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SNIA chairman denies friction with Aperi

27.07.2006
Sun Microsystems Inc. last month pulled out of the IBM-led open-source storage group Aperi, and said it would back an older SMI-S storage management software standardization effort being championed by the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA). After Sun's move, Aperi said it would place itself under the auspices of the vendor-neutral Eclipse Foundation. With that backdrop, Wayne Adams, chairman of SNIA's board of directors, recently spoke with Computerworld about friction between SNIA members who support the Aperi/Eclipse open source project -- and those who don't.

Excerpts from that interview follow:

Vendors such as HP and Sun have been critical of Aperi and have taken sides on the open-source issue. Has that created internal turmoil at the SNIA? There's no turmoil taking place inside SNIA. A lot of companies that founded Aperi are also members of the board and technical counsel of SNIA. What we've been working on inside SNIA is finding a way to do more software development in-house with our current governance document. The balance of it is that if SNIA was to do software development, under what licensing terms could that be done and what types of effort would be required by companies to make it successful.

That's the same thing the Eclipse Foundation also has to have -- a value proposition out there so there's a licensing model, and there's a cost of operations and a membership fee model and so on.

How does Aperi's move toward the Eclipse organization affect the situation? In the case of Aperi, they're working on a couple [of] different components ascribed to the SNIA: a storage management framework, an SMI-S client implementation and some type of work-around graphical user interface. So this is all about coded implementation of software, and one of those components is SMI-S. And it would be done in a fashion that is consistent to the norms of open-source development.

So is SNIA going forward with its own open-source effort, which competes with Aperi? At the moment, there is no software development in place that would be considered open source by SNIA. On 6-22, a group of vendors, which included [Hitachi Data Systems], Symantec, HP, Sun and EMC made a statement that they planned to make a reference implementation of SMI-S. That would be a set of software for the membership of SNIA to use as an example of how the specification should be implemented. It's an example or interpretation of the specification and includes all the feature sets. My understanding of Aperi is that they're only working SMI-S from a client (server) standpoint and there's an assumption that there will be a vendor community that will continue to provide SMI-S in their (storage) products.