Infotech Lead America: EMC unveiled the EMC ViPR, a Software-Defined Storage platform, at EMC World 2013. The EMC ViPR helps data centers manage storage infrastructure and the data contained within, while reducing the related costs.
EMC ViPR secures organizations’ investments in infrastructure by making storage architecture ready to accommodate future application deployments. The system eliminates the need to employ thousands of technical experts to build a custom environment.
EMC ViPR can manage the Control Plane – the storage infrastructure, and the Data Plane – the data stored within the infrastructure. Customers can choose to use only the Control Plane or both Planes together.
The system enables users to view objects as files and provides file access performance. EMC ViPR can be implemented entirely in software and will run against EMC, non-EMC and commodity hardware.
The EMC ViPR Controller virtualizes the underlying storage infrastructure and allocates various storage management functions such as provisioning or migration to different storage arrays to make management easy with a single point-and-click approach.
EMC ViPR discovers storage, creates virtual storage pools and provisions those pools to the application. EMC ViPR Controller processes what it finds in the underlying storage infrastructure.
EMC ViPR can be used in traditional workloads that utilize file and block. EMC estimates that such workloads will grow approximately 70 percent by 2016, while workloads related to Big data will grow approximately 700 percent by 2016.
ViPR HDFS Data Service simplifies the task of managing heterogeneous storage environments so that the IT department can focus on their core function.
The ViPR Object Data Services will provide Amazon S3 and OpenStack Swift compatible REST APIs and HDFS access methods and support existing EMC Atmos, EMC VNX and EMC Isilon arrays.
EMC expects to provide a broader set of data services as a part of the ViPR platform in future. Pools of storage created using EMC ViPR will leverage VMware APIs and appear as an array within VMware vSphere.
The ViPR Controller can integrate with VMware SDDC management and orchestration tool vCloud Automation Center as well as vCenter Operations Manager so that storage can be managed by ViPR either as an entity in its own right or as an integral part of the VMware Software-Defined Data Center.
According to IDC, the storage industry grew by 8 percent in Q2, posting sales of just under $8.1 billion. EMC had 22.6 percent of the market share with $1.8 billion in sales.
EMC ViPR is scheduled to be generally available in the second half of 2013.
