EMC pulls the ViPR’s fangs, eases internal competition

pile of stinking hotspur

nuff said

Wither ECS?

Where does this announcement leave ECS? ViPR was the secret sauce providing Object and HDFS services.

Chris - disclosure EMCer here.

Chris - your penchant (and skill) with an eyeball-catching title leaves me breathless :-)

The reality is far less dramatic, and highlights that the "Occam's Razor" principle on "understanding what's up in the industry" (vs. the dramatic speculation) sometimes works :-)

- ViPR Controller is doing great. Customers like the idea of of an open abstractor of storage services for a broad range of data services, and a broad range of vendors. They are deploying. What they want is: a) even more open; b) broader platform support. What they didn't dig particularly was: c) embedding additional data services themselves - makes the controller heavier and bigger than it needs to be.

- ViPR Data Services are doing great - but people didn't a) get the naming. They understand that ViPR Object and HDFS are software that runs on all sorts of hardware. They get that Elastic Cloud Storage is an appliance that bundles that software with EMC provided industry standard hardware (servers and switches) into an appliance - which delivers AWS S3 like functions - but better, and at lower cost. Naming is an SOB. Get naming right - yeah! Get naming wrong - ugh. So - the ViPR Data Services are now Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) Software (bring your own hardware), and you can get it also as ECS Appliance (we support the whole thing as an appliance).

ViPR Controller will continue to be able to manage ECS Software for those who want to bring their own hardware, and have single abstraction to mange their traditional LUNs and POSIX filesystems (EMC and non-EMC) and their Elastic Cloud Storage Object and HDFS software + commodity storage (in either the "bring your own hardware" or "as an appliance" variation).

That's it - nothing more, nothing less.

Stay tuned for more on what we're doing to keep listening and adapting to what customers tell us :-)

EMC will continue to invest in Object and HDFS services with ViPR

The conclusions reached in the article are incorrect, based on inaccurate and incomplete information that was posted in an earlier EMC Community blog that has since been updated. EMC apologizes for this error.

The technology built into ViPR Controller to provide Object & HDFS data services on existing File arrays, continues to be a key part of the ViPR, ECS, and overall EMC storage strategy going forward.

In June 2014, we introduced a new capability of ViPR Object & HDFS data services running directly on commodity hardware, which was branded as ECS, and packaged into both software and hardware appliances under the ECS brand. The ViPR Object & HDFS data services running on File arrays continued to be exposed directly thru ViPR Controller, as before.

To date, both modes of ViPR data services have required external element management thru ViPR Controller. Based on feedback, this function is now being built into ViPR data services and ECS itself. Therefore, going forward both modes of ViPR data services will be able to work without ViPR Controller. In conjunction with that shift, ViPR Controller will provide plugins for management of Object & HDFS storage on ECS just as it provides plugins for management of Block & File storage on EMC and 3rd party arrays today.

Bottom line: EMC is not pulling Object and HDFS support for ViPR. ViPR is still the secret sauce inside ECS, which is at the heart of EMC’s geo-distributed cloud storage strategy.

Vikram Bhambri, VP Product Mangement