Neither organization would discuss the progress of the talks, which IBM said were subject to a non-disclosure agreement. However both sides have already struck similar agreements with other storage suppliers, and a deal is very likely to be reached, possibly even within the next few weeks.

Last month IBM announced that it had begun shipping a CIM-compliant API with its high-end ESS Shark storage array. It is this API that IBM is doubtless offering in return for access to the API to EMC’s Symmetrix storage array.

An agreement will allow each side to write storage management software that can handle the other’s hardware, and it will be one of the last API swaps to be completed between the four biggest high-end disk array makers. Hewlett Packard Co has already swapped APIs with all three others – EMC, IBM and Hitachi Ltd’s subsidiary Hitachi Data Systems. EMC and Hitachi swapped APIs in a deal they announced earlier this month.

The incentive for these swaps has been the industry focus on storage management software. Customers are prepared to spend money on software that will lighten the heavy workload of managing rapidly growing and complex storage systems, and suppliers are looking to software as a means to bolster their profit margins against the commoditization of storage hardware.

One of the most obvious features of the SRM and SAN management software updates that IBM unveiled yesterday was its inability to perform some tasks on anything other than IBM hardware – something that IBM is naturally keen to remedy.

Despite some indications to the contrary, IBM said its API does cover all of the important functions of the Shark, including the key data replication functions. It said the API it is shipping with the Shark is compliant not only with the CIM standard, but with the current draft version 1.0 of the SMIS specification – formerly known as BlueFin. The copy functions covered in the API are already part of the next issue of the SMI specification, likely to be called version 1.1, according to IBM.

APIs are programming interfaces, and providing access to them involves – among other things – revealing their syntax and vocabulary. IBM said that because its API is CIM and SMIS-compliant, EMC in fact need not negotiate access to it at all, because it has been written to the publicly-available SMIS and CIM standards. One high-level source however told ComputerWire that although this is technically true, EMC would profit greatly from IBM’s cooperation in accessing the API.

Source:Computerwire