"The cost of building storage management software is outrageous, because there are so many devices you have to support," says Ash Ashutosh [ed. note: Gesundheit!], founder and CTO of AppIQ. "Using CIM knocks months off the development cycle." As evidence of the difficulty of producing viable storage management tools, he points to BMC Software Inc.'s (NYSE: BMC) recent decision to cease development of its storage management product (see BMC Folds Storage Unit).
But how soon will SNIA's CIM-based standards actually be widely supported and usable? Ashutosh says by mid-2003 he expects nearly all the major hardware vendors will have committed to delivering CIM-compliant systems, with most software players coming on board in 2004.
Others who are party to the standards-setting process, however, don't have as clear a picture as that. "When will SMIS be a viable standard? I don't know," says an industry executive who did not want to be identified. "There is a mountain of work still to go... The spec itself is still very fluid. That needs to stabilize."
If the industry adopts storage management standards in relatively short order, AppIQ may well be in the catbird seat. But there's always the chance that some companies will drag their feet.
"All the major vendors do have a proprietary API strategy, as well as their CIM strategy," says the storage executive. "This could fall apart if a significant chunk of vendors decide to go their own way... by not really investing in CIM, and instead investing in the status quo."
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