At the recent EMC World 2013 conference, the storage giant unveiled its new software-defined storage platform ViPR—this product puts them on pace with other software-defined vendors (which have been expanding slowly through compute and networking) and gives IT departments a new way to give their own apps and external developers access to their systems. Using the concepts of API management this even turns storage itself into an API.

For a primer on API management and DevOps, see this talk by Layer 7’s CSO Dimitri Sirota—as for ViPR and software-defined storage, there’s still a lot to grow into, but it’s looking good.

For developers and IT the software-defined storage approach has a lot of implications for API, as Prasad Rampalli, Senior Vice President of Solutions Engineering at EMC explained during an interview, “ViPR is the best thing that has happened to solutions. ViPR has got RESTful APIs that completely put the semantics on the type of storage capabilities that can be exposed.”

Looking at EMC’s marketing materials on ViPR speaks to the problems faced by many enterprise and even small-medium businesses when it comes not just networking, compute, and storage (all situations provided in solutions in the software-defined ecology.) As a storage solution, ViPR changes storage itself into an API, enabling IT and DevOps teams to work seamlessly with storage and not have to worry about what they’re connecting to—what lies beneath can change without greatly damaging the overlaying application layer.

As a product, ViPR sits in the same vein with other software-defined storage solutions such as those developed by HP’s 3PAR and NetApp’s ONTAP.

Brining virtualization and the cloud to networked storage and the API

Modern IT teams have discovered themselves seeking out solutions that not only let them have more open and faster access to their own systems, but the advent of the cloud has changed the paradigm by which even enterprise DevOps approaches systems: provisioning from a datacenter or a block makes more sense when it doesn’t require adding a specific new server for a task. Solutions such as EMC’s ViPR allow for software to define how storage is accessed and used and this takes away some of the system administration heavy lifting.

As a result, ViPR’s software-defined aspect would allow Dev to provision or prepare their own environments via API and move Ops just a little closer to the DevOps side. By not having to worry about how the underlying hardware and architecture is administered, Dev can be certain that their development and test environments don’t differ as much from production—this also means that configuration and deployment by Ops doesn’t need to worry as much about changing parameters when apps are moved into public visibility.

As Rampalli said during his interview, this is indeed “the best thing to happen to solutions,” in essence: this is a software-defined storage solution that solves itself via the API layer.

The next controversy over software-defined-X is “open source”?

The open source movement has done a great deal of good for the DevOps community—and for developers and operations in general—it has produced excellent products that constantly maintain and innovate themselves. It’s also give products that enterprise and proprietary products can build themselves to work with or sit atop of, due to the layered nature of the Internet and computer science in general; however, there’s still a bit of a tug-of-war between the proprietary culture of enterprise and the highly open and fluid nature of the democratized open source culture.

As a result, when an executive such as Amitabh Srivastava, EMC Advanced Storage Division President say that ViPR is “open but not open source,” it tends to scratch away at old wounds.

We can probably expect this controversy in the software-defined “X” market to continue as this software and the hardware that it supports continue to provide solutions and APIs. The various vendors seeking an in with enterprise will follow what the buyers want from security, inter-accessibility, quicker time-to-live, or even that little bit of a secret-edge on their competitors.