Welcome to the Aperi Blog

New Flash Tutorial Posted on How to Use Aperi to Discover and Manage Your Environment

2008-01-25T06:57:00.000-08:00

Over the last couple of months, the community has been working on new tools to help folks become more familiar with the Aperi software. To that end, we've just posted the 2nd Flash tutorial to the Aperi Demo page. The Flash tutorial shows how easy it is to use the Aperi GUI to discover and probe elements across the storage environment and is a great complement to the first tutorial we posted a couple months prior, which shows how one can easily download, install, and configure the Aperi software.

As we begin the new year, we want to make sure we continue to focus on the needs of the community and provide tools like this that help accelerate the adoption of the Aperi code. If you have any recommendations on new tools, please share your thoughts with the community. The best way to do this is through the project mailing list.

All the best,
Allen

Aperi Storage Network Simulator available

2008-01-18T15:50:00.000-08:00

The Aperi project announces the first release of the Storage Network Simulator. The simulator is a tool that enables you to simulate a storage area network (SAN) through software. You can create a SAN configuration, add devices to the SAN, create arbitrary connections between devices, and remove connections between devices. Using this tool to create a simulated SAN environment can help when you:

Have limited or no access to hardware and software when developing and testing SRM applications

Have "off-line"' access to SAN devices without impacting the performance of the real network (such as the SNIA lab or any SAN in the world).

Need to perform "what-if" analysis before you plan to extend or reconfigure your SAN

The SAN Simulator provides an increase in productivity and efficiency for Aperi development and testing by removing the dependence on device availability.

The Storage Network Simulator is now available at the Aperi Downloads page.

Install instructions are available from the Storage Network Simulator Installation Instructions page.

Cheers,
Tom

Aperi storage manager release 0.4 available for download

2007-12-07T10:35:00.000-08:00

Release 0.4 of the Aperi storage manager is now available at the Aperi Downloads page.

Instructions are available from the Aperi Storage Manager Installation Instructions page.

Please give it a try and let us know what you think!

Cheers,
Tom

Aperi Marketing Meeting - November 29

2007-12-03T10:11:00.000-08:00

We held our final Aperi marketing meeting for 2007 on November 29, 2007. Our agenda included:

• Introductions
• Quick status on Aperi R0.4
• Musings from SNW
• Review Aperi survey and input
• Aperi, the next step
• Planning for Aperi 2008

Thanks to the folks that joined the call! We have posted the meeting agenda and minutes on the Aperi Wiki for those that were unable to join us.

You are welcome and encouraged to post your thoughts and ideas on candidates for Aperi Release 0.5 on this blog so we can prepare for our next meeting in January that will set our scope for the project and timelines.

Have a Happy Holiday!

Musings from SNW Fall in Texas

2007-11-15T05:03:00.000-08:00

As many of you know, the community sponsored an Aperi project booth at Storage Networking World in Texas last month, and it was good to talk to more attendees familiar with the project and looking for more information. It's clear the idea of a common management framework is catching on!

If you were at SNW and came by to chat with us, you probably saw a demonstration of the milestone 0.4 release code and saw the new SAN Simulator tool, which was created to help users who don't have a storage area network readily available test their applications with a simulated one.

The community will continue to create tools like this to help users like you become more familiar with the Aperi framework. In fact, over the next few weeks we will be posting some short tutorials that illustrate how to install and configure Aperi, as well as use the SAN Simulator. These and all the developer tools and documentation are available on the Aperi Webpage Website, so if you're looking for information, this is where you'll find it.

Cheers!
Allen

APERI Survey Completes

2007-11-12T05:39:00.000-08:00

Thanks to those of you that took our survery. I would like to summarize what I see as the results:

(1) Aperi is used to manage your storage environment. The discovery of the storage resources, the topology view,the monitoring and management of the fabric environment are the key features Aperi provides.

(2) The primary reason you would adopt the Aperi code is to improve interoperation with your hardware and software with storage devices.

(3) Some inhibitors/challenges are in the area of ease of installation and configuration. Hopefully some of this concern has been addressed in Aperi R0.4. For R0.4, the install has been significantly improved over R0.3 because of the install wizard and more bundled 3rd-party libraries (as a result, the documentation will also be improved).

(4) Aperi is used in conjunction with other commercial storage manangement applications.

As we define our themes for Aperi R0.5, we will take these key messages as our guidance. I would like us to focus on integration of the commercial applications we use, via Aperi, so as to ensure we provide storage management solution that is easy to install and use. Based on this focus, I propose that the interoperation of our software and hardware solutions be the main driver for our community. We will want to leverage our applications and Aperi to be able to fully manage and monitor the storage infrastructure.

As I have spoken to each of you that has replied to my emails or have been actively involved in Aperi, I am also receiving a clear message that the community wants to clearly understand the business value for their company in working on Aperi projects. We must provide value to our business and customers by selecting projects that are of reasonable size and enabling the use of common components across the Aperi family. This will allow us to leverage our products today, as well as provide our customers additional value beyond what each of our products do on their own.

