Aperi Comes Out Fighting
Headline
June 29th, 2006: IBM's storage standard consortium adds Novell, and proposes the Aperi 'standard' to a global Open Source community with a twist.
Following the departure of Sun Microsystems from the Aperi group of companies, IBM's announcement that Novell has come onboard is timely. As is its declaration of Open Source solidarity with the Eclipse Foundation.
The company announced the extension of its open standards storage management project as follows:
"The Aperi community of leading storage vendors today announced it has proposed an open source project to the Eclipse Foundation, home to one of the industry's largest open source communities. This is the latest step in Aperi's efforts to give customers more choices for deploying open storage infrastructure software-based on an industry-standard platform developed by the open source community".
Ensuring that this move was not to be played up into yet another Aperi versus SNIA battle, IBM was also keen to quote Wayne M. Adams, Chair, SNIA Board of Directors, who said, "The SNIA SMI-S industry standard enables IT end users to establish an interoperable, storage management environment that simplifies manageability and improves investment protection when adding, changing, upgrading, and retiring storage components. SNIA's planned relationship with Aperi will include interoperability programs for SMI-S, the use of SNIA facilities for Aperi interoperability programs, and advancing current and new storage standards. The IT industry will benefit from Aperi helping to drive SMI-S implementations, storage technologies and open standards."
The Eclipse Foundation was founded in 2003, and converted in 2004 to a not-for-profit entity to further development of a 'vendor neutral' development and application framework. It's foundation members include, Borland, CA, Red Hat, Borcade, NetApp, Cisco Systems, and IBM.
Fujitsu, IBM and McDATA today announced they intend to contribute storage management software code to the Eclipse Aperi project. IBM plans to contribute more than one million lines of code from its TotalStorage Productivity Center software to the proposed Eclipse project.