Laura Sanders, vice president of storage products at IBM, said in a press briefing at Storage Networking World in Orlando Tuesday that EMC had been invited to be a part of the nonprofit organization called Aperi, which is made up of nine storage vendors, including Cisco Systems Inc., Sun Microsystems Inc., Network Appliance Inc., Computer Associates International Inc. and Brocade Communications Systems Inc.

"It's a big day for storage," Sanders said, adding that the group is forming a community around an open-source system for storage resource management. "EMC was invited to join and haven't decided to yet. I hope they will."

However, Mark Lewis, EMC's chief development officer, said his company was surprised by the announcement and wasn't asked to join the group until "30 minutes before the press release went out."

"We're perplexed by two things. Why did IBM create this in privacy and at a Storage Networking Industry Association-sponsored event? Why would you choose to go off and do something without us?"

Lewis said EMC has no plans to join the group.