Zmanda has announced ZCloud, an open API that the company says will simplify the development of backup-to-cloud applications by providing a consistent and easy interface for storage cloud and backup software vendors. Zmanda is the sponsor of the ZCloud open source community project, and has also released an open source reference implementation of ZCloud.
By enabling this API, a storage cloud becomes a potential destination of backup-to-cloud applications, including the Amanda open source backup project. The storage cloud vendor does not need to worry about specifics of backup and recovery process. Instead they can continue to focus on scalability and robustness of their core offering. By supporting ZCloud API, a backup software vendor can immediately use a growing choice of storage clouds, including Amazon S3, as well as private storage clouds as a destination of its backup archives.
"Storage clouds represent a radical shift in secondary and tertiary storage. With increasing Internet bandwidth and economies of scale of storage cloud vendors, IT managers will realize dramatic cost and complexity reduction for their off-site backup needs," said Zmanda's Chander Kant. "By normalizing the idiosyncrasies of specific clouds, ZCloud enables a vibrant ecosystem needed to serve this growing demand."
