Gang of Five Counters Aperi

One day after Sun bolted from the Aperi initiative IBM created last fall, it joined hands with EMC, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi Data Systems, and Symantec to trumpet an expansion of the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) created by the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA). (See Sun Withdraws From Aperi and Management Muddle.)

In a joint statement, the group vowed to work together to ensure that the (SNIA) Storage Management Initiative specification (SMI-S) becomes a common, widely used industry standard." Translation: The five partners are ganging up on IBM to thwart Aperi.

Users will take any standards that work. The SMI-S initiative has been going for years now with mixed results, so some saw Aperi as a breath of fresh air. (See Users to SNIA: Help Us Manage and Aperi Appears Amid Questions.)

But the vendor's agenda has a life of its own. When Aperi was first announced, industry insiders considered it a potential broadside to SMI-S. (See Aperi Appears Amid Questions.) It seemed especially dangerous to HP, which acquired AppIQ last September for around $250 million. (See HP Chomps AppIQ & Peregrine.) AppIQ's embrace of SMI-S was considered key to winning OEM deals with HP, Hitachi, LSI Logic, and Sun, and HP continues those OEM relationships.

Now, Sun's defection appears to have polarized things even more, making Aperi more of an IBM initiative than ever. Aperi now includes Brocade, Cisco, CA, Emulex, Fujitsu, LSI Logic, McData, and NetApp alongside IBM. Except for CA, the rest are IBM partners. Most Aperi members, including IBM, are also SNIA members.There's lots of market weight on both sides of this latest debate. EMC and Symantec -- the biggest software vendors in the Gang of Five announcement -- together account for more than half the storage software market, according to IDC, but IBM has gained ground in recent quarters.

Nonetheless, the Gang of Five could tip the effort in favor of the SNIA. "They've got the five big guys lined up behind this [SNIA] initiative," said Clipper Group analyst Diane McAdam. "This one has more legs to it."

The Gang of Five see today's statement as a sign that they're actively working on open standards while IBM has been largely silent since announcing Aperi.

For the record, IBM is not backing down on Aperi. Spokespeople at the company also say IBM supports the SNIA and SMI-S. But IBM positions SMI-S as an industry standard while Aperi is a framework to manage and deliver open source products.

In a statement released today, IBM said it "fully supports activities to further develop open standards for storage -- and has long been involved in SNIA. However, the open source collaboration model, like the one being used for Aperi, is one that has taken off and its results are all around us -- it has reenergized the whole IT industry."The SMI-S crowd says it's hard to create standards without the industry leaders.

"You don't create standards by creating a proprietary cabal. You do it by using a standards body," said Ash Ashutosh, AppIQ founder and current CTO of HP's StorageWorks division. "The proprietary approach cannot work."

It's not clear what any of this will mean to end users. Analyst Arun Taneja of the Taneja Group says it doesn't make sense to have two competing storage management standards, particularly when one is driven by a major vendor. "For anything to be truly open source it has to be owned by nobody," he said, adding that IBM is "too intimately attached" to Aperi.

Over time, Taneja feels that the SMI-S and Aperi initiatives may start to converge. "My gut tells me that ultimately we will reach a point where [Aperi] allocates a whole bunch of stuff to SMI-S."

This sentiment is echoed by at least one Aperi member. Brocade CTO Dan Crain says the switch vendor will stay in Aperi, but remains a staunch defender of the SMI-S initiative. Crain hopes the battle over standards will push the industry towards faster adoption."I suspect it will promulgate greater adoption of SMI-S, which has been slow," Crain said. From his perspective, the present agitation will help vendors get off the fence and get going.

SMI-S could use the boost. So far, SMI-S has focused on creating standards to discover, model, and provision storage devices. As part of its fresh onslaught, the Gang of Five said it will add to this by defining more advanced management functions, such as topology, navigation, policy management, security, and workflow.

"We see this as continuing to move SMI-S or industry standards from device management to overall systems management," Ashutosh said. "We're defining a common set of storage management services that applications can leverage."

— Dave Raffo, News Editor, Byte and Switch

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