SNIA Forms Alliance, Propels XAM

SAN DIEGO -- The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) and the Eclipse Foundation today announced that the two organizations will increase their collaboration around open storage management standards such as the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) and the Eclipse Aperi open source project.

This alliance emphasizes both the SNIA’s and Aperi’s shared vision for delivering more choice and greater interoperability to end users,” said Vincent Franceschini, Chairman of the Board of the SNIA. “We are very pleased that SNIA and Aperi will be formalizing our collaboration to help ensure that SMI-S delivers on its promise to the industry. Together, we plan to accelerate further the adoption of SMI-S and help ensure that end users have the confidence that Aperi development efforts are complementary to the SNIA’s SMI-S progress.”

In addition to Aperi software conforming to the SNIA SMI-S standard, the collaboration between the two organizations will span a variety of focus areas including conformance testing, marketing, education, and end user outreach. Additionally, this alliance allows members of Aperi to participate in the SNIA’s Storage Management Initiative, SNIA Conformance Testing Program (SNIA-CTP), and the more recently announced SNIA Management Framework activities surrounding SMI-S, while providing the SNIA with a new opportunity to further penetrate the storage management landscape with SMI-S enabled products.

In a separate release:

SAN FRANCISCO -- The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) today announced the formation of the XAM Initiative to drive adoption of its forthcoming eXtensible Application Method (XAM) specification.This Initiative will build and serve a XAM community that includes storage vendors, independent software vendors, and end users to ensure that the specification fulfills market needs for a fixed content data management interface standard. These needs include interoperability, information assurance (security), storage transparency, long-term records retention and automation for Information Lifecycle Management (ILM)-based practices. This announcement continues SNIA's expansion of XAM activities to deliver on the specification's goal of establishing standard interfaces for coordination of information and content metadata among applications and storage systems.

In January, the SNIA formed the XAM Software Development Kit (SDK) Technical Working Group (TWG) to develop a XAM software reference implementation and related software tools. The TWG's efforts will accelerate adoption of XAM and improve interoperability of the specification’s implementations. The XAM SDK TWG is the first software project initiated by the association under its expanded charter to develop software for distribution to the SNIA members and the industry. This new TWG will work side-by-side with the existing Fixed Content Aware Storage (FCAS) TWG that is developing the XAM specification.

“Today, many vendors have implemented their own proprietary interfaces for applications to manage and place fixed content data, which has resulted in robust deployed solutions with limited interoperability or capabilities to share and interpret data across multiple management environments,” said Vincent Franceschini, Chairman of the Board of the SNIA. “By establishing the XAM Initiative to drive the specification’s adoption through the use of XAM SDK tools coupled with planned interoperability programs, we envision rapid market availability and acceptance of the standard. Together, these efforts will help provide end users with interoperable fixed content solutions that can be deployed across SAN, NAS, CAS, and other types of XAM compliant storage.”

Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA)