IBM: Aperi Lives

5:55 PM -- IBM said little last week when the Aperi open source project it started last year was thrust into the news. (See Gang of Five Counters Aperi and Management Muddle.)

Sun bolted the Aperi camp to join EMC, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi Data Systems, and Symantec in starting a new SMI-S initiative seen as an Aperi killer. Outside of a terse statement, IBM kept mum.

Today, IBM offered its response with an announcement that Aperi is joining the open source Eclipse Foundation, Novell is joining Aperi, and IBM, McData, and Fujitsu are donating storage management code to Eclipse. (See Aperi Contributes Code.) IBM also says Aperi and SNIA are in complete support of each other.

That's not much of a response, really. But it is IBM's way of saying it is sticking with Aperi, and Aperi is a group effort rather than IBM leading around a passive group of partners.

Taking it a step further, IBM Tivoli marketing manager Jamie Gruener says Big Blue is looking to save SMI-S, not bury it."We're moving ahead with Aperi for a fundamental reason: serious customer challenges around SMI-S," Gruener said. "We've identified the idea that you need some level of standards around that project. This will really help foster and accelerate that standard. This is a non-political forum. It's open to any vendor who wants to join."

When asked about the perception that Aperi is an IBM initiative, Gruener said, "I'm still scratching my head about that comment. It's not an IBM directive. Membership drives the decisions on this, not IBM."

For the record, Aperi's other members are Brocade, Cisco, CA, Emulex, LSI Logic, and Network Appliance.

The tiff has highlighted the lack of storage standards. Even a week after Sun's salvo, we still don't know much more about what Aperi or the new SMI-S initiative is actually accomplishing. Let's just hope both sides are doing more to drive standards than talking about it.

Dave Raffo, News Editor, Byte and SwitchOrganizations mentioned in this article: