In addition to its Elastic Cloud Storage Appliance (ECS), EMC Corporation also unveiled ViPR 2.0 at EMS World 2014 in Las Vegas. ViPR is a software-defined storage platform that simplifies the management of both existing and new storage infrastructure, and provides new data services to underpin next-generation applications and Big Data analytics.
The 3rd Platform of IT is based on the mega trends of cloud, mobile, social, and Big Data and is creating a new world of opportunity — and competitive threat —†for businesses in every industry. New mobile applications are delivering unique and frictionless experiences for customers to both interact and transact. These new applications will require new storage infrastructures, but they must run alongside the back-office applications that run the business today.
ViPR 2.0 offers to build a bridge to the 3rd Platform by enabling customers to manage both existing and new storage infrastructures. ViPR also plugs into higher-level management and orchestration tools from†VMware, OpenStack, and Microsoft so storage can be a part of broader data center workflows.
According to EMC, the value of the ViPR software defined storage platform is that it separates the Control Plane (which is the ability to centrally manage various storage array functions including discovery, provisioning, and reporting through ViPR Controller) from the Data Plane (which are advanced data services that run on top of storage arrays through ViPR Data Services delivering, for example, object capabilities to file-based platforms or block capabilities to commodity platforms). By decoupling the Control Plane from the Data Plane, ViPR simplifies management of intelligent arrays while leveraging their underlying intelligence in a fully automated way that is based on policy.
New ViPR Data Services
ViPR Data Services have also been enhanced. Support for commodity drives has been added to the existing object and HDFS storage implementation along with block data services, based on EMC ScaleIO.
ViPR 2.0 has included multi-site support through new geo-scale storage capabilities, which provide data access, integrity, and protection. This means ViPR Object Data Services can now span multiple locations and offer geo-replication and geo-distribution capabilities. ViPR Object Data Services also features compliance capabilities to ensure federal, healthcare, and other industry requirements are met, and provide support for the EMC Centera CAS (Content Addressable Storage) API. This allows EMC Centera customers to maintain the retention and compliance elements offered by their applications on any ViPR-supported platform with no software changes required.
ViPR 2.0 also includes ViPR Block Services, new data services based on EMC ScaleIO server-SAN software. ViPR Block Services deliver block storage capabilities to any ViPR managed commodity storage array.
Enhanced ViPR Controller, Bridge to the 3rd Platform of IT
ViPR Controller now natively, and through a new OpenStack Cinder plugin, supports commodity as well as even more storage arrays. The full list of natively supported arrays now includes EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, and NetApp. Additionally, through the OpenStack Cinder plugin, ViPR supports Dell, HP, and IBM arrays. ViPR 2.0 delivers “pane-of-glass” management for customers to automate and standardize the management of an existing storage infrastructure, while bridging the support for the new storage infrastructure that is policy-driven.
ViPR 2.0 extends support for EMC arrays with improved integration and management of EMC VPLEX and EMC RecoverPoint. This includes the addition of multi-site capabilities and augmented multi-tenancy to support geo-scale storage environments that scale to hundreds of tenants in multiple locations all through a single namespace.
Enhanced Software-Defined Storage Suites
EMC’s software-defined storage suites, ViPR SRM and Service Assurance (SA) Suite, have also undergone enhancements. The updates to these suites are designed to give customers maximum visibility into complex multi-vendor environments. In addition to support for a broad range of EMC and third-party platforms, ViPR SRM offers improved integration with both ViPR and VPLEX, providing new chargeback capabilities to enable organizations to offer IT-as-a-Service beyond SLAs. Enhancements to ViPR SRM include virtual storage management through the ViPR console. SAS 9.3 boasts integration with VMware NSX, providing visibility into compute and network infrastructure in both physical and virtual environments.
EMC’s ViPR 2.0, ViPR SRM, and SAS 9.3 will be available in the second quarter of 2014.
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