Of course, the fact that the SMI-S standard is all but set raises the question of why a developers program with interoperability testing is necessary in the first place. Isnt the point of standards to be able to avoid participating in time-consuming tests with other vendors equipment?
Kemp agrees that with more mature standards, a developers program would probably be a waste of time. SMI-S, however, he says, is still a very young standard, and companies are looking for a business case for developing it into their products. HPs developers program addresses this not only by giving its partners access to its SMI-S interfaces for testing purposes, but also by offering them its mighty marketing resources and support. Everything except the support is free of charge, Kemp says. Were offering them a very low barrier to get involved.
And as with any standard, there are always going to be nuances in how it's implemented that need to be ironed out. Theres still a need for a small amount of consulting, Kemp contends, pointing out that the standard wont be exactly the same for managing tape versus managing disk. There will also be differences between different types of disk arrays, he says.
HP has already signed up AppIQ Corp., BMC Software Inc. (NYSE: BMC), Computer Associates International Inc. (CA) (NYSE: CA), CreekPath Systems Inc., Storability Inc., and Veritas Software Corp. (Nasdaq: VRTS) for the program. This is going to give us a much quicker time to market with supporting the HP storage platforms, says Jim Geronaitis, AppIQ's director of strategic alliances. Were very, very excited to be one of the first companies to work with them in this space. [Ed. note: Not just excited, but very, very excited.]
While HP is the first company to launch a developers program aimed specifically at easing the migration to the SMI-S standard, it is certainly not the only vendor working on getting the standard off the ground (see Bluefin Swims to the Surface). Every major storage player out there has joined the charge towards standardizing storage management by participating in interoperability tests and SNIAs SMI Lab plugfests.
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