"In the spirit of the Tanenbaum bromide that the good
thing about standards is that there are so many of them, Sun
Microsystems has now offered direct access to its own cryptology
recommendation. Naturally Sun is also promoting a
vendor-independent, generic and open source approach. Its answer is
the Crypto KMS Agent Toolkit under a BSD license that,
unfortunately, can only be compiled with Sun Studio 12. According
to Jason Schaffer, senior director of storage product management at
Sun, "Open Storage solutions allows customers to break free from
the chains of proprietary hardware... [in this] highly fragmented
encryption market." The Sun solution involves "a number of
additional partners" such as EMC's RSA Security division proposing
a unified standard to the IEEE 1619.3 Working Group.
"But the two competing standards groups are still not
cooperating. In fact, a ChannelWeb article says that they're
unprepared to do so. Both entities say alternately that each is
welcome to participate in each other's work."