Although cloud solutions are currently enjoying intense industry hype, security concerns and other adoption challenges have slowed takeup.

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) has drafted a standard for cloud storage, which it claims will help resolve many of these challenges, and anticipates ratification in Q1 2010.

Vincent Franceschini, vice chair of SNIA said: “We have just issued specification 0.8, which is getting good feedback, and hope to have version 1.0 ready in Q1. Of course, the standard itself is not a solution per se, it is an enabler, so a lot more work will be required to ensure vendors actually adopt it. We will have a reference implementation up and running by mid-to late next year, so vendors can begin testing.”

Franceschini continued: “Currently there are demands that cloud security policies should be set far higher than those that most enterprises use day to day. This is due to a lack of trust and transparency. Solid security foundations will build more transparency and trust into the cloud storage market, which we feel is vital to its success.”

The draft standard, called draft Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI), uses metadata to manage the data within ‘containers’, which enables administrative and management applications to control data movement within systems. Authorisation and authentication in the data path of CDMI is handled using the same mechanism as in NFS, while Data System Metadata allows information to be encrypted while stored in the underlying infrastructure – an important capability in multi-tenant situations such as public clouds.

SNIA members include EMC, Hitachi, HP, Sun Microsystems and Symantec.

Meanwhile, Cisco Systems, EMC, and VMware have confirmed a joint venture into cloud computing. Called V-Block, the venture has been widely rumoured since September, and will consist of EMC storage equipment, Cisco virtualised servers and networking, and VMware's virtualization technology.