The rapid development cloud based services has presented technology consumers a big range of choice. Currently when you choose a cloud service provider or providers you need to consider the long term cloud strategy of your organisation. This is especially true if you are planning on using cloud based database and platform based services. The problem with the technology is it is largely proprietary in nature. There are no agreed data storage and inter operational standards.

If you develop applications to run on Amazon Web Services, you may need to completely re-write your  applications if you move to Microsoft and their equivalent offerings. The same also goes for platform based services. How will you migrate between one provider and another?

The Open Cloud Consortium (OCC) hopes to do something about this issue and push for open standards between cloud providers. The open standards will enable the development of an open framework, enabling services from different vendors to inter-operate in a seamless manner.

The OCC was formed in mid 2008 by a group of Universities with the goal of improving the performance of storage and cloud computing.

The OCC also wants to see the development of open source software for cloud based computing.

The OCC are doing some pretty interesting tests with their Open Cloud Testbed. They are using open source software developed by the National Center for Data Mining and have achieved transfer speeds twice as fast as the Apache Software Foundation project, Hadoop. The protocol they use is UDT, not TCP. UDT is specially designed for the transfer of large datasets.

The use of open source software is not new, most vendors are using Xen server virtualization software. Now if you can add another layer of open source software on top of this you should get a much more economical service that would really give businesses no reason not to adopt cloud services that meet their needs.

[Via NetworkWorld]