Sun Shines On SNIA

June 23rd , 2006: Sun MicroSystems splits from IBM's Aperi consortium to join the Storage Networking Industry Association's (SNIA) alliance in forming a global storage management standard.

Sun joins industry heavyweights, HP, EMC, Hitachi Data Systems and Symantec to push SNIA's Storage Management Initiative specification (SMI-S). IBM's Aperi consortium, formed in 2005, which seeks to form an open source-based standard, now consists of Brocade Communications, Cisco, Computer Associates, Engenio Information Technologies, Fujitsu, McData and Network Appliance.

Interoperability between disparate storage, storage networking and storage management systems is rating highly as a problem due the haphazard, multi-vendor implementations combined with huge growth in storage itself. So, a concentration of major industry force to a single standard is certainly high on the agenda.

At the launch of Aperi IBM declared that 'The (Aperi) community will build upon existing open storage standards, including the Storage Networking Industry Association's (SNIA) Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S), which develops and standardizes interoperable storage management technologies for storage hardware interfaces". This seemed to indicate that Big Blue's initiative was complementary to SNIA's. In fact, it has also been viewed as IBM's impatience at the speed at which SMI-S has been rolled out - it was first previewed in 2003.

Either way, Sun's defection from Aperi (latin for 'open') is good news for SNIA, whose Storage Networking World event kicks off in Australia this September, but has potential to quell future storage management issues. However, it still leaves a substantial cadre of storage-related vendors fighting the standards battle from outside the SNIA bailiwick.

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