The security and storage software giant has taken the same stance as Hewlett-Packard Co, by declaring that its support of the Storage Networking Industry Association’s SMI-S standard rules out membership of Aperi.
Symantec believes the storage management community should focus efforts on supporting the SNIA initiatives and accelerating the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) and standard into solutions for customers, the company said in a statement emailed to Computer Business Review.
Consequently, Symantec has chosen not to participate in this open source initiative as the program is currently structured, the statement continued, before adding that it could join Aperi in future if the open source group becomes better aligned with existing initiatives.
Aperi is an initiative under which IBM and currently eight other storage suppliers plan to create a library of open source storage components that will handle low-level storage management functions, such as hardware discovery.
Although IBM and its fellow Aperi members say that the project complements rather than competes with the SMI-S standard, HP has already claimed that in order to complete its goal the group will have to create some sort of specification, and that this will compete with SMI-S.
Symantec did not say when it was invited to join Aperi. When Aperi was launched, EMC revealed that it had been invited to join the group only the night before the launch. At the time of going to press, EMC said it is still considering the invitation.
The eight other suppliers that have joined IBM in Aperi are Network Appliance, Cisco, Computer Associates, Brocade, Engenio, Fujitsu, McData, and Sun Microsystems, now the owner of Storage Technology Corp.
