Vendors Want Open Standards For Cloud Computing

The Distributed Management Task Force is creating a group that will look at the need for open management standards for cloud computing.

The group—called the Open Cloud Standards Incubator—will develop a set of informational specifications for cloud resource management that should lead to the eventual adoption of standards, according to the task force, which announced the group this week.

Of specific interest is creating specifications that can facilitate interoperability of operations between private and public cloud environments.

Pat Patla, general manager and vice president of Advanced Micro Devices’ Server and Workstation business and a member of the DMTF board, said open standards that help businesses manage heterogeneous cloud resources and create interoperability between cloud environments will help drive the adoption of cloud computing technology.

“IT customers consistently tell us that, while they like to take advantage of new technologies to benefit their companies, they also need to contain data center management complexity and IT costs,” Patla said in a statement. “By supporting industry standards for systems management and interoperability, we can better deliver on this goal of making critical IT technologies like cloud computing simpler and more cost-effective to deploy and maintain.”

Cloud computing is a popular buzzword in the industry, and analysts say the technology is more than just hype. In a recent statement, research firm IDC said that global spending on cloud services will grow to $42 billion (£29bn) by 2012, with a key driver being the need to cut IT costs.

There also is a push among vendors, such as Opalis Software, to offer products that let enterprises move easily between public and private clouds.

However, DMTF members – from vendors such as AMD, Intel, Novell, Red Hat, Microsoft, IBM and HP – say there are no current standards that enable easy interoperability between private and public clouds, such as those operated by Amazon.com and Google. The Open Cloud Standards Incubator will deal with those issues by creating cloud resource management protocols, packaging formats and security mechanisms, they said.

“Cloud computing will have a major impact on IT management,” DMTF President Winston Bumpus said in a statement.

Bumpus said the DMTF group is the best environment in which to create the standards needed in this area.

The Open Cloud Standards Incubator is part of the task force’s Standards Incubation process, which is designed to bring together DMTF members who then create informational specifications that can eventually be quickly run through the standards development process