The enterprise will undergo a fundamental shift towards hyper-convergence, said Vickram Bhambri, VP of Product Management for EMC Corp.’s Advanced Software Division (ASD). In conversation with Dave Vellante and John Furrier on theCUBE, Bhambri addressed the use of ViPR in vCloud Air, the promise of Docker, why resilience is central to the datacenter, and how workloads will define the adoption of cloud in the enterprise.

ViPR was the right choice for vCloud Air, Bhambri explained, because it was written with cloud principles at its core. ViPR has been used for a variety of other cloud products, including ATmos. “This is truly our third generation of cloud storage product.” ASD has leveraged the learnings from building ATmos has been invaluable to building a ViPR platform, Bhambri said.

Storage management in the enterprise

As VMware, Inc. moves into the hyper-convergence space, Bhambri predicts there will be a mix of hyper-converge and two-tier architectures at play. ViPR, though, Bhambri said, “was written from the ground-up with the premise that one day they would want to enable that type of convergence.”

Even before Docker, Inc. arrived on the scene with its popular use cases for containers, Bhambri said ASD used container technology to deploy ViPR code on the underlying hardware infrastructure. Bhambri says the next step will be figuring out how ViPR will be able to deploy compute workloads alongside its current functions.

ASD had been following Docker since its inception. Bhrambi noted that it was the “simplicity and low overhead of delivering container technology” that first attracted ASD’s to Docker. But as ASD started to dig deeper into Docker, deploying it for specific use cases, his organization realized that it was the model they had been seeking.

Docker functions as a bridge that simplifies “the whole story of bringing that convergence together.” He added, “In one shot you have a fully converged infrastructure running in your environments.” Certainly Docker is revolutionary from an architecture perspective, Bhambri remarked, but in actual implementation, “it just works.”

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The Agile Holy Grail is in resilient hands

The advantages of public cloud — being able to deploy, break things, and move things around —  are beginning to move into the enterprise space. “There’s a good match,” Bhambri said, “between the requirements have had for a while, but they haven’t had the technology in order to enable it.” Docker brings it all together.

Recover is a key place where infrastructure is “breaking –” where innovation is occurring. Software is now designed to ensure that it can handle and recover from failure quickly. When building ViPR,  Bhambri explained, the principles were “making sure there’s no second point of failure.” When there’s a failure, Bhambri said, the goal is to “recover from that failure very quickly,” while keeping the system running.

A big part of this, Bhambri acknowledged, has to do with automation. There’s as little human intervention as possible. “Everything in ViPR,” he said, “we considered as a fall domain.” Everything from a single disk to data, to the building itself can fail. When resilience exists in the software layer, the problems become easier to handle because businesses can continue to operate.

For the enterprise, choice is essential

While the technology is still new, Bhambri said enterprises are beginning to take a proactive approach to new technology, like the cloud. Public cloud’s are very homogenous, though, and enterprises homogeneity doesn’t necessarily meet all the workload needs that enterprises have. “It’s important not to take a way flexibility,” Bhambri commented, which is why ViPR allows customers to run services on traditional hardware, commodity hardware, or EMC hardware.

Even born in the cloud service providers use ViPR, said Bhambri. They see ViPR as a “commodity plate.” They use it to enable cloud services on top of commodity hardware in their data center or service provider data centers.

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