As we cast a backwards glance over the past year, we see tremendous growth and accomplishment within the DMTF. Set upon the building blocks of the previous year, the organization continued to thrive as a relevant and vital organization hard at work.

The notable work of the past year speaks for itself. The Scalable Platforms Management Forum (SPMF) released the initial Redfish specification, an open industry standard specification and schema leveraging the OData definition of a RESTful interface that meets the expectations of end users for simple, modern and secure management of scalable platform hardware. This came on the heels of four Work In Progress deliverables released within months of the Forums creation. The Open Software Defined Data Center (OSDDC) Incubator released its white paper reviewing industry standards for the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) and identifying use cases, definitions, and existing standards gaps, as well as possible architectures for the various implementations of SDDC.

Continuing its cadence of releases every four months, Common Information Model (CIM) 2.45 was released just last month with additional releases on the horizon. The schema includes ongoing improvements to support DMTF Profiles and Management Initiatives. Working closely with DMTF Alliance Partner Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), this release specifically implements over 250 change requests, mostly focused on the final storage model classes. The adoption of Cloud Infrastructure Management Interface (CIMI) by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) represented the continuing trend of the international adoption of DMTF standards.  The Platform Management Components Intercommunication (PMCI) Working Group has done some great work over the past year including creating updates to Network Controller Sideband Interface (NC-SI) and Non-volatile memory express (NVMe) as well as support for Management Component Transport Protocol (MCTP).  

SMBIOS 3.0 was also released; this new version now extends support for 64-bit architecture systems. The Open Virtualization Format (OVF) specification was updated to leverage synergies with CIMI while the Cloud Auditing Data Federation (CADF) created a profile for OpenStack  -- demonstrating our ongoing collaborative work with open source efforts.

DMTF welcomed the OpenStack Foundation and the Open Compute Project (OCP) as Alliance Partners -- establishing work registers with each organization. The OpenStack work register describes joint interest in the CADF standard for cloud while the OCP work register describes the Redfish standard for hardware management.  Finally, the China Chapter announced the launch of its website, which includes translated DMTF content and specification documents. For the first time in the organization’s 20-year history content and documents are now available in Chinese.

As we enter into 2016, we expect to build on the foundations laid in years past. CIM continues to be the cornerstone of standards such as Network Management Initiative, Storage Management Initiative (SMI-S) as well as Systems Management Architecture for Server Hardware (SMASH) and Desktop and mobile Architecture for System Hardware (DASH). We anticipate increased cooperation and renewed alignment with other Standards Development Organizations through additional alliance partnerships [https://www.dmtf.org/about/registers] and collaboration with organizations like the SNIA and European Telecommunications Standards Institute-Network Function Virtualization group (ETSI-NFV). We’re looking forward to more ground-breaking work from the SPMF around Redfish, Cloud Management Working Group (CMWG) and other working groups within our organization. There is great potential to expand collaboration with the Open Source community and enhance our relationships with organizations such as Open Compute Project and OpenStack Foundation.  DMTF will also continue to grow its global presence capitalizing on the reach of its members from 43 countries and local bodies in China and Japan.

As has been the case for more than 20 years, DMTF is the ideal forum for industry leading companies to come together in a non-competitive environment to collaborate on relevant interoperable management standards. The work of the past year shows that our efforts to lower process overhead and increase agility have truly paid off and will continue to do so in the coming year. The hard work and leadership of our members remains invaluable. If you are not yet a member, we invite you to join the steady stream of new companies and alliance partners who have invested in DMTF membership. Learn more about how to get on board with us in 2016 at dmtf.org/join. It is through this collective effort that we will continue to set the gold standard for management interoperability.