EMC has said that its long-anticipated ViPR software defined storage platform will be available at the end of the month.
The storage solution company has been busy announcing a range of new cloud technologies over a 24-hour digitally hosted conference involving a number of channel and technology partners. EMC also announced that it has revamped its VNX hybrid storage lineup to take better advantage of multicore processors, which it says will deliver performance increases on a magnitude of four times what is currently experienced.
“Customers are demanding more performance and efficiency from their current data center infrastructure while, at the same time, exploring new architectures for their next generation mobile and Web applications,” said David Goulden, EMC’s president and chief operating officer. “By fully embracing and exploiting disruptive technologies such as Intel MultiCore, virtualization and flash, EMC is providing customers with the products and solutions they need to help transform their IT department–not only delivering unprecedented levels of performance and efficiency but also providing the agility needed for their business to remain competitive.”
ViPR will allow datacentres administrators to pool and manage storage infrastructure – using what it calls the ViPR Controller – with the key being sales pitch being that it automates some of the fine tuning under the hood that would usually be required. By standardising the VNX storage lineup on the VSPEX reference architecture the company is enabling both object management and data management through ViPR Object Data Services, and it says the technology will be able to support APIs from popular services and solutions providers like OpenStack Swift , Amazon S3 and Atmos, with support for Hadoop and other distributed file systems coming in the future. The ViPR platform will initially supports EMC and NetApp storage, but EMC hasn’t indicated when it plans to add support for other third-party storage arrays.
James Mystakidis, group executive at Macquarie Telecom says the new technology is a “game changer”: ““Data growth is at the point where it is outpacing IT’s ability to keep up. This is forcing us, as well as our customers, to look for new, transformative ways to manage data… The ViPR software platform gives us the ability to efficiently manage data growth and automate necessary processes – allowing us to drive down costs and do more with less. Its software capabilities enable us to simplify our existing storage infrastructure so that we can manage growing customer requirements and workloads in ways we never could before.”
EMC (and its virtualisation-focused subsidiary VMware) has been pushing its vision of the software defined data centre for some time now, which to an extent walks hand in hand with the increasingly prevalent notion of the virtualisation of everything, and 2014 is the year the company promises to deliver public cloud features – automation, elasticity, time-to-market, ease of management primarily – to the storage market, an initiative it’s calling Project Nile. Writing on EMC’s blog Amitabh Srivastava, president of the company’s advanced software division said that Project Nile, which will be available sometime during the first half of next year and encompass some of the innovations announced today, “will be the first commercially available, complete, Web scale storage infrastructure for the datacentre.”
“Today is a significant milestone in EMC’s vision to deliver customers–both large enterprises and service providers–the foundation on which to build a Web-scale datacentre capable of growing to tens and hundreds of petabytes of information. By delivering ViPR ahead of industry expectations, we will provide our customers with a lightweight, software-only approach to storage management and a foundation for next generation applications. This approach not only solves the problems they face today, but provides a path to the future,” Srivastava said.
[“Source- businesscloudnews”]
