Storage Gets Open Community

A group of big-name vendors last week kicked off an open-source community to let customers deploy open standards-based storage-infrastructure software. The community, called Aperi, plans to develop a common storage-software-management platform based on specifications from the Storage Networking Association.

The vendors, Brocade, Cisco Systems, Computer Associates, Engenio, Fujitsu, IBM, McData, Network Appliance, and Sun Microsystems, plan to donate part of their storage-infrastructure-management technology to the open-source community. Notably absent from the group are EMC, Hewlett-Packard, and Symantec, whose storage-management software would face competition from the development of open-source systems.

Aperi plans to take an open approach to building a common platform for managing all brands of storage systems, with community members contributing code and taking advantage of a common platform for building storage software applications. The goal is to let businesses choose from more storage products and eliminate the need to replace storage-management software when acquiring new hardware or applications.