More than two years ago, EMC outlined a vision to fundamentally change how storage is managed, through what we call “software-defined storage.” This vision was to turn physical arrays into pools of virtual shared storage resources, enabling the delivery of innovative data services across arrays, even in complex, multi-vendor storage environments. Earlier this year, at EMC World, we primed the market for software-defined storage by unveiling a forthcoming product we named EMC ViPR. Customers and analysts responded with enthusiasm for the boldness of our vision and with confidence in EMC’s ability to execute as promised. This week, EMC delivered on that promise by making ViPR available to customers. ViPR is the only true software-defined storage product in the marketplace, and we expect it to become a significant differentiator for our business.
Customers ask for our help in solving increasingly complex problems. The growth of traditional enterprise application workloads, coupled with the explosive growth in new cloud-based and mobile-enabled applications, demand a simple, automated way to align storage and other IT resources to a variety of ways of storing, protecting and accessing data. Over the same time, the rise of public cloud computing models are prompting customers to ask much more of their service providers as well as their storage administrators and IT decision makers. As one analyst from IDC explains, “Customers want to extract more value from their storage investments while scaling back on management, and ViPR meets these needs while embracing open architecture and catering to all arrays.”
EMC ViPR includes the ViPR Controller, which automates storage management across traditional enterprise storage architectures while leveraging the full power of underlying arrays. And it includes ViPR Data Services, which can provide the architecture for new web apps with object storage while also leveraging commodity hardware for relevant workloads. With these two capabilities in one product, ViPR is the only software-defined storage platform to bridge the second and third platforms of IT.
This achievement represents the culmination of two years of research and development and significant contributions from our early access customers and partners. Thanks to a tremendous amount of hard work and investment, true software-defined storage is here.
