SNIA and the Eclipse Foundation Announce Alliance

Business Wire, April 16, 2007

New Alliance Increases Collaboration to Further Storage Management Standards Efforts Between the SNIA and Eclipse's Aperi Open Source Project

SAN DIEGO -- The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) and the Eclipse Foundation today announced that the two organizations will increase their collaboration around open storage management standards such as the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) and the Eclipse Aperi open source project.

"This alliance emphasizes both the SNIA's and Aperi's shared vision for delivering more choice and greater interoperability to end users," said Vincent Franceschini, Chairman of the Board of the SNIA. "We are very pleased that SNIA and Aperi will be formalizing our collaboration to help ensure that SMI-S delivers on its promise to the industry. Together, we plan to accelerate further the adoption of SMI-S and help ensure that end users have the confidence that Aperi development efforts are complementary to the SNIA's SMI-S progress."

In addition to Aperi software conforming to the SNIA SMI-S standard, the collaboration between the two organizations will span a variety of focus areas including conformance testing, marketing, education, and end user outreach. Additionally, this alliance allows members of Aperi to participate in the SNIA's Storage Management Initiative, SNIA Conformance Testing Program (SNIA-CTP), and the more recently announced SNIA Management Framework activities surrounding SMI-S, while providing the SNIA with a new opportunity to further penetrate the storage management landscape with SMI-S enabled products.

Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation, added, "Open standards and open source implementations are key to driving the adoption of new technology. We are excited to enter into this relationship with SNIA to further the momentum of emerging storage network standards."

Already, the Aperi code version 0.1 has been tested and passed the SNIA Conformance Testing Program for both disk array discovery and disk array management. By passing the test, Aperi v 0.1 is now conformant to SMI-S version 1.1.0 - providing confidence for end users and vendors that Aperi's developments are consistent with the progress of the SMI-S. Already, more than 450 products have passed conformance testing for the SMI-S standard.

This alliance is also focused on achieving three core goals, which include:

1- Encourage the release of Aperi-based vendor products coming to market to solve storage management problems for end users

2- Deepen vendor collaboration on SMI-S to spur innovation and reduce barriers to interoperability

3- Help address interoperability challenges by allowing vendors to contribute code directly to the Aperi software project

For more information on the SNIA and Aperi alliance, please visit www.snia.org and www.eclipse.org/aperi.> About the SNIA

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is a not-for-profit global organization, made up of more than 460 member companies and close to 7,000 active individuals spanning virtually the entire storage industry. SNIA members share the common goal of advancing the adoption of storage networks as complete and trusted solutions. To this end, the SNIA is uniquely committed to delivering standards, education and services that will propel open storage networking solutions into the broader market. For additional information, visit the SNIA web site at www.snia.org.

About the Eclipse Foundation

Eclipse is an open source community, whose projects are focused on building an open development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools and runtimes for building, deploying and managing software across the lifecycle. A large, vibrant ecosystem of major technology vendors, innovative start-ups, universities and research institutions and individuals extend, complement and support the Eclipse Platform.

The Eclipse Foundation is a not-for-profit, member supported corporation that hosts the Eclipse projects. Full details of Eclipse and the Eclipse Foundation are available at www.eclipse.org.