VMware's Cloud Ambitions

It appears that VMware's cloud ambitions are starting to take shape. I have received several reports indicating that VMware is activily recruiting people for its new cloud initiative based in Palo Alto.

In a recent job posting VMware states they are looking for a Sr. Software Engineer who can deliver products and features that relate to how VMware can participate in the hosting/Cloud computing/SaaS space. This person will participate in all stages of development from proof of concept to production documentation, and support.

Sounds like an early stage project, I'll keep you posted.

Cloud Computing Guide (Contributor Sign-up)

Over the last few weeks we've been busy finalizing the cloud computing book and I am now happy to announce the deal is done and will be published by a major book publisher (with an Irish name). We are now ready for potential contributors to signup to help us create the book.

If you are interested in contributing to the "Cloud Computing Guide" we have created an online submission form to help in the selection process. In order to be considered, you will need to fill out the form located at http://cloudcomputing.wufoo.com/forms/book-contributor-form-cloud-computing-guide/

If you have any questions, please feel free to get in touch.

We've also created a discussion group at http://groups.google.com/group/cloudguide

Layoffs: Future Hazy for Bungee Labs

It's been a very busy couple days for cloud related news.Yesterday, Bungee Labs fired 15 employees which they blamed on actual versus anticipated rates of adoption of their platform as a service offering. I've know team at Bungee for a few years and admire them all. I can only imagine this must have been a very tough decision for them to make.

That said I've always said that a hosted cloud IDE is a level of vendor lockin most customers are not prepared to engage. For Bungee Labs to be successful or any proprietary cloud platform to be successful, they need to have massive and broad adoption using common programming languages and tools. I feel the only way this will happen, specially in the platform as a service space is for PaaS service providers to GO OPEN SOURCE!

So whats next for Bungee, well, they're going open source.

Here's what they said.

We have begun the process of opening our own source code via the publication and “solicitation for comments” on the Bungee Labs Community Source License (BCSL) which will provide no-fee source code access to Bungee’s full stack when we emerge from Beta.

More Details: http://blogs.bungeeconnect.com/2008/08/27/changes/

Offline Cloud: Google says sorry for outage

It appears to be the summer of the cloud outage. After a significant gmail outage earlier this month. Google has come out with a number of improvements to their customer service and SLA. In an interesting turn of events, they seem to be taking a page from the Amazon Web Services playbook by offering a cloud dashboard to provide users with up to the minute system status information. It's nice to see Google starting to pay attention to their "paying customer" base.

I should also note Microsoft has done a particularly good job with their new cloud dashboard.

Here is the email Google sent to "paying" Google apps users.

We're committed to making Google Apps Premier Edition a service on which your organization can depend. During the first half of August, we didn't do this as well as we should have. We had three outages - on August 6, August 11, and August 15. The August 11 outage was experienced by nearly all Google Apps Premier users while the August 6 and 15 outages were minor and affected a very small number of Google Apps Premier users. As is typical of things associated with Google, these outages were the subject of much public commentary.

Through this note, we want to assure you that system reliability is a top priority at Google. When outages occur, Google engineers around the world are immediately mobilized to resolve the issue. We made mistakes in August, and we're sorry. While we're passionate about excellence, we can't promise you a future that's completely free of system interruptions. Instead, we promise you rapid resolution of any production problem; and more importantly, we promise you focused discipline on preventing recurrence of the same problem.

Given the production incidents that occurred in August, we'll be extending the full SLA credit to all Google Apps Premier customers for the month of August, which represents a 15-day extension of your service. SLA credits will be applied to the new service term for accounts with a renewal order pending. This credit will be applied to your account automatically so there's no action needed on your part.

We've also heard your guidance around the need for better communication when outages occur. Here are three things that we're doing to make things better:

1. We're building a dashboard to provide you with system status information. This dashboard, which we aim to make available in a few months, will enable us to share the following information during an outage:
   
   
   1. A description of the problem, with emphasis on user impact. Our belief is during the course of an outage, we should be singularly focused on solving the problem. Solving production problems involves an investigative process that's iterative. Until the problem is solved, we don't have accurate information around root cause, much less corrective action, that will be particularly useful to you. Given this practical reality, we believe that informing you that a problem exists and assuring you that we're working on resolving it is the useful thing to do.
      
