Aperi Year in Review

As we look forward to an eventful 2007, I felt an urge to reflect on the exciting year we had in 2006. If you recall, the ten founding members first announced the intent to form this open source storage management project in October of 2005. Working together, we were eager to develop and promote an open source framework based on open standards in an effort to facilitate more collaboration and interoperability across the storage community. As with most open source communities, the goal was, and still is, to foster collaboration across vendors and end users. To that end, we should feel proud of what the Aperi community has been able to accomplish over the last fourteen months. OK then... in keeping with the spirit of the season, here is the year in review.

We spent the first several months of 2006 evaluating potential organizations under which to establish the Aperi project. After weeks of assessing how each met the needs of the project, the project participants cast their ballots in favor of the Eclipse Foundation after learning that it was created for the sole purpose of creating, promoting, and supporting open source projects. Soon thereafter, we announced in June that Novell had decided to join the project and that we had submitted a formal project proposal to the Eclipse Foundation.

With an initial contribution from IBM that included an implementation of the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA)'s SMI storage standard, the project participants set out to work closely with the standards body on driving wider adoption of its standards through the Aperi framework. Wayne Adam's, the chair of SNIA's board of directors, remarked that, "Eclipse's Aperi Project will further advance the adoption of SNIA's SMI-S, benefiting the entire storage industry and IT community."

Several months later in September, Eclipse announced it had fully reviewed the project proposal and had decided to formally approve the creation of the Aperi Storage Management Framework Project. The news came while the project participants were promoting Aperi at the fall StorageWorld Conference in Boston. It truly was exciting to be able to talk to the attendees at the show about the great progress we were making. To celebrate, some of us decided to take in a Red Sox baseball game, and yours truly managed to spill a full beer in his lap. What a waste!

While the project was now official, the initial contribution still had to be reviewed by Eclipse's intellectual property team to ensure no legal claims could be made against code. In late October while we were hosting a small booth at the fall Storage Networking World conference in Orlando, the Eclipse team advised us that we passed the review. With this news, we were able to generate a lot of enthusiasm with the many visitors who came by our booth to see the live code demonstration. In fact, several attendees were asking how soon they could download the code, and we told them that the news from Eclipse would allow us to post the code libraries on the Aperi Website in a matter of days. It wasn't long before we saw people across the planet downloading the framework! As of January 4, 2007, the number of global downloads has reached 132, so momentum continues to build for the project.

So, what can we expect for 2007? With the many challenges associated with the founding of the project and the selection of the appropriate governance procedures and open source licensing behind us, we can focus on growing the community and building more momentum. Through 2007, the community will continue to enhance the initial release and promote the benefits of Aperi for both vendors and end users. Meanwhile, we encourage all interested parties to download the Aperi framework to see for themselves what an open source storage framework can do for them. Here's to a great 2007! Cheers... and try not to spill the beer!

Allen