The past week saw a variety of announcements from the Aperi community. Collectively, however, the announcements seem to send out mixed signals to the open source community.
The Aperi community recently announced that it has proposed an open source project to the Eclipse Foundation. Aperi also announced that Novell has joined the community, bringing the total number of members to 10 companies. Novell joins other companies including Brocade Communication Systems, Cisco Systems, CA, Emulex, LSI Logic, Fujitsu Limited, IBM, McDATA and Network Appliance.
Aperi says the positive step towards the Eclipse foundation is the latest in the community’s efforts to give customers more choices for deploying open storage infrastructure software based on an industry-standard platform developed by the open source community.
Fujitsu, IBM and McDATA also announced that they intend to contribute storage management software code to the Eclipse Aperi project. IBM plans to contribute more than one million lines of code from its TotalStorage Productivity Center software to the proposed Eclipse project.
By developing a storage management platform as an open source-based framework, the Eclipse Aperi project will continue growth of the Eclipse ecosystem with a new community of storage management applications and increase collaboration and innovation across the storage industry. Technology vendors can enable their offerings to the common Aperi framework or contribute code to the open source project, or both.
"Aperi is working to simplify the management of storage environments through a standards-based, open source software framework. With Eclipse Foundation's history of hosting successful open source projects - including those for communications, collaboration, identity, database and device management - we're very excited about the Aperi community coming to Eclipse and using the Eclipse Public License," said Mike Milinkovich, executive director, Eclipse Foundation. "The Aperi framework can thrive in a vibrant open source community and help expand the greater Eclipse ecosystem."
In another twist, companies participating in Aperi will work closely with the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) to drive existing standards and develop new ones while carrying out open source software development under Eclipse. The Aperi framework will comply with the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) and will be certified at the latest SMI-S levels.
While SMI-S is the open standard specification that SNIA members support and drive, Aperi is the open source implementation of that standard. By providing a tested implementation of SMI-S, which standardizes storage management technologies for storage hardware interfaces, Aperi aims to drive greater industry support and wider adoption of SMI-S.
However, the announcement that software maker Novell is contributing to Aperi comes in the wake of Sun Microsystems’ abrupt departure from Aperi. Sun went on to join the Anti Aperi Group (AAG). Rumors are also thick about a growing rift between Aperi/SNIA members and pure SNIA members. Nevertheless, Bob Sutor, vice president of open source at IBM, assures that SNIA members have all been very positive about the type of work being done for the industry. A letter released to SNIA members on Friday seems to underscore a collegial relationship between the two organizations.
"Both parties have concluded formation and relationship discussions whereby Aperi, once established within Eclipse, plans to formalize a relationship with SNIA that will focus on standards, testing and implementation of SMI-S, testing of applications using SMI-S, and common marketing and education programs that focus on SMI-S and storage management," said the letter, which was sent by SNIA Executive Director Robin Glasgow.
Sutor likened the relationship between SNIA and Aperi to that of the World Wide Web Consortium and Apache. One organization develops the standards, while another group develops an open-source code that adheres to those standards.
"The SNIA SMI-S industry standard enables IT end users to establish an interoperable, storage management environment that simplifies manageability and improves investment protection when adding, changing, upgrading, and retiring storage components," said Wayne M Adams, Chair, SNIA Board of Directors. "SNIA's planned relationship with Aperi will include interoperability programs for SMI-S, the use of SNIA facilities for Aperi interoperability programs, and advancing current and new storage standards. The IT industry will benefit from Aperi helping to drive SMI-S implementations, storage technologies and open standards."
Chris Mellor takes a look at the contrasting shapes of the IBM-led Aperi Group and the AAG. He points out that members of Aperi like NetApp and LSI Logic have no plans to ship code to Eclipse. It is hard to see what benefits they receive from Aperi other than ensuring that Aperi code supports their products, he says. "As they are SNIA members and strong SMI-S supporters and Aperi will support SMI-S, then you may conclude that there doesn't seem to be any pressing reason for them to be in Aperi."
On the other hand, AAG seems to be working differently. Chris refers to a blog posting by HP’s Duncan Campbell, an AAG member who volunteers to divulge the goings-on in his camp. First, Campbell says HP is leading the AAG effort. At face value, Chris hints that a HP group is facing an IBM group. Campbell also confidently posts that they (HP) will be enhancing SMI-S with new specifications and programming interfaces for a Web services framework for advanced storage management, and providing the first reference implementation of SMI-S.
Since it is only under the authority of the SNIA that SMI-S specifications can be changed, this presents a competitive arena. Both Aperi and AAG support the SNIA and aim to work within the SNIA structures. Both are now in a race to develop the most SMI-S compliant storage management product. "Although this is good news for end-users, who can benefit from constantly upgrading products, the downside is that there could be strongly-contested discussions in prospect in the relevant SMI-S committees as members of the two groups seek to advantage their own efforts and disadvantage the others," Chris says. The two communities will now function as two sides of a coin. Which side will exert greater influence on the SNIA coin, only time will tell.
The Eclipse Foundation is still conducting a 30-45 day review of the proposed Aperi project, although Foundation members have hinted that it is likely to pass through approval easily. |
