Distributed Management Task Force

= Cloud Computing standards organization

URL = http://www.dmtf.org/.

Description

"Backed by such familiar names as AMD, Cisco, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Red Hat, Sun, and VMware, the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) has joined the increasingly fragmented fight for so-called open cloud standards.

Today, the DMTF announced the formation of an "Open Cloud Standards Incubator," charged with developing a set of specifications for online distributed computing operations along the lines of Amazon Web Services - operations generally referred to as infrastructure clouds.

The DMTF is the organization behind the open virtualization format (OVF), an effort to standardize virtual machines so that they can easily move between competing VM platforms.

"A number of members of the DMTF believe that OVF is a key building block for cloud interoperability," says DMTF president Winston Bumpus, also the director of standards architecture at VMware. "And these leaders have gotten together to work on extensions for OVF that apply to cloud computing and also to address the protocols and APIs used by clouds as well as security and the whole issue of federated trust." (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/27/dmtf_open_cloud_standards/)