Reaction was swift from storage leader EMC regarding the IBM-driven "Aperi" open-source storage management initiative, which was announced at Storage Networking World in Orlando. But "EMC overreacted, again," said leading storage analyst Marc Farley (pictured), President of BuildingStorage. Farley, who attended the Orlando event, said that Aperi was not generally perceived as a major announcement by those in attendance.

"The major discussions this week were about ILM, defining it, how to address it, etc., and other business-driven processes," Farley said. He also noted that on the purely technological front,  "iSCSI is (now) here, and there were some discussions about it at the conference."

Meanwhile, a source familiar with HP's storage management team said that HP, which was not part of Aperi, perceives it as "no big deal and was not overly concerned about it."

IBM spokespman Jim Stallings said "the door is open" to companies who want to join in the effort, and noted that even though IBM did not make this announcement in conjunction with leading indusry organization SNIA, that IBM and other Aperi collaborative companies planned to work with SNIA in developing a unified SAN/NAS storage platform open-source standard.