Hot-Button Issues
Cloud computing and green IT are two of the hottest IT areas and two hotbeds of standards angst. The cry for cloud computing standards in particular has reached a fever pitch in recent weeks since a group of vendors released the Open Cloud Manifesto, an outline of core principles intended to boost interoperability among various cloud computing technologies.
Critics charged that IBM and other vendors developed the manifesto behind closed doors and then tried to foist it on the industry. Microsoft, which said it agreed in principle with most of the manifesto, was nonetheless disturbed by the lack of openness in the process (the irony isn't lost on us) and called for more open discussion. Amazon.com's response was more measured, noting that the company has offered Amazon Web Services APIs in various languages and formats based on customer demand.
People should calm down. Frankly, the manifesto was simply a statement of intent with a diverse set of backers, including AT&T, F5 Networks, Hyperic, IBM, and SAP. What isn't clear to us is whether cloud computing standards are necessary.
That's not to say we don't need specs for the technologies that keep clouds aloft. Some standards work for virtualization, for instance, already has been completed. The Distributed Management Task Force announced in March the Open Virtualization format, which standardizes the virtual machine file format and schema description and is backed by VMware and Citrix Systems. Microsoft says it will support the spec in Hyper-V but hasn't provided a timeline.
In the green IT market, Cisco came under fire for not taking EnergyWise--its program for monitoring, managing, and reducing power consumption that it says was three years in the making--to a standards group. The company counters that when it started on EnergyWise, the goal was simply to manage the power consumption of Power over Ethernet devices, but over time the scope broadened to include more devices, data gathering, and management.
What Cisco ended up with wasn't what it started with, says Hugh Barrass, a Cisco technologist responsible for standards, who adds that the vendor has every intention of submitting the EnergyWise work to a standards body. "Digging in our heels isn't beneficial to anyone," Barrass says. "What we learn from EnergyWise implementations we will take to the standards bodies to create effective standards."
Competitors counter that Cisco's aim was to get a jump on everyone else--there are few green IT standards on the table, outside of the IEEE 802.3az Energy Efficient Ethernet task group, which doesn't seem to be gaining much traction. And in fact, Cisco does benefit from being first out, if for nothing else than bragging rights if EnergyWise proves successful.
Gray Areas
Standards bodies aren't a panacea. Some specs designed from the ground up in these groups are still incomplete. 802.1X, which was ratified in 2001, defines host authentication to authorize use of a port. Unfortunately, the spec defined port use as all or nothing, either open or closed, which means those hosts unable to authenticate, such as guests or devices that don't support 802.1X, couldn't connect at all, at least according to the standard.
To support guest access, Hewlett-Packard and other vendors added proprietary capabilities to their switches. Cisco went a step further, allowing its Cisco Discovery Protocol to pass through the port to discover a host, such as a voice-over-IP phone, before the port is authenticated. Both functions are necessary, and even though they don't comply with 802.1X, they don't break interoperability, either. The IEEE is now working on a revision to 802.1X that enhances the protocol based on needs discovered in field deployments.
That example just gives credence to vendors' favorite argument: Technology must be developed and deployed with live customers before functionality can be standardized.
"As standards grow larger in scope and become more complex, it becomes difficult to make fundamental changes to the underlying architecture," says Paul Congdon, CTO of HP ProCurve and a longtime representative to several standards groups. "This is similar to the software problem of adding new architectural constructs to mature operating systems." The answer, many industry players argue, is targeted industry consortia that can perform in-depth testing while maintaining compatibility.
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