Distributed Management Task Force, Inc. (DMTF), the organization bringing the IT industry together to collaborate on systems management standards development, validation, promotion and adoption, today announced the availability of two new documents produced by its Open Cloud Standards Incubator. The documents – “Use Cases and Interactions for Managing Clouds” and “Architecture for Managing Clouds” – will form the foundation for DMTF’s ongoing cloud standards work. In addition, DMTF has also launched the Cloud Management Workgroup (CMWG), to develop cloud management standards based on the recommendations outlined in the Incubator documents.

The “Use Cases and Interactions for Managing Clouds” and the “Architecture for Managing Clouds” describe how standardized interfaces and data formats can be used to manage cloud environments. Together, they provide a comprehensive overview of DMTF’s recommended use cases, interactions, data formats and overall architecture for cloud management. Moving forward, the CMWG will focus on using this information to develop a set of standards that deliver architectural semantics and implementation details to achieve interoperable management of clouds between service providers and their consumers and developers. Additional areas of emphasis within the workgroup will include creating cloud service management models and developing mappings to prevalent infrastructure models, including DMTF’s Open Virtualization Format (OVF). The CMWG will also continue collaborating with DMTF alliance partners including Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), Open Grid Forum (OGF), TeleManagement Forum (TM Forum), and Cloud Security Alliance (CSA).

“We are extremely pleased with the progress we’ve made toward our goal of enabling interoperability in the cloud computing space,” said Winston Bumpus, DMTF President. “While there are a number of cloud management protocols available in the market today, the deliverables produced by DMTF’s Open Cloud Standards Incubator are the first to provide a comprehensive, industry-backed base for interoperable cloud management solutions.”

DMTF announced the formation of the Open Cloud Standards Incubator in April 2009, to address the need for open management standards for cloud computing. Led by many key stakeholders in the cloud computing space, the Incubator developed a set of informational specifications and processes to advance the standardization of cloud management. In addition to the “Use Cases and Interactions for Managing Clouds” and “Architecture for Managing Clouds,” a whitepaper entitled “The Interoperable Cloud” is also available. Documents developed by the Incubator can be downloaded here.

About DMTF

DMTF enables more effective management of millions of IT systems worldwide by bringing the IT industry together to collaborate on the development, validation and promotion of systems management standards. The group spans the industry with 160 member companies and organizations, and more than 4,000 active participants crossing 43 countries. The DMTF board of directors is led by 15 innovative, industry-leading technology companies. They include Advanced Micro Devices (AMD); Broadcom Corporation; CA, Inc.; Cisco; Citrix Systems, Inc.; Dell; EMC; Fujitsu; HP; Hitachi, Ltd.; IBM; Intel Corporation; Microsoft Corporation; Oracle; and VMware, Inc. With this deep and broad reach, DMTF creates standards that enable interoperable IT management. DMTF management standards are critical to enabling management interoperability among multi-vendor systems, tools and solutions within the enterprise. Information about DMTF technologies and activities can be found at http://www.dmtf.org.

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