Work In Progress

Techworld.com – Fibre Channel SANs: Final Days?
Practical SMI-s products are arriving courtesy of AppIQ and the associated Aperi competition

Byte and Switch – Signiant Appoints Exec – Storage Networking News Wire
BURLINGTON, Mass. — Signiant, the leader in distributed data management, today announced that Dave Lemont has been appointed vice chairman of the company’s board of directors. Previous to this appointment, Lemont served on Signiant’s advisory board since March 2006.

Techworld.com -
The systems management area, with Aperi, affects storage. Why is IBM doing this? Why is IBM trying to get rid of added value in the storage system management area? The thinking is that IBM benefits because its services arm, IBM Global services, will pick up projects that integrate Aperi and other open source ultra-commoditised software applications into large business projects. It denies sales to competitor products and, because those competitors don’t have world-class services operations, denies them services business too.

There is no threat that hardware could go open source; it’s software that’s the battlefield here. There is a looming problem for storage system software suppliers where an open source approach could work. Are you listening HP? It seems to me that IBM wants to destroy the added value represented by AppIQ and replace it with Aperi code instead.

My take on this:

• open source is hard to engineer (the social problems are tricky, industry consortia don’t have a good track record) and so time frames tend to be long – this may not be acceptable in the immature SRM marketplace
• srm software is expensive to engineer (equipment access in particular doesn’t come cheap) – this may be a barrier to open-source contributors
• The GoF represents most (80%?) of the current and near-term potential market for SRM software. It will be tough for IBM etc. to get on the train.

Techworld.com – SMI-S – sound and fury signifying what?
…Take EMC, IBM, Hewlett Packard, Hitachi Data Systems, Network Appliance and Sun (then led by Scott McNealy). By August, 2005, they were all OEM’ing AppIQ’s storage management product, and therefore had a more or less equal interest in AppIQ and in the SNIA’s SMI-S standard developing smoothly…

It is certainly a better story with EMC, IBM and NetApp OEM’ing AppIQ than with just HDS, LSI, SGI, Sun and HP. I only wish it had been the case, we might have done an (even) better deal.