Blog Entry

Novell, as a member of both the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), and the Eclipse foundation, has been participating in an open source Storage Resource Management (SRM) project called Aperi

Goals of Aperi are stated at the project page - Aperi is a vendor-neutral, open, storage management framework designed to cultivate both an open-source community and an ecosystem for complementary products, capabilities, and services around the framework to promote greater consumer choice and foster competition.

Aperi discovers and manages storage network devices (arrays, swiches and HBAs) and relationships with host servers using a variety of protocols and standards, including SNMP and the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S). SMI-S is based on the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) Common Information Model (CIM) and defines a number of now standard profiles for storage management.

SNIA has published a series of excellent tutorials on Storage Resource Management and the SMI Specification.

As an Eclipse project committer, I've been spending a bit of my spare time contributing to the Aperi project - first to get the Eclipse based Linux development environment and build working for SUSE Linux Enterprise 10, and most recently, adding code to support Xen-based Virtual Machines:

The upcoming 0.4 release of Aperi will support SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 SP1 and therefore layered Novell products such as Open Enterprise Server 2 and ZENworks Orchestrator based Virtual Machine Manager, which provide Xen as the platform Hypervisor for running guest Virtual Machines.

The Aperi project is a great open source Storage Resource Management tool, for many Fibre Channel SAN-based storage solutions including High Availability Clusters and Virtual Machine Grids.

You can download source code and binaries here and the Aperi project welcomes additional developers, maybe there is a feature you would like to see added, please us know or join the project via the aperi-dev mailing list.

Regards,
Robert