Juniper and EMC have just outlined their respective software-defined-networking and software-defined-storage strategies, with support for OpenStack being the common thread between both new solutions. We’re expecting plenty more SDN news before EMC World comes to its conclusion later this week too, with companies like Red Hat, Mirantis and Citrix all expected to enter the conversation at the neighboring Interop show.

First up though is Juniper’s news. The company has just launched a new suite of products called JunosV Contrail, which includes the all-important JunosV Controller. According to Juniper, its controller represents an open-standards approach to SDN that de-couples network management from the underlying hardware, allowing service providers and channel partners to roll out network services more rapidly, and to better manage their existing services. The solution works by virtualizing the network to enable seamless orchestration of different services among public and private cloud environments.

Juniper lists its key SDN partners as Red Hat, Citirix, Cloudscaling and Mirantis. In addition, the company insists that its new SDN solution will support both OpenStack and CloudStack, which are rival cloud platforms in this emerging market.

Bob Muglia, Juniper’s executive vice president, says in a prepared statement:

“Customers are looking for agility in their networks. With JunosV Contrail, Juniper will deliver a network infrastructure that meets customers’ immediate and long term needs. The response from our trial customers has been overwhelmingly positive and from a roadmap perspective, we are delivering on our SDN strategy ahead of schedule. From our systems to a growing portfolio of new SDN software, and a cloud-oriented software licensing model that grows with our customers’ needs, Juniper provides a simpler and lower risk option to begin the transition to an SDN future.”

The launch of Junos V Contrail comes after Juniper’s Muglia criticized rival company Cisco earlier this year, saying that it would face challenges with its own SDN strategy – claims that Cisco have strongly refuted.

EMC Unveils ViPR Software-Defined Storage Solution

In separate news, EMC yesterday announced the availability of its new ViPR software-defined-storage solution at EMC World.

EMC indicated that ViPR contains three key components, including the ViPR software-defined storage platform that gives partners control over the management of their storage infrastructure (control plane) and the data that resides within it (data plane). In addition, it also includes the ViPR controller, that leverages existing infrastructure for traditional workloads, whilst simultaneously provisioning new ViPR Object Data Services for next-generation workloads. In turn, ViPR Object Data Services is able to integrate with OpenStack via Swift, allowing it to be run against any enterprise or commodity storage.

Wikibon’s co-founder and chief analyst Dave Vellante spoke about ViPR on yesterday’s NewsDesk with Kristin Feledy. EMC claims that ViPR is a vendor agnostic solution capable of running on all types of hardware. But while this might be true, Vellante says its likely the case that it’ll perform far better with EMC’s own hardware than that offered by competing vendors.

Juniper’s and EMC’s latest announcements follow a trend that has seen just about every networking and storage vendor come up with a software-defined “something” in the last few months. Throw in startups like Nexenta Systems and Big Switch Networks, and we can see that Software-led infrastructure of all kinds is clearly becoming one crowded, and highly competitive marketplace. It’ll be interesting to see how the traditional vendors can compete against the new kids on the block, with companies like EMC essentially being forced to play catch up. Nexenta is a case in point – it claims its SDN system has already had more than 5,000 customer deployments.