   2. A continuously updated estimated time-to-resolution. Many of you have told us that it's important to let you know when the problem will be solved. Once again, the answer is not always immediately known. In this case, we'll provide regular updates to you as we progress through the troubleshooting process.
      
      
2. In cases where your business requires more detailed information, we'll provide a formal incident report within 48 hours of problem resolution. This incident report will contain the following information:

   a. business description of the problem, with emphasis on user impact;
   b. technical description of the problem, with emphasis on root cause;
   c. actions taken to solve the problem;
   d. actions taken or to be taken to prevent recurrence of the problem; and
   e. time line of the outage.

3. In cases where your business requires an in-depth dialogue about the outage, we'll support your internal communication process through participation in post-mortem calls with you and your management team.

Once again, thanks for you continued support and understanding.

Sincerely,
The Google Apps Team

A Cloud Haiku

Today, Sam Charrington posted an entertaining cloud poem on the google cloud group. So I thought I'd take a stab at doing one as well, but mine is in haiku (俳句), and based on some resent cloud computing events :)

A white cloud rises
Cascading systems run
Breaks in the night

Major Storage issues at Flexiscale

I've been holding off reporting this. (Sorry Tony) But now that it has become public knowledge I feel its appropriate to post. Flexiscale has over last 24 hours been having some serious problems with their storage systems. Typically these type of problems relate to some runway process, like in Amazon S3's outage last month where their gossip protocol was to blame. But in the case of Flexiscale it seems that the problem appears to be that of a human error, which was made worst by a poor disaster recovery process. It seems that one of their administrators mistakenly deleted one of the main storage volumes. Now more then 12 hours later flexiscale users have read-only access to the storage platform but no read-write. Simply put, they have to rebuild their arrays, but don't have the space to do so.

Here's what Tony Lucas of FlexiScale had to say.

As some of you are aware, we have been having issues with I/O (disk speed) in recent weeks. We identified short term and long term measures to eliminate these problems. The short team measures involved reorganising how data was stored across our storage network in a more efficient manner, and the long term measure was to increase the overall I/O capacity of the platform.

As a preparatory step to adding additional capacity one of our engineers was reorganising the data structure on the storage network and whilst cleaning up the snapshots we use as our backup process accidentally deleted one of the main storage volumes. This caused an immediate outage to a large amount of our customers

We immediately took action to take the entire disk structure offline (which caused the remaining customers to be taken offline) as it was the only way to preserve the integrity of the data on the system. Work then commenced with our storage vendor to restore this data.

Although we have now successfully gained read-only access to everyones data, a bug in the storage platforms operating system has prevented us from providing read-write access to it. This was discovered at 11pm last night, just when we thought we were about to bring the entire disk structure back online.

After consulting with our storage vendor it was agreed the most sensible option would be to copy the entire volume to a new disk structure (still maintaining it's integrity and structure), from where we could re-mount it correctly. Unfortunately due to it's size we didn't have spare capacity on the platform to create a complete duplicate of it.

An investigation of other ways of restoring the data then was undertaken but all options were considered too risky, and although downtime is a major problem for everyone, we felt the integrity of the data was the most important factor.

The decision was then taken to get additional capacity in from the storage vendor as soon as possible so that we could then increase the capacity to a sufficient level to allow us to copy the volume and successfully restore it. We originally thought we would be able to get this today, but unfortunately it will not arrive until mid-morning tomorrow, although we have done (and will continue to do) everything we can to speed this up.

At this time we are assisting customers who need access to specific files to get this, and we will continue this as long as we can into the night as resources allow.

Tomorrow morning once the storage arrives and is online, we will copy the data across and then begin to restart the entire platform as quickly as possible, but as the system wasn't designed to restart everything at once, this will take time.

We will be offering credits against our SLA, which will be determined once everyone is back up and running, as I'm sure you can appreciate all resources are being focused on that at this moment.

I, and all my staff are well aware of the potential impact this will be causing to you our customers, and we are doing everything we can to help in that respect. We will also be undertaking an investigation to ensure additional safeguards are put in place to prevent this happening again.

