SNIA in Open Source Collaboration

April 17, 2007: Just in time for San Francisco’s Storage Networking World, the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) and the Eclipse Foundation have announced increased collaboration around open storage management standards.

With both organisations pledging to offer each other further support, the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) and the open source Eclipse Aperi project both look set to gain momentum.

Vincent Franceschini, chairman of the Board of the SNIA says the alliance represents a shared vision for delivering greater interoperability around storage management. “Together, we plan to accelerate further the adoption of SMI-S and help ensure that end users have the confidence that Aperi development efforts are complementary to the SNIA’s SMI-S progress.

With Aperi software conforming to the SMI-S standard, collaboration looks set to further progress by jointly promoting user-outreach, marketing, education and conformance testing. It’s an opportunity for Aperia to participate in SNIA initiatives such as the SNIA Conformance Testing Program and SNIA Management Framework activities.

At the Eclipse Foundation, the move is central to their belief that open source implementation are key to driving the adoption of new technology. “We are excited to enter into this relationship with SNI to further the momentum of emerging storage network standards,” says Mick Milinkovich, executive director of Eclipse.

Early achievement of the joint collaboration have seen the Aperi code version 0.1 tested in both disk array discovery and disk array management By passing this SNI conformance test, the code is now conformant to SMI-S version 1.1.0. A confidence boost for vendors and users alike that Aperi developments are already on track to conform with the 450 products that have already conformed to the SMI-S standard.

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