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Have you heard about the Eclipse Aperi Storage Management Project? The project was founded by some of today’s leading storage vendors and has developed a common, open source framework to spur innovation and help end users and storage vendors overcome the complexity and interoperability challenges in today's storage environments. To that end, Aperi has indicated it intends to work closely with the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) on interoperability programs for its Storage Management Initiative - Specification (SMI-S) standard, the use of SNIA facilities for Aperi interoperability programs, and advancing current and new storage standards.
In fact, in April an alliance between the Eclipse Foundation, where the Aperi project is based, and the SNIA was announced at the spring Storage Networking World conference. Such an endorsement from a highly respected standards body underscores both the SNIA’s and Aperi’s common goal of delivering more choice and greater interoperability to both end users and vendors. Vincent Franceschini, Chairman of the Board of the SNIA, emphasized this in a press release when he declared that, "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."
Aperi’s mission is to cultivate an open source community and ecosystem for complementary products, capabilities, and services around the Aperi framework. Currently, the project participants include Brocade Communication Systems, CA, Cisco Systems, Emulex, Fujitsu Limited, IBM, LSI Logic (Engenio Storage Group), Network Appliance, and Novell.
The Aperi community made available the latest release of the open source Aperi framework, which provides additional flexibility and extensibility through Eclipse plug-ins and OSGi (formerly known as the Open Services Gateway initiative) services. The new release underscores the project’s focus to create a standards-based storage management framework and to nurture an open source community around the framework. This adds to the momentum from the framework having recently passed the SNIA Interoperability Conformance Test Program*, which is important in verifying a storage product implementation is compliant to industry specifications, such as SMI-S.
The following questions and answers explain how Aperi intends to foster innovation and help provide a greater choice of management offerings for end users.
Q: How can an open source storage project benefit your company?
A: Open standards and collaborative communities help spur innovation in the market and eliminate many barriers to interoperability. With the backing of some of the storage industry’s biggest names, the Aperi project will benefit users by helping advance the interoperability across storage systems, devices, and software. And since this is open source, users also are free to modify the source code to suit their specific needs.
Summary: Users will benefit through greater flexibility and choice across storage offerings, which may result in lower total cost of ownership.
Q: What capabilities will the Aperi Framework include?
A: One of the guiding principles of the Aperi project is that the framework should provide immediate value upon install with basic storage management capabilities, rather than simply a collection of components that require costly integration. Community participants have discussed requirements for heterogeneous functions such as:
- Resource discovery, monitoring, and reporting
- Topology mapping
- Event management
- Disk and Tape management
- Device configuration and LUN assignment
- SAN fabric management
- Basic asset management
- User Interface
Summary: The Aperi framework offers a spectrum of basic management components that users and vendors can use and build on. The initial contribution includes a market-tested SMI-S (standards) implementation, which provides immediate value and a sense of assurance for customers looking to deploy the whole framework or select components.
Q: What is the typical relationship between open source and standards?
A: Typically, one organization develops the standards, while an independent group develops open-source code that adheres to those standards. Many successful open source communities implement open standards to a great degree. A good example is the relationship between the MySQL and PostgreSQL open source databases and the Structured Query Language (SQL) standard.
Summary: Aperi is an open source implementation of the SMI-S (Storage Management Initiative Specification) standards created by the SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association). All current Aperi participants are active SNIA members, and the project plans to work closely with the SNIA on interoperability programs and advancing current and new storage standards.
Q: How do Aperi and the SNIA work together?
A: SNIA and Aperi have very complementary roles in defining and driving standards across the entire storage market. The two organizations collaborate on the 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. In April, an alliance between the Eclipse Foundation, where the Aperi project is based, and the SNIA was announced at the spring Storage Networking World conference. Vincent Franceschini, Chairman of the Board of the SNIA, underscored the importance of this relationship in a press release when he remarked, "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."
Summary: By providing a tested implementation of SMI-S, Aperi can drive broader industry availability of SMI-S, as well as offer the many benefits of an industry-backed open source community.
Want to learn more? Visit ibm.com/storage/community.
* SNIA and the SNIA SMI-S design mark are trademarks and service marks of the Storage Networking Industry Association.
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