Surya Varanasi, Vice President of Engineering at EMC, joined theCube hosts Dave Floyer and John Furrier at the recently concluded EMC World to talk about the storage firm’s recently launched entity, the ViPR Group.

In November 2011, Surya Varanasi was the first employee of Project Born. Back then the biggest trend was converting storage to a private cloud and taking things to the next level, offering this service to service providers.

Initially Project Born started out as Storage OS, an underlying platform. The plan was to build a platform that could do two things: provide automation and meet the demands for new data systems that people wanted. The name wasn’t representative for the daring project so, after a brainstorm, Project Born was the official choice of the team.

The difference between the incipient Storage OS, as a platform, and the ViPR of today, is that ViPR is no longer a platform; it is rather a layer that can sit on top of any platform.

“We try to provide services that are written on top of our platform, across all the physical infrastructure,” declared Surya Varanasi.

The main aspect that the hosts focused on was the importance of separating the control plane from the data plane. Functionally, everything that a company does for storage management starts from provisioning its replication, backup, considering the net route and how to program it, the host, the storage – basically the entire life cycle.

2 challenges ViPR addresses

From his experience, Surya Varanasi identified two challenges when it came to talking to customers. The first was related to the fact that the customers purchased best of breed equipment, which also provided solutions that worked for everybody. However, managing them was extremely complicated.

The first need of the customer is providing automation and simplification of data management. The second need pertains to new data servers. Customers are often confused about the number of solutions they actually need. That’s where EMC comes in, because the company aims to provide a single place where customers can do both.

“Wherever we can, the hardware underlying infrastructure, we try to leverage it. If it’s not possible, then we’ll try to augment that with services of our own. We provide a common set of APIs on the system, so customers can provide the same services across all the infrastructure”, says Varanasi.

ViPR is a software solution, not a hardware offering, running on a virtual machine. When compared to other solutions, it stands out because those are platforms that provide automation stacks whereas ViPR provides a storage platform that plugs into all of these stacks.

As for who will adopt this service, the answer is simple: large enterprises as well as services providers. ViPR works for anyone who has heterogeneous environments and who wants to simplify how they consume storage.

Right now, EMC focuses on two aspects: helping customers manage today, and providing solutions for tomorrow.

ViPR is still in the process of pricing.