EMC Unveils ViPR Software-Defined Storage Platform

EMC World kicked off Monday with a big announcement about the EMC ViPR Software-Defined Storage Platform. EMC ViPR is built for cloud environments and service providers, and designed to serve as the foundation for a modern storage architecture for future application deployments. It provides the ability to both manage storage infrastructure (Control Plane) and the data residing within that infrastructure (Data Plane). The EMC World conversation can be followed on Twitter hashtag #EMCWorld

Control Plane

The EMC ViPR Controller can deliver improvements in automation by abstracting common storage management functions like provisioning or migration. This allows different storage arrays to be managed as a single pooled resource in exactly the same way. ViPR delivers a single point-and-click approach. It can leverage existing storage infrastructures for traditional workloads, and also provision new ViPR Object Data Services (with access via Amazon S3 or Hadoop APIs) for next-generation workloads. ViPR provides a self-service portal so application owners can browse the storage service catalog and provision service resources best suited for their needs.

"Building the web-scale data center is critical for service providers and large enterprises," said Amitabh Srivastava, President, Advanced Software Division, EMC. "The rise of the Software-Defined Data Center is a groundbreaking step toward delivering the management and performance capabilities needed to protect and leverage data. Only by separating the data center from its underlying hardware can IT truly deliver resources as customizable, on-demand services. This is a game-changer for storage.”

Data Plane

For traditional workloads that utilize file and block, EMC ViPR steps out of the way and lets the underlying array fulfill the role of Data Plane, or the data stored within the storage infrastructure. However new workloads are emerging, often operating on vast quantities of data (Big Data) and servicing tens of thousands or millions of users. EMC estimates these workloads will grow approximately 700 percent by 2016 — an order of magnitude more than traditional storage. With storage infrastructure evolving to object storage and access methods changing to new protocols such as HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System), EMC ViPR provides Object Data Services.

The ViPR Object Data Services will provide Amazon S3 and OpenStack Swift compatible REST APIs and HDFS access methods — existing software applications written to these APIs should run seamlessly. ViPR Object Data Services will support existing EMC Atmos, EMC VNX and EMC Isilon arrays as a persistence layer in addition to third party arrays and commodity hardware.

"EMC’s new ViPR offering is key to how the storage industry and enterprises will evolve to a software-defined data center," said Gary Budzinski, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Global Infrastructure Services at CSC. "By moving to an Infrastructure-as-a-Service model and virtualizing storage, network and compute environments, CSC has the ability to bring new business value to our clients including faster time to market, reduced complexity and increased innovation."

EMC staff offer videos and commentary on the ViPR announcement: