Eight major storage vendors, including IBM and Cisco, have joined forces to develop a common open source platform for managing storage devices. The idea is that customers will be able to use the result of their labours to make it easier to manage their storage systems, regardless of the vendor.

Brocade, Sun, CA, Engenio Information Technologies, Fujitsu and McData complete the line up, while players like Symantec, EMC and HP are more notable by their absence.

The group says it will not forsake existing efforts to develop a standard platform, such as those from the Storage Networking Industry Association. Instead it plans to build on work already done, according to reports.

The main difference is that this project will be open source. IBM has said it will donate chunks of its storage management technology to the project, and that all other members are welcome to do the same. ®