Business is getting smarter by the day, and that include’s the datacenter.  Software is redefining datacenter architecture at the storage level, lowering costs and improving efficiency all the while.  And as hardware continues to “disappear” at the enterprise and consumer levels, the importance of software is on the rise.  The evolution in the datacenter has sparked a transformation for legacy vendors, forcing the shift we’re now seeing at Hewlett-Packard, Dell and others towards a Services-based business model.

EMC’s also been affected by this shift, taking the transformation motif quite literally at its annual customer event, being held in Las Vegas this week.  One key development in EMC’s transformation unveiled yesterday is ViPR, the company’s next step in software-led storage.

It’s a necessary move for EMC, as the company unifies its “federation” of entities to offer a complete portfolio of solutions for the datacenter.  But is it all that innovative?  Even as EMC has been working on ViPR, other storage providers have put a great deal of time and effort into their software-led storage solutions as well.  NetApp, for one, has spent years crafting its ONTAP solution, wisely anticipating the emerging trend towards software-driven capabilities in the datacenter.  And with all the noise EMC’s been making with software-defined storage (SDS) this week, NetApp’s quick to respond, emailing us the following statement:

“CIOs today are embracing new technologies and service models that make IT agile and more responsive, which provides a competitive advantage for their company. Software-Defined Storage, one example, is about doing for storage what server virtualization did for servers–breaking down the physical barriers that that bind data to specific hardware, enabling greater operational efficiency, greater availability and lower cost. NetApp is excited that the broad market is beginning to recognize the value of decoupling storage services from storage devices and focusing on rich integrated, IT service delivery versus hardware attributes – an approach we’ve taken with Data ONTAP for a long time.  

NetApp provides this capability with our with open and flexible Storage Virtual Machine (SVM) technology in Clustered Data ONTAP. Hardware independence spanning NetApp optimized to commodity hardware to the cloud with Amazon Web Services. Combine the best set of software-enabled data services with programmable APIs and the broadest set of integrations is precisely how Data ONTAP became the #1 most deployed Storage Operating System. 

 We welcome others in the industry to join along and help customers and partners today solve real business needs, without complicating the challenges CIOs face today. CIOs need IT to move ever faster to keep pace with the changing needs of business; today, they need to be able to do so at Cloud–velocity.  That means they need an infrastructure that can work without interruption, keep cost under control, and can deliver new services, projects and capacity instantly.”

– Brendon Howe, Vice President, Product and Solutions Marketing, NetApp