UPDATED 19:59 EDT / MAY 07 2013

NEWS

Testing EMC’s ViPR Firsthand : Embracing Diversity in Storage Estates #emcworld

Christopher Flaesch, VP of Global Delivery, CSC Managed Services, discussed the new ViPR release from EMC, sharing his unique perspective as a customer who has been testing the solution for a year, with theCube co-hosts David Floyer and Dave Vellante, live at EMC World 2013.

This major ViPR customer focuses on product management for storage as service offerings, mainframe offerings etc. “It was a long evolution to get to the diversity that we have,” Flaesch said, and having standard approaches to technology deployment is key.

Testing ViPR first-hand

 

CSC has been working with EMC since last year on implementing ViPR, and the goal was to get it rolled out, a project that involved a good portion of the tech and implementation team, to test it and give feedback, stressing multi-tenancy aspects which were important to this particular customer.

“The most important thing for us is to define standards,” what technology and what products the company is going to standardize on. “We need to add a software defined networking and compute to virtualize more of our storage,” he added.

A diverse & global infrastructure

Describing CSC’s  current infrastructure, Flaesch mentioned the current state is 67 data centers spread across the globe – 100,000 x86 boxes, 75,000 mid-range boxes and more, all part of our legacy infrastructure. “Now the tools are mature enough, our partnerships as well, to make strides in this direction,” he said, related to the ViPR implementation.

Software-defined storage (SDS) means “you are no longer constrained by the traditional cloud storage.” The value of SDS is that it embraces the diversity the company has in its storage estate and the fact it allows it to create its own API, for example. “We can make our own decision about building and API” and integrating it into our platform.

“The underlying architecture of ViPR is quite innovative and modern. We need to be in a position to make the decisions that are best for our business,” Flaesch explained. Being able to implement ViPR and develop APIs for the array storage the company has is very valuable.

“For all of our customers, we typically work there when the decisions were made for the infrastructure they have in place,” Flaesch said,mentioning that this led to the understanding that there is no perfect system that answers all the questions. In a speed-to-market environment, ViPR allows the company to integrate faster.

“The challenge for us is setting priorities and determining where to integrate, which APIs are most valuable for us” and then, in the multi-tenancy environment, being able to say which customers does such an implementation affect. CSC’s target is to get to a point where we can manage ViPR with its own set of tools, which would translate into a competitive advantage.


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