UPDATED 14:00 EDT / MAY 15 2014

Simplicity is key to effectiveness at scale, says ViPR mastermind | #EMCworld

Manuvir Das - EMC World 2014 - theCUBEAlthough a significant (and highly touted) milestone in the company’s history, the first iteration of ViPR was only a stepping stone towards EMC’s vision for software-defined storage. Earlier this month at its annual customer conference, exactly one year after the platform made its original debut, the vendor pulled the curtains back on a new version that its creator claims brings universal programmability much closer to reality for the traditional enterprise.

“We have built out the platform to the level that we intended to build it,” Manuvir Das, the vice president of engineering for EMC’s Advanced Software Division, told SiliconANGLE founder John Furrier and Wikibon chief analyst Dave Vellante in a recent appearance on theCUBE following the announcement of ViPR 2.0. Unlike the first iteration, the latest release doesn’t depend on the underlying storage hardware for data management, a major improvement that Das says makes it possible to truly decouple capacity from infrastructure.

ViPR is now a storage system in its own right, the former lecturer explains, capable of handling critical tasks such as data protection at the software layer rather than leaving it all up to the individual components that make up the user’s environment. That means the platform can run on commodity machines (as opposed to more expensive and feature-rich proprietary boxes), allowing organizations to drive increased cost-effectiveness at scale without compromising on manageability.

“The way ViPR works is you give it as many servers as you got, it will lay itself out over all those servers and that’s as much capacity as you get. The more servers you get, the more capacity you get,” Das says. To make it simpler for customers to take advantage of this elasticity, EMC has bundled the software into a physical module dubbed the ECS Appliance that can scale both horizontally and vertically.

The system is designed for traditional service providers and IT departments that act like one, according to Das, a role that CIOs are increasingly struggling to adequately fulfill as more and more of their internal users turn to the public cloud.

“The internal IT customers are struggling with that because they’re the ones saying ‘no you cannot go to the public cloud because there’s regulation, compliance and all of that’ but they don’t have a weapon in their own arsenal to offer” that can match the convenience and affordability delivered by external providers, Das notes.

EMC claims that its ECS Appliance makes it possible for users to deliver a private cloud experience that lives up to the standards set forth by Amazon without the governance issues associated with moving sensitive data outside the corporate firewall.

Although ECS is being aggressively marketed alongside ViPR, customers have other options when deploying the platform. The latest version supports the Cinder block and Swift blob and object store components of OpenStack, Das notes, which means that storage any device sporting a driver for either service is also compatible with ViPR out of the box. That openness is a key aspect of EMC’s vision for delivering a universal storage platform,  as is providing the ability for customers to viably scale their environments across multiple locations.

To that end, ViPR 2.0 features a geo-replication and distribution capability that Das hails as an industry first. He explains that it eliminates the trade-off associated with traditional data protection schemes, allowing users to ensure that information remains accessible even if an entire facility goes down and effectively address local failures  while keeping overhead at a minimum.

“The algorithm we’ve invented for ViPR combines the best of both worlds,” he details. “We have a model where we spread the data in such a way that we got full copies of the data, so you don’t have to go across the WAN, and yet in terms of overhead it’s as low overhead as anything you would do by distributing your erasure codes.”

“What I’m especially proud of is that, in terms of simplicity, if I were to take an engineer and describe the technique on a whiteboard, they would look at me and say ‘they’re nothing intelligent here, why didn’t I think of that!” – and that’s my whole point. Those things work well at scale,” Das says.


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