Consortium tackles cloud computing standards

Everyone's talking about building a cloud these days. But if the IT world is filled with computing clouds, will each one be treated like a separate island or will open standards allow all to interoperate with each other?

That's one of the questions being examined by the Open Cloud Consortium (OCC), a newly formed group of universities that is both trying to improve the performance of storage and computing clouds spread across geographically disparate data centers and promote open frameworks that will let clouds operated by different entities work seamlessly together.

Cloud is certainly one of the most used buzzwords in IT today, and marketing hype from vendors can at times obscure the real technical issues being addressed by researchers such as those in the Open Cloud Consortium.

"There's so much noise in the space that it's hard to have technical discussions sometimes," says Robert Grossman, chairman of the Open Cloud Consortium and director of the Laboratory for Advanced Computing (LAC) and the National Center for Data Mining (NCDM) at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Say you're running an application with one cloud provider, such as Amazon's EC2 service, and want to switch to another one. "Our goal would be that you would not have to rewrite that application if you shifted the provider of cloud services," Grossman says.

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