Ken Black, global storage architect at Yahoo Inc. in Sunnyvale, Calif., said that if the group produces an open-source storage resource management application, it would be one of the things his organization will look at to ease interoperability headaches.

"When you look at the number of petabytes of storage we have and how few people are managing it, it's incredible. So we're trying to find tools and methods out there that will ease that task," Black said.

The Aperi group will be managed by an independent, nonprofit organization with a multivendor board of directors. Sanders said Aperi will be modeled after the Eclipse consortium set up by IBM with other vendors to handle open-source projects to create development tools and frameworks for building software. "It's now the default development language for Java," Sanders said.

The storage open-source standard developed by Aperi will be based on the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S), which defines the way multivendor systems can communicate with each other. Aperi is proposing a standard for how to manage devices from multiple vendors.

Other members of Aperi include CA, Engenio Information Technologies Inc., Fujitsu Ltd. and McData Corp.