EMC is certainly no stranger to open source. EMC and Pivotal are both founding members of the CloudFoundry Foundation. And EMC recently announced a $10 million investment and its first CloudFoundry dojo, based in Cambridge, MA, that will attract developers and facilitate the creation of applications on CloudFoundry. In November, EMC announced the EMC OpenStack Reference Architecture Partner Program and partnerships with Canonical Ubuntu, Mirantis and Red Hat. EMC also recently launched EMC {code} – the Community Onramp for Developer Enablement, which provides both EMC and community contributions of open source code, drivers, tools, samples, and more. EMC supports and contributes to open source in a number of ways, yet EMC is still considered a proprietary vendor. Well, if none of the above proves EMC’s open source bona fides, perhaps this will: On May 5th, EMC is moving EMC ViPR Controller development into the open source community.
This is big news. For the first time, EMC is 
taking a commercial product and releasing it to community-driven development. The open source project, named CoprHD, makes the code for ViPR Controller – all the storage automation and control functionality – available in the open source community. Customers, partners, developers and other storage vendors can download, expand and contribute to CoprHD. EMC will continue to sell EMC ViPR Controller as a commercial offering enhanced with service, support, training, and more to help organizations quickly adopt software-defined storage.
It’s been an amazing journey. Two years ago, EMC announced and subsequently launched EMC ViPR Software Defined Storage. Two years later, The ViPR Controller code, now open source project CoprHD, will be open and available for download on Github. This signifies a fundamental change to EMC’s development model. All development for ViPR Controller and CoprHD will be done in the open source community, with EMC and others contributing. CoprHD is licensed under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 (MPL2.0), which encourages community sharing and requires anyone who modifies the source code to share those modifications with the community. EMC is also establishing free and frictionless access to CoprHD to facilitate community-driven collaboration that will accelerate and expand functionality and support for third party storage.
Why is EMC taking this step? EMC fundamentally believes that software-defined storage is a strategy, not a product. The goal of software-defined storage is to give customers choice of storage services and hardware platforms, make it all simple and less costly to manage, and eliminate proprietary lock-in. Making the ViPR Controller source code available as open source project CoprHD will accelerate development and increase support for non-EMC storage arrays and data protection technologies. It also strengthens CoprHD as a single, vendor-neutral API control point for software-defined storage automation.
This open source model of open, collaborative development is crucial to the future success of software-defined storage and storage automation and management. CoprHD and ViPR Controller will give customers choice, flexibility, and transparency. Purpose-built storage platforms from EMC and others will always remain data center necessities. But customers increasingly value more plug and play architectures – driven by software-defined solutions and standardized infrastructure – and will often sacrifice some level of efficiency to obtain best-of-breed features, more flexibility and lower switching costs. In the modern data center, successful storage vendors will compete on the merits of their solutions and deliver compelling customer experiences. As CoprHD and ViPR Controller extend support to more and more storage platforms, EMC welcomes this new competitive playing field. EMC is ready to lead in this new software-defined world.
Are you a developer that has contributed to a product in the open source community before? Are you planning on contributing to CoprHD? Are you a storage administrator or architect looking to evaluate and deploy CoprHD? If so, tell us about your experience! We invite you to join us on this new journey and share your discoveries…let’s see where it takes us.