We will be having a kickoff meeting the week of November 27th to discuss and define our objectives, themes, and content for Aperi R0.5. I am excited to see many of you are now working on proposals to contribute to Aperi and/or participate in Aperi projects that will achieve these goals. We will discuss our draft candidate list, discuss the survey feedback on your interest to contribute and define how we can work closely together on themed based projects that will start to deliver Aperi based solutions to the market together.

Thank you

Russ

Aperi Year in Review

2007-01-05T14:10:00.000-08:00

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

Aperi at the Eclipse Summit Europe

2006-12-01T00:53:00.000-08:00

Marcus Siegmund and Christoph Reichert attended the Eclipse Summit Europe in Esslingen, Germany.
We held a project talk presentation giving an overview of the Eclipse Aperi project and hosted a poster booth about Aperi at the Poster reception during the summit.
The main audience of the Eclipse Summit were Eclipse developers and technical folks, looking for the newest development tools and features. So some were really surprised to see a complete storage management application running on the Eclipse platform.
For us as new Eclipse members with the Aperi project, it was very exciting to get a closer look to the Eclipse community and meet some Eclipse representatives.
When the Aperi project evolves and other management projects are created with the Eclipse framework, attention and enthusiasm will only grow at future Eclipse Summits.

Christoph R.

2006-11-14T17:24:00.000-08:00

Aperi at Storage Networking World Conference

The project hosted a small booth at SNW this month with representatives from across the community demonstrating live code, collecting leads and handing out Aperi t-shirts and trifolds. We hosted a variety of vendors and end users from all over the globe who had read and heard about the great progress the project is making. Several large users came by to express their excitement about deploying the Aperi framework in their environment to overcome some of the limitations with their existing solution.

Like most Aperi watchers, they were especially excited to learn that Eclipse had passed their legal review of the code during the week, which meant they could go to the project Website and download it. What's more, we spoke to many end users who said they would consider using an open source solution to manage their storage environments. These details were captured in the lead generation system we rented and will be available over the next couple of days to help with our recruitment efforts.

Overall, it was a very good show for the project participants to attend, and we should feel proud of our accomplishments thus far. It was great to have five of the ten participating vendors spending time at the booth visiting with attendees. This, combined with the tabletop displays and trifolds we had at each of the member booths, went a long way in demonstrating the inertia of the community. Congratulations on a very eventful first year and let's build on this strong momentum through the remainder of this year and into 2007!

Aperi at EclipseWorld 2006 - Boston - Notes from Allen Marin

2006-09-18T11:30:00.000-07:00

The Aperi community hosted a pedestal at this year's EclipseWorld conference recently in Boston, which was our first public event since the Eclipse Foundation announced the acceptance of our project. The event allowed us to demonstrate live working code, as well as a Powerpoint presentation featuring Aperi's mission, scope, benefits, architecture, and some embedded flash files of key functions from the actual code.

As you might expect at an Eclipse conference, the most popular booths were those from companies with a hand in major aspects of some of Eclipse's traditional application development projects. In fact, our observation was that most of the attendees were software developers, and at least half of them were interested in using Eclipse technology for general application development with the other half wishing to extend or leverage the Eclipse development framework.

Most of the attendees on the first day were curious to know what this new Aperi project was about. While they were familiar with Eclipse's application development framework, they were intrigued by a new project for storage administration. During the course of the two-day event, we handed out quite a few of the Aperi trifolds the community had recently created and educated attendees on the importance of the SMI-S standard and how Aperi was committed to implementing it. Since this was an open source event, most attendees were already well aware of how open source projects made overwhelming use of industry standards.

Mike Milinkovich, the executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, was the keynote speaker and emphasized that the dynamic growth of the Eclipse community was a result of the community's vibrant ecosystem. The Eclipse community and ecosystem it has spawned, he claimed, continues to gain considerable momentum as a result of its members being driven by the concept of separating the development efforts of the "stuff that matters" from the "stuff that doesn't matter". That is, the entire community stood to benefit by collaborating on the technology that was essential but that didn't provide much differentiation across competing vendors. To see natural competitors showing an eagerness to collaborate with each other through the community is what he called the secret ingredient to Eclipse's success. It was clear in his view that since the entire community works to maintain the lower-level, commodity technology, all vendors can focus their efforts on delivering the higher-value capabilities they otherwise wouldn't be able to afford. The result is that vendors have created (and continue to create) their own niches that target the segments of the market they want to pursue. Naturally, end users have seen increasing benefits as the community brings to market innovative plug-ins that make use of the open source frameworks being enhanced by the entire community. This type of collaboration has become a hallmark of the Eclipse open source community and is the reason the Aperi community is so excited to be part of this dynamic environment.

Allen