Colorado Springs, Colo. based software development company XAware has announced the availability of specialized software components that implement the Bluefin specification for interoperability. XAware Bluefin components adopt a modular approach to software development that can help storage industry vendors adopt and leverage the specification more rapidly.
The Bluefin specification is an initiative to improve the interoperability of storage management software. It enables discovery and management of resources in a multi-vendor storage environment, and can identify, classify, monitor and control physical and logical storage resources. Bluefin is significant because it will remove a major obstacle preventing deployment of SANs. It is the first open and extensible interface that will enable management systems and devices to communicate. To date, 19 companies — representing 80 percent of storage vendors — have publicly announced support for the Bluefin specification, which is a Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) initiative.
XAware components include an integration server and adapters that enable existing interfaces to SANs such as SNMP, TCP/IP, CORBA, TELNET, Java RMI and HTTP-SERVLET to be transformed to XML to comply with Bluefin. XAware’s system manages synchronization through the application of business rules, data transformations and conditional workflow processing. These services enable devices to “talk” via XML to the management layer.
“These software components will help speed Bluefin standards-compliant products to market, while reducing development costs,” said Bill Miller, chief executive officer of XAware. “We have taken four years of XML integration experience and applied that knowledge to helping storage vendors with some of the more tricky implementation details of Bluefin. By starting with XAware tools and software components rather than building from scratch, developers of storage management software can easily and quickly modify their existing software or develop new software that is SNIA Bluefin-compliant. XAware’s XML data exchange and integration components are all about driving rapid adoption of industry standards, which will make software easier to build, deploy and manage.”
XAware estimates that vendors will spend three to six months incorporating Bluefin into their products using custom programming and traditional software development methodologies. Alternatively, vendors can now integrate XAware Bluefin software components in a modular or building-block approach in days instead of months to reduce development costs and speed products to market.
