Along with Sun and NetApp, Aperi's membership includes Brocade Communication Systems Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., CA Inc., Engenio Information Technologies Inc., Fujitsu Ltd. and McData Corp.

Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group Inc., a Milford, Mass.-based consultancy, said that the bottom line was that the SNIA is the place for storage standards. Consequently, most vendors would want to keep anything standards-related there, Duplessie said.

According to Duplessie, Aperi has left a bad taste with partner vendors who are concerned about looking too subservient to IBM.

The SMI-S (Storage Management Interface Specification) is a set of common models and protocols that will allow storage management tools to communicate with and manage storage devices from any manufacturer. For users, this will mean lower management costs and fewer headaches because a single software console will allow them to manage more storage devices.

Aperi was believed by some to have been set up in competition with the SNIA's SMI-S effort to develop an industry-standard application programming interface for managing storage systems, but IBM has always claimed the group was complimentary not adversarial to SMI-S.