Jiro

"For the famed Sakhalin Husky dog belonging to the 1958 Japanese Antarctica expedition, see the article about the film Nankyoku Monogatari"

Jiro, (pronounced like gyro) is the registered name used by Sun Microsystems for an extension to Java and Jini.

Jiro was established by Sun in 1998 subsequent to acquiring a small company called Redcape Policy Software, initially known by the moniker "StoreX" this technology was targeted at storage management. Although there was nothing inherent in Jiro to make it particularly suited for storage management. Jiro in many ways was a management oriented extension to Jini, leveraging many of Jini's ideas and capabilities for automatic detection of elements to be managed. Jiro was a Management Framework infrastructure based on a distributed runtime environment. It was standardized as [http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=9 JSR 9] by the Java_Community_Process.

Jiro never gained the broad industry support necessary for success due to the fact that every device had to have a custom adapter (or Management Facade), and was withdrawn from the market in 2001. Though never gaining commercial or industry acceptance, Jiro was one of the precursors to the development of the Storage Networking Industry Association's (SNIA) Storage Management Initiative (SMI) [http://www.snia.org/smi/home SNIA SMI Home Page] , which has been seen as successful in promoting the use of open standards for storage management. Mark_Carlson_(engineer) (one of the first employees at Redcape) led this effort based on his experience at Sun Microsystems as a Jiro developer and evangelist. By 2005, most large storage systems providers had announced adoption of SNIA's SMI specifications within their storage management products. The SNIA has now embarked on a project to standardize Management Frameworks along the lines of the earlier Jiro project using web services to communicate between standard service components.