In an announcement that followed Sun's departure from Aperi, EMC Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., Hitachi Data Systems Corp., Sun, and Symantec Corp. announced that they were still committed to working together to support SMI-S.

EMC had claimed it was snubbed by IBM when it first announced the formation of Aperi at the Storage Networking World conference last year.

An EMC spokesman said that IBM's Aperi announcement was little more than a "publicity stunt" aimed at alienating EMC.

"We didn't know about the initiative until 30 minutes before the announcement," the spokesman said.

The SMI-S group said it would continue to enhance its standard with new specifications and programming interfaces for a Web services framework for advanced storage management, as well as provide the first reference implementation of SMI-S.