Controversy still surrounds the Aperi group, but joining Eclipse is an important step to better storage management After joining the open source community of Eclipse last week, the people from the Aperi storage group had one more reason to celebrate this Fourth of July. It took Aperi eight months to get to this point, but the controversy that has surrounded the consortium since its birth has not lessened — in fact, it’s probably stronger than ever.If you need any proof of that controversy, just consider that Sun Microsystems, one of the early promoters of Aperi, decided to leave the consortium just days before it joined Eclipse, stating the lack of “SNIA [Storage Networking Industry Association] governance” as a principle reason for its decision.You can read more on this episode of the Aperi saga here, but please come back after checking that out — because the story gets better. On June 24, only two days after Sun’s good-bye, Robin Glasgow, executive director at SNIA, sent an internal memo to all SNIA members announcing that Aperi was about to join Eclipse and was also “… stating their plans to establish a formalized relationship with the SNIA.”How do we know that? Because that memo was leaked to Jon Toigo, managing principal of Toigo Partners International, who published the document on his blog.My understanding after reading that multifaceted memo is that cooperation between Aperi and SNIA is not only possible but sought by both parties. Why, then, is Sun really leaving Aperi? Let’s focus on the good news first. For example, it’s good to know that Aperi is not kicking the bucket quite yet and has become an officially proposed open source project inside the Eclipse family.Aperi was born with an open source predestination, and being part of Eclipse should trigger the interest of many worthy contributors who will help create a comprehensive storage management solution. Let’s call this rosy vision of the Aperi’s future scenario number one.Scenario number two could be that, despite the generous software contributions from IBM and McData (more than one million lines of code, I am told) and the exposure to the Eclipse community, the number of open source developers interested in working on Aperi doesn’t reach a proper critical mass and the project will never be completed or become relevant. It’s an unlikely scenario but still possible. Either way, Aperi’s home within Eclipse should make monitoring progress much easier than it was in the past.“From this point on, the code will be contributed to Eclipse and there will be the ability for the public to watch the evolution of the project in real time,” predicts Karla Norsworthy, vice president of software standards at IBM.Controversies notwithstanding, the actual work to turn the Aperi vision into reality is finally getting ready to start. The Eclipse Web site already shows a (very) high-level architecture for Aperi, but it’s too soon to even guess how the project will evolve from there. “I think the first step is to get the code out there,” Norsworthy states. “There have been some discussions among the partners about particular topics, but now we are anxious to hear the feedback of the community.”I am also anxious to hear that feedback and to learn which direction the development will take, because there is so much at stake. Whatever comes from Aperi will probably not be a storage-management panacea either, but I am willing to speculate that it will certainly cost less than proprietary solutions and will not lock you into a specific vendor platform, be it hardware or software. I have yet to find users that are fully satisfied with their storage management applications — but please let me know if you are an exception to that trend.Join me on The Storage Network blog with questions or comments.