementation of SNIA standards, shorter times to market as part of commercial vendor offerings and improved interoperability amongst the industry offerings."

The first software to be approved by the SNIA membership for public use is the Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP) Software, which has been developed by the SNIA NDMP Software Technical Work Group. NDMP is a standard protocol for managing backup and restore of Network Attached Storage (NAS) file servers and appliances. The NDMP software has progressed through the in–depth peer review process, the Intellectual Property review and several interoperability testing activities. The SNIA NDMP Software implements the Version 4 NDMP industry standard for network–based backup of file servers. The software can be downloaded for free.

The draft release of the XAM SDK, which implements the XAM V1.0.1 specification is available for free download . This SDK provides Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), storage vendors, operating system vendors and in–house development teams the software libraries and tools they need to develop and test the XAM V1.0.1 specification, which has been submitted to INCITS for ANSI and ISO accreditation. XAM is suited for a wide range of applications including digital preservation, electronic health records and patient health images and e–discovery.

The SNIA has launched the development of a software reference implementation for the SNIA Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI). A draft release is available for download on the SNIA Cloud Storage. The SNIA CDMI, based on the SNIA Information Resource Domain model, is an application interface to create, retrieve, update and delete data elements to and from the cloud. CDMI is suited for both public and private clouds, and can overlay existing cloud interfaces without compromising features or performance.

John Webster, principal analyst at Illuminata added: “I’ve seen the SNIA has taken some of its best practices from its specification and standards development efforts and applied them to software in a very wise way. The industry will benefit greatly if the SNIA is able to work across its membership to provide the building block software to help with data management and cloud storage.”