[news.eclipse.technology.aperi] New Aperi How-to tutorial and SAN Simula

[A Marin <amarin@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Happy new year to the Aperi community!

As we begin 2007, I want to acknowledge our many achievements over the 
last 18 months. The community has come together to deliver four 
milestone releases since the project was established in June 2006, and 
we've seen a steady increase in the worldwide interest in the project. 
I've attached a couple charts that illustrate the monthly trend of Aperi 
downloads, as well as the countries from which users are downloading the 
code. You'll notice there is a correlation between the number of 
downloads and the weeks following our presence at Storage Networking 
World, where we co-sponsored a small booth and demonstated live code to 
attendees. The SNW show has been very valuable in allowing us to show 
storage professionals Aperi's capabilities and educating them on our 
progress and on how Aperi can help foster interoperability and 
innovation. Clearly, interest continues to grow, and for that we should 
feel very proud.

Over the last couple of months, we've also worked hard to create new 
tools to help folks become more familiar with the Aperi software. For 
instance, we have just posted the 2nd Flash tutorial to the Aperi Demo 
page and the new SAN Simulator to the Downloads page. The Flash tutorial 
shows how easy it is to use the Aperi GUI to discover and probe elements 
across the storage environment and is a great complement to the first 
tutorial, which shows how one can easily download, install, and 
configure the Aperi software.

For its part, the SAN Simulator is a tool that enables users to simulate 
a storage area network (SAN) through software. You can create a SAN 
configuration, add devices to the SAN, create arbitrary connections 
between devices, and remove connections between devices. The tool aids 
Aperi development and testing by removing the dependence on device 
availability, and we're working on another Flash tutorial to show how 
one can easily use it for this purpose. If you've seen the new tutorials 
or have downloaded the simulator tool, please consider sharing your 
thoughts with the community. Together, we'll continue to enhance the 
code and make the framework easier to use.

Again, thanks to everyone for your involvement and contributions over 
the last 18 months and let's continue pressing for increased 
interoperability across the industry in the years to come.

Best regads,

Allen

Attachment: AperiDownloadsChart[1].pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document