IT giants form open source storage group

Storage big guns have formed a group called Aperi

IBM, Cisco and Network Appliance have teamed up to push the idea of open source computing for storage management software.

The firms have formed a group called Aperi, along with Brocade Communication Systems, Computer Associates, Engenio Information Technologies, Fujitsu, McData and Sun Microsystems.

The group hopes to make the management of data easier for firms using components from different vendors by making code openly available.

Each company has the option of making code available to the group, and IBM has started the ball rolling by donating portions of its network management code.

Data management is flooded with software from different vendors that makes patching together different hardware a difficult task.

But critics point out that some heavyweights in storage are missing from the group, most notably EMC, HP, Hitachi and Symantec.

They also point out that the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) has already initiated efforts to create a standard for storage management software. Last year the association began final testing of its Storage Management Initiative Specification for version 1.1.

IBM has insisted that all the major storage companies were invited to join Aperi, but EMC has denied this.

"We were perplexed that EMC was informed of the proposed initiative from IBM after IBM had already pre-briefed some of the media, reflecting a consortium without EMC's inclusion," said EMC in a statement.

"We were equally perplexed that the SNIA, the existing industry consortium that has been working on storage management standards for a number of years, was also not engaged in the process."

Meanwhile Frank Harbist, vice president and general manager of HP's ILM and Storage Software group, said in an email: "We welcome IBM's efforts to make HP's proposed model stronger.

"But we do not understand why IBM has skipped over the necessary first step of defining a specification, and instead has moved directly to suggesting an implementation and a business model.

"And we do not believe that another project is needed to drive standards, since this appears to be based on IBM's own technology under the guise of open source."

Greek nationals may be pleased with the announcement, however. Aperi was the name of the old capital of Karpathos, a long narrow island in the Dodecanese range.

But the group may not have done its homework when it comes to finding a home on the internet. The www.aperi.com domain is owned by London-based Aperi Ltd.