Sincerely,
Tony Lucas
Chief Executive Officer
XCalibre/FlexiScale

Evolutionary Computing

As an unpractical futurist the concept of singularity (the theoretical future point of technological advancement in which the ability for software to improve itself using artificial intelligence is archived) is an idea that has been of great interest to me for a long time. In order to create a self improving cloud computing systems (autonomic computing) you first need to look at what "life" is and how it can be applied to computing.

Life doesn't necessarily have to be self-aware in order to be alive. A single cell bacteria is arguably just as alive as my dog Winston and Winston just as alive as a human. Whether an application is simple or complex isn't important either, the common thread among all life forms is its ability to reproduce and adapt. The more important aspect is that of the life cycle; birth and death, mutation and evolution. In order to enable this type of life cycle computing (evolutionary computing), we need to create a software system capable of creating its own source code and then being apply patches to itself, then repeating the process over and over. The system should be capable of seeing any quantitative changes for better or worse overtime in each iterative version. These improvements could be a kind of artificial evolutionary process where certain branches may result in dead ends and where other branches may evolve into improved versions of the software. It should also be able to examine other source code as a basis of comparison and apply certain aspects when and if needed. (As a developer its easier to go modify some else's code then to create it from scratch.)

To provide some background, the Seed AI theory referred to the concept of recursive self-enhancement and is a key aspect of superintelligence (superior intelligence when compared that of a human). But in my opinion; intelligence is not as important as the ability to be performance aware. I'd rather have a system capable of understanding that a core component isn't running in a optimal way, then attempt to apply a series of patches until it fines a better more efficient way. As humans, we tend to find solutions to problems based on trial and error, so why not give our software the same freedom. The software should also be able to understand past failures and be able to determine that certain directions may not have worked. But it also should be able to understand that certain aspects of a previous branch that failed could also potentially be useful in other successful branches.

The biggest issue other then the obvious "how", is security related. This where the story starts to sounds a little big like science fiction. Hypothetically these types of systems could become incredibly powerful and the biggest threat they will face will be human. Embedding rules of conduct such as Isaac Asimov "Three Laws of Robotics" could be easily removed because of the evolutionary nature of the system. Thus controlling the system will start to look more like partnership. This type of evolutionary, self improving, self adapting, and self replicating technology could improve almost all aspects of technology, but with great power comes great responsibilities. Once the cat has been let out of the bag, it will be impossible to ever go back.

So will it ever happen? Arthur C. Clarke formulated the following three "laws" of prediction:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Will we archive "singularity" some day? Certainly. Will we be able to control it? I doubt it.

Linkedin Adding Group Discussions

As a long time linkedin user, I was quick to create a number of Linkedin user groups including my Toronto Entrepreneur, cloud storage and cloudcamp groups. But for the most part linkedin's group functionality has been, umm, none existent, forcing me to look for alternatives such as Google Groups. But that's about to change.

This Friday, linkedin will be adding several much-requested features to their group functionality:

* Discussion forums: Simple discussion spaces for members.
* Enhanced roster: Searchable list of group members.
* Digest emails: Daily or weekly digests of new discussion topics which members may choose to receive.
* Group home page: A private space for members on LinkedIn.

Expect a notice from me on linkedin, assuming you've joined one of my groups.

Is MapReduce going mainstream?

It's been an interesting summer for Google's MapReduce software paradigm. I'm not going to get into the finer details of MapReduce, the general idea is its Google's magic sauce, basically it's what lets them run their massively distributed data sets. So any company that wants to be like Google or needs to compete with Google should pay attention to MapReduce.

Last month Intel, HP and yahoo announced a joint research program to examine it's usage and now today Greenplum, a provider of database software for the what they describe as "next generation of data warehousing and analytics", announced support for MapReduce within its massively parallel database engine.

Greenplums announcement to integrate MapReduce functionality into its enterprise focused database is an important step toward taking MapReduce out of academic research labs and moving it to lucrative corporate users.

To give you some background, currently the two most popular implemtations of MapReduce are the open source Apache Hadoop project and unfortunately named Pig project. For those of you who don't know about about Hadoop, it is an open source platform for distributing, managing and then collecting computing work throughout a large computing cloud using MapReduce. Pig, a Yahoo Research project currently being incubated at Apache, is a language designed to make using the Hadoop infrastructure effectively. It has been described as SQL for MapReduce, allowing queries to be written and then parallelised and run on the Hadoop platform.

I found this quote interesting, it was mentioned in Greemplums press release.

"Greenplum has seamlessly integrated MapReduce into its database, making it possible for us to access our massive dataset with standard SQL queries in combination with MapReduce programs," said Roger Magoulas, Research Director, O'Reilly Media. "We are finding this to be incredibly efficient because complex SQL queries can be expressed in a few lines of Perl or Python code.

Also interesting to note that earlier this year IBM released an Eclipse plug-in that simplifies the creation and deployment of MapReduce programs. This plug-in was developed by the team at IBM Software Group's High Performance On Demand Solutions Unit at the IBM Silicon Valley Laboratory. So it may be a matter of time before we see MapReduce commercially offered by IBM.

So what's next? Will we see a Microsoft implementation or an Oracle MapReduce? For now, MapReduce appears to be the new "coolness" and with all the industry attention it seems to be getting I think we may be on the verge of finally seeing MapReduce enter the mainstream consciousness.

As a side note, my favorite MapReduce implementation is called Skynet. The name says it all.

Ruv's Law: Less is Less, More is More

The point is, ladies and gentleman, that more-- for lack of a better word -- is good.

More is right. More works.

Although I am not a fictional wall street tycoon, I do have a hard time buying the continuing view that server consolidation is the ultimate use case for virtualization. Call me a wide eyed optimist, I believe my company will continue to grow and as my company grows our demand for additional computing capacity will grow and for that reason I believe more is better.

If I we're a minimalist, I may believe that less is more, but unlike Ludwig Mies van der Rohe I do not believe that anything which is spare or stripped to its essentials is better. It is not. I'd rather a have more, more family, more employees and yes, even more money.

Now you know.

Gartner Redux

It appears people actually read what I write here. My post the other the other day, Worldwide IT worth $3.4 Trillion in 2008, seems to have ruffled a few feathers. Today to my surprise I received a call from Gartner and they were very quick to point out a few things.

1. They work for their customers, and those customers dictate their agenda.
2. They claim to be one of the most objective of the all major analysis firms
3. They don't appreciate being labeled a payola scheme.

I will say it is not too often a firm will directly address a critic, I am impressed with their direct and frank approach to my criticism. I am also impressed by their offer to meet with their team. I guess I too can be bought, but my purchase price is much lower, all I ask for is transparency. Nice work guys and I will take you up on your offer.

Dell's CloudBox (Containerized Data Centers)

Taking a tip from Google, Sun, Rackable and HP the word on the street is that Dell is preparing to enter the new and exciting world of containerized data centers. Helping further suspicions, in a job posted earlier today today on Linkedin, it seems that Dell is finally ready to make the dip. They describe the job role as "The primary purpose of the Enclosure Product Management position is to develop a strategy around Dell's entry into the Datacenter enclosure market place, implement and then sustain the execution of that strategy." Combined with the rumors about joint facebook / Dell cloud services, the pieces seem to be falling into place.

I find this move particularly interesting given Dell's interest in cloud computing. I think Dell may envision the ability to use these type of containerized data centers as a method of "rapid physical cloud provisioning". (Facebook suddenly has an increase in demand from Japan, no problem we'll have a container on the next ship to Toyko.)

In yet another interesting twist of fate, Google has received a patent from the USPTO for the concept of a "mobile datacenter" stored in a standard shipping container and equipped with multiple racks of high-powered servers with its own internal cooling system.

Also interesting to note that HP announced their Cloud-enabling data center infrastructure called POD (Performance-Optimized Datacenter) program last month.

I'll keep you posted as I learn more.

MetaCDN, Cloud based content delivery networks

James Broberg at The University of Melbourne has written a very interesting paper called MetaCDN: Harnessing ‘Storage Clouds’ for high performance content delivery. The idea of the low cost "CloudCDN" has been of particular interest to me and is an ideal use of cloud based storage solutions such as CloudFS and Nirvanix. CloudCDN's look like a potentially very important part of the emerging global cloud computing environment. It's nice to see someone putting some thought into this area.

Abstract:
"Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) such as Akamai and Mirror Image place web server clusters in numerous geographical locations to improve the responsiveness and locality of the content it hosts for end-users. However, their services are priced out of reach for all but the largest enterprise customers. An alternative approach to content delivery could be achieved by leveraging existing infrastructure provided by 'Storage Cloud' providers, at a fraction of the cost. In this paper, we introduce MetaCDN, a system that exploits 'Storage Cloud' resources, creating an integrated overlay network that provides a low cost, high performance CDN for content creators. MetaCDN removes the complexity of dealing with multiple storage providers, by intelligently matching and placing users' content onto one or many storage providers based on their quality of service, coverage and budget preferences. We then demonstrate the utility of this new approach to content delivery by showing that the participating 'Storage Clouds' used by MetaCDN provide high performance (in terms of throughput and response time) and reliable content delivery for content consumers."

Download the paper here > http://www.gridbus.org/reports/meta-cdn2008.pdf

IBM says don't use tape, use the Cloud

IBM is preparing to tell its customers to stop using tape and backup their data to cloud-based IBM Business Resilience data centers. It's spending $300m to build 13 such centers ($23 million per center) around the globe.

Customers will have a Service Delivery Platform in their data centers which automatically backs up data to an offsite IBM Business Resilience data center located in their part of the globe such as Hong Kong; Tokyo, Japan; Paris, France; London, UK; Beijing and Shanghai, China; Izmir, Turkey; Warsaw, Poland; Milan, Italy; Metro Park, New Jersey; Cologne, Germany; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Mumbai, India; South Africa; and Brussels, Belgium.

It is calling its new backup to cloud disk offering IBM Information Protection Services. The combination of the IBM storage appliances and Arsenal's software is called a Data Protection Vault.

More details here.

Enomalism Google Group / Discussion List

In my attempt to better organize our Enomlism open source project, we've created a Google group for the discussion of the open source Enomalism Cloud Computing Platform.

Feel free to signup here
http://groups.google.com/group/enomalism

Enomalism's RESTful API

For those of you interested in RESTful cloud computing, we've just published our Enomalism REST API for review.

Each Enomalism REST API call will return the result in JSON format. JSON is a lightweight format that virually every programming language can easily parse.

Most of the URIs that comprise the Enomalism REST API have variable paths. A path takes the
following form:

/segment/segment/segment/

Each segment in a given path has the ability to be dynamically interchangeable. That is, in a given URI, one segment is typically a variable that is processed by the REST controller while the remaining segments are static. This is only the typical case. There could potentially be any number of variable segments in a given URI. REST controllers can also accept HTTP parameters. These look like typical GET parameters or they could also be submitted via an HTML form. This depends on which HTTP methods the controller supports. For eaxample, the end result of submitting an HTML form is issuing an HTTP POST request. If the contoller we are submitting to supports POST methods, great. If not, we will not get the desired result.

Please feel free to download a copy of our API doc at https://enomalism.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/enomalism/enomalism_rest_api.pdf

CloudVirt

So it would seem my cloud standardization post has hit a nerve with a few. So I would like to post a some follow on ideas I've had, since yesterday.

First of all I'm also not totally sold on the whether or not cloud computing is ready for a cloud standard just yet. What I do think we need is a reference implementation (Platform & Infrastructure) and common extensible API. "CloudVirt" This API may someday form the basis for a standard, but in the mean times gives us a uniform API to work against., so whether you're using Google App Engine or Force.com, GoGrid or EC2, Nirvanix or S3, you'll have a central point of programmatic contact. I personally don't want to have to rewrite my platform for every new cloud providers API., which is exactly what we're doing now.

Also a few people have point out the CIM (Common Information Model) could be a ideal starting point for a cloud API, for those who are unfamiliar, CIM is an open standard that defines how managed elements in an IT environment are represented as a common set of objects and relationships between them. This is intended to allow consistent management of these managed elements, independent of their manufacturer or provider.

For those interested in joining the discussion, please signup for our cloud computing group.

More ideas to follow.

The Standardized Cloud

Over the last few weeks I've been engaged in several conversations about the need for a common, interoperable and open set of cloud computing standards. During these conversations a recurring theme has started to emerge. A need for cloud interoperability or the ability for diverse cloud systems and organizations to work together in a common way. In my discussion yesterday with Rich Wolski of the Eucalyptus project he described the need for a "CloudVirt" API similar to that of the Libvirt project for virtualization. For those of you that don't know about libvirt, it's an open source toolkit which enables a common API interaction with the virtualization capabilities of recent versions of Linux (and other OSes).

I would like to take this opportunity to share my ideas as well as get some feedback on some of the key points I see for the creation of common cloud computing reference API or standard.

* Cloud Resource Description
The ability to describe resources is (in my opinion) the most important aspect of any standardization effort. One potential avenue might be to use the Resource Description Framework proposed by the W3C. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a family of specifications, originally designed as a metadata data model, which has come to be used as a general method of modeling information through a variety of syntax formats. The RDF metadata model is based upon the idea of making statements about Web resources (or Cloud Resources) in the form of subject-predicate-object expressions, called triples in RDF lingo. This standardized approach could be modified as a primary mechanism for describing cloud resources both locally and remotely.

* Cloud Federation (Cloud 2 Cloud)
The holy grail of cloud computing may very well be the ability to seamlessly bridge both private clouds (datacenters) and remote cloud resources such as EC2 in a secure and efficient manor. To accomplish this a federation standard must be enabled. One of the biggest hurdles to over come in federation is the lack of clear definition to what federation is.

So let me take a stab at defining it.

Cloud federation manages consistency and access controls when two or more independent geographically distinct clouds share either authentication, files, computing resources, command and control or access to storage resources. Cloud federations can be classified into three categories: peer-to-peer, replication, and hierarchical. Peer 2 peer seems to be the most logical first step in creating a federation spec. Protocols like XMPP, P4P and Virtual Distributed Ethernet may make for good starting points.

* Distributed Network Management
The need for a distributed and optimized virtual network is an important aspect in any multi-cloud deployment. One potential direction could be to explore the use of VPN or VDE technologies. My preference would be to use VDE, (Virtual Distributed Ethernet). A quick refresher, a VPN is a way to connect one or more remote computers to a protected network, generally tunnelling the traffic through another network. VDE implements a virtual ethernet in all its aspects, virtual switches, virtual cables. A VDE can also be used to create a VPN.

VDE interconnects real computers running (through a tap interface), virtual machines as well as the other networking interfaces through a common open framework. VDE supports heterogeneous virtual machines running on different hosting computers and could be the ideal starting point. Network shaping and optimization may also play an important role in the ability to bridge two or cloud resources.

Some network optimization aspects may include;

• Compression - Relies on data patterns that can be represented more efficiently.
• Caching/Proxy - Relies on human behavior , accessing the same data over and over.
  
• Protocol Spoofing - Bundles multiple requests from chatty applications into one.
  
• Application Shaping - Controls data usage based on spotting specific patterns in the data and allowing or disallowing specific traffic.
  
• Equalizing - Makes assumptions on what needs immediate priority based on the data usage.
  
• Connection Limits - Prevents access gridlock in routers and access points due to denial of service or peer to peer.
• Simple Rate Limits - Prevents one user from getting more than a fixed amount of data.
  

* Memory Management
When looking at the creation of compute cloud memory tends to be a major factor in the performance of a given virtual environment, whether a virtual machine or some other application component. Cloud memory management will need to involve ways to allocate portions of virtual memory to programs at their request, and freeing it for reuse when no longer needed. This is particularly important in "platform as a service" cloud deployments.

Several key memory management aspects may include;

• Provide memory space to enable several processes to be executed at the same time
• Provide a satisfactory level of performance for the system users
• Protect each program's resources
• Share (if desired) memory space between processes
• Make the addressing of memory space as transparent as possible for the programmer.

* Distributed Storage
I've been working on creating a cloud abstraction layer called "cloud raid" as part of our ElasticDrive platform and have been looking at different approaches for our implementation. My initial idea is to connect multiple remote cloud storage services (S3, Nirvanix, CloudFS) for a variety of purposes. During my research the XAM specification began to look like the most suitable candidate. XAM addresses storage interoperability, information assurance (security), storage transparency, long-term records retention and automation for Information Lifecycle Management (ILM)-based practices.

XAM looks to solve key cloud storage problem spots including;

• Interoperability: Applications can work with any XAM conformant storage system; information can be migrated and shared
• Compliance: Integrated record retention and disposition metadata
• ILM Practices: Framework for classification, policy, and implementation
• Migration: Ability to automate migration process to maintain long-term readability
• Discovery: Application-independent structured discovery avoids application obsolescence

Potential Future Additions to the API