At this point, the project can now move into the implementation phase, said Brenda Haynes, director of the Aperi open-source project at IBM. Aperi's Web site is up and running, and all materials are available to the community, including information on the organization's benefits and mission, the project in general and design documents, she said.

"Our goal is to deliver to customers the capability to have an Aperi framework that provides a basic storage manager infrastructure for heterogeneous storage management," Haynes said.

Before the end of the year, IBM will upload code that can be used either directly by users or incorporated into products by vendors, Haynes said. That Web site will also let people submit enhancements, report problems and get documentation, she said.

Aperi was seen by some as conflicting with the Storage Networking Industry Association's (SNIA) Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) to develop an industry standard for storage management.

In late June, after member Sun Microsystems Inc. left the organization to work with SMI-S, Aperi said it would use the Eclipse Foundation as its repository in order to give it credibility among vendors and users suspicious of IBM's role. At that time, Fujitsu Ltd. and McData Corp. said they and IBM would develop open-source implementations, and Novell Inc. also said it was joining Aperi. Other members include Brocade Communications Systems Inc., CA Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., Emulex Corp., LSI Logic Corp. and Network Appliance Inc.