PHOENIX — (BUSINESS WIRE) — April 6, 2004 — The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) announced today it has achieved a major milestone -- the Object-based Storage Device (OSD) specification version 1.0 has completed a Letter Ballot in the InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) T10 Technical Committee.

The OSD specification enables a new class of shared storage systems that incorporates intelligent space management at the device level to deliver enhanced performance and manageability gains.

"We are pleased to announce that the INCITS T10 Technical Committee has voted in favor of forwarding the OSD specification for the first public review. This is a major step toward OSD becoming the 10th family of SCSI commands, a peer to the widely used command sets for disk drives (the SCSI Block Commands) and tape drives (the SCSI Stream Commands)," said Michael Mesnier, co-chair of the SNIA OSD Technical Work Group (TWG) and storage architect at Intel. "The OSD TWG will continue to work with the INCITS T10 Technical Committee to complete the current specification and advance the specification with additional functionality."

About the Object-Based Storage Device Specification

The OSD specification is based on an architecture of data objects -- containers that house both application data and an extensible set of storage attributes. These objects can be used to store a variety of data, including files, database records and e-mail. The combination of data and attributes allows an object storage system to make decisions on data layout or quality of service on a per-object basis, improving performance, flexibility and manageability.

The device that stores, retrieves and interprets these objects is an object store, or an Object-based Storage Device, in SCSI terms. This unique architecture transfers the low-level storage functions of file systems and databases into the storage devices, adding significantly to the traditional block-based interface. New storage systems enabled by the OSD specification will offer more scalable, secure and cross-platform data sharing. The systems also will benefit from intelligent, low-level optimizations in the storage device, such as delayed allocation of data on the storage media, data aware caching and data pre-fetching.

Julian Satran, co-chair of the SNIA OSD Technical Work Group and distinguished engineer at IBM, said: "The OSD 1.0 specification is the first significant step of a long-term roadmap planned for OSD. There are important extensions planned in the areas of information lifecycle management and quality-of-service attributes which expand the range of applications that the OSD can address. In addition, the SNIA has set a goal that all new storage networking products will utilize the SMI-S management standard in 2005. The OSD TWG has committed to making this SNIA goal a reality in the next version of the OSD specification."

Ultimately, storage systems based on the OSD specification can be created with the following characteristics:

• Robust, shared access by multiple clients
• Scalable performance via an offloaded data path
• Strong, fine-grained, end-to-end security

These capabilities are desirable for a variety of IT storage applications. In particular, enterprise and scientific applications that generate high levels of concurrent read/write access to shared files (e.g., file systems and databases) will benefit from the scalability of OSD; applications with a demand for data security will benefit from capability-based authorization of individual I/O requests; and general storage applications can more easily share data, given that details of the underlying storage hardware are abstracted at a higher level than current block devices.

Garth Gibson, member of the SNIA Technical Council, founding member of the NSIC NASD Work Group and CTO of Panasas, said: "A broad set of storage experts have been collaborating over the last several years to define OSD. This work builds upon and extends concepts from the Network Attached Storage Devices (NASD) project of the National Storage Industry Consortium (NSIC), the Network Attached Secure Disk (NASD) project at Carnegie Mellon University, as well as several academic and corporate research projects including those at IBM Research, Seagate Research and the University of California at Santa Cruz, and the University of Minnesota."

More than 25 storage vendors and individual contributors are working together to advance the storage industry toward a new multi-vendor storage device interface via their participation in the OSD TWG. Active work group members include HP, IBM, Intel, Lingua Data, Panasas, Seagate, Veritas and Xyratex.

The specification is available for public inspection at http://www.t10.org.

About the Object-Based Storage Device Technical Working Group

The SNIA Object-Based Storage Device Technical Working Group (OSD TWG) is creating a new interface standard for storage devices. The OSD specification enables the creation of self-managed, heterogeneous, shared storage for storage networks. The specification is focused on moving low-level space management and security functions into the storage device itself, allowing applications to access the device through a standard object interface. The group plans to extend their work based on further input from member companies, users and academics within the SNIA OSD TWG and work closely with the INCITS T10 Technical Committee to standardize the resulting specifications. For further information, visit the website at http://www.snia.org/tech_activities/workgroups/osd.

About the SNIA

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is a not-for-profit organization, made up of more than 300 companies and individuals spanning virtually the entire storage industry. SNIA members share a common goal, to advance the adoption of storage networks as complete and trusted solutions. To this end, the SNIA is uniquely committed to delivering standards, education and services that will propel open storage networking solutions into the broader market. For information, visit the SNIA Web site at http://www.snia.org.