SunGard Availability Services has joined the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) Open Cloud Standards Incubator Leadership Board to help address the need for open management standards and interoperability for cloud computing. As a member of the Open Cloud Standards Incubator Leadership Board, SunGard will contribute its expertise in information availability and recovery issues, and contribute to the development of emerging cloud computing standards.

"As organizations embrace cloud-based models, they will plan, design and build IT services very differently - and need to account for these changes in the way that they architect to meet their uptime, continuity and resiliency objectives," said Winston Bumpus, DMTF president. "We're pleased to add SunGard to the leadership of our Open Cloud Standards Incubator and look forward to the contributions they will make in helping DMTF address information availability and recovery in our standards initiative."

While there is a proverbial ‘alphabet soup’ of standards bodies attempting to grapple with virtualization and cloud computing standards, DMTF has exhibited proven results, such as the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) standard and the Virtualization Management (VMAN) initiative, while also fostering agreement across multiple companies with diverse interests.

Also important to SunGard in joining DMTF was being able to contribute to the OVF standard that provides an open packaging and distribution format for virtual machines, which will help foster an ecosystem of interoperable cloud computing services.

"As an integrator of technologies, SunGard, in the past, has shied away from actively participating in standards development," said Don Norbeck, technology officer for virtualization, cloud computing and product strategy at SunGard Availability Services. "However, the promise of virtualization services, rapid emergence of cloud computing models and respected status of DMTF presents a unique opportunity. SunGard looks forward to participating in the development of cloud computing interoperability standards which will have a profound effect on the way IT infrastructures and services are developed and consumed for years to come."

SunGard joins other industry heavyweights participating in the DMTF of Open Cloud Standards Incubator Leadership Board such as AMD, Cisco, Citrix, EMC, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Novell, Rackspace, RedHat, Savvis, Sun Microsystems and VMware.

No specific standards currently exist for enabling interoperability between private clouds within enterprises and hosted or public cloud providers. DMTF has formed an Open Cloud Standards Incubator to focus on addressing these issues by developing cloud resource management protocols, packaging formats and security mechanisms to facilitate interoperability.

www.availability.sungard.com
www.dmtf.org/

•Date: 30th July 2009• Region: World •Type: Article •Topic: BC markets
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