On July 24, 2013, at the Distributed Management Task Force’s (DMTF’s) co-located Alliance Partner Technical Symposium and Management Developers Conference events, DMTF and the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) successfully demonstrated interoperable cloud management utilizing three existing cloud standards simultaneously. For the first time, the DMTF’s Cloud Infrastructure Management Interface (CIMI) and Open Virtual Format (OVF), an ISO standard, and SNIA’s Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI), also an ISO standard, were shown in multi-vendor implementations. This was part of a series of Cloud Plugfests, the next of which will take place during Cloud Interoperability Week, being held September 16-20, 2013, in Madrid, Spain, and simultaneously in the U.S. in Santa Clara, Calif.

With the rapid growth of cloud services and products in the IT market, the need to more effectively manage multiple cloud services and products from multiple vendors is increasing. Cloud standard specifications, including OVF, CDMI, and CIMI, offer consumers vendor-independent, interoperable management for real world implementations.

The demonstrations showed two scenarios/use cases that help to manage multiple cloud infrastructures with standard APIs and standard formats. The first scenario involved importing a virtual system to multiple cloud infrastructures using OVF and CDMI. This enables customers of cloud infrastructures to reduce costs when managing multiple cloud infrastructures, since the same OVF file can be used to deploy a system in a multiple cloud platforms.

The second scenario showed managing multiple cloud infrastructures with a standard API. In the demonstration, a single client managing these different cloud infrastructures used a single standard API - CIMI. This reduces both initial cost and operational cost to use different clients with different APIs to manage various cloud infrastructures.

The demonstration was prepared in the DMTF Virtual Cloud Management Forum (VCMF). Companies participating in this demonstration included France Telecom Orange, Fujitsu Limited, Oracle Corporation and VMware, Inc.

For more information, visit http://dmtf.org/standards/cloud.