EMC has announced general release of ViPR, its software-defined storage system (SDSS) initially promised at EMCWorld 2013 in May and pre-announced at an event in Barcelona in early September. ViPR features support for EMC VMAX, VNX, Isilon, VPLEX, and RecoverPoint and for NetApp arrays out of the box, with ENC ExtremeIO all-flash arrays scheduled to be added in the first major upgrade, scheduled for 1Q14, and support for other vendors’ arrays also promised for 2014.

ViPR is designed to solve four problems, says Sal Desimone, VP and CTO for EMC’s Advanced Software Division:

1.  Create operational efficiencies across EMC clients’ typically heterogeneous storage environments: This, he says, is the biggest problem EMC customers face. “They love the boxes, but customers have lots of different gear that requires different management approaches. They have problems operating all of those systems efficiently, and storage is the hardest part of their infrastructure to automate.” ViPR is designed to unify management across their existing storage infrastructure, not just new systems.
2. Create a platform that supports scale-out database services: ViPR Object Data Services supports the S3, SWIFT, and EMC Atmos standard APIs, allowing developers including those in the Open Source community to point higher-level data applications at ViPR and automatically use that underlying heterogeneous storage environment. This includes not just services using traditional SQL databases but unstructured data as well.
3. Create a unified environment across different data types. ViPR is designed to unify structured and unstructured data storage and structures to avoid creating new vertical stovepipes in IT and allow applications running over it to access both structured and unstructured data.
4. Support multiple software stacks: ViPR supports VMware, OpenStack, and Microsoft’s storage stack out of the box. That means that developers can point applications already built on any of those stacks at ViPR and have them work without customization. This is particularly important because of the proliferation of different kinds of Big Data. That strategy seems to be working. For instance, cloud management company ServiceMesh announced support for ViPR soon after it was initially announced in May.

Pricing

EMC has created a tiered pricing schedule for ViPR. However, where many of these systems establish a price for, for instance, the first 100 Tbytes of data and then offer a lower price on the second, EMC’s schedule reduces the price for the entire system, including that first Tbyte, as customers grow their systems to qualify for higher tiers. “One of our goals is that price should not inhibit use,” said Chris Ratcliffe, VP of Marketing for the Advanced Software Division. For structured data, he said, the three-year total lifetime cost for ViPR, including maintenance, works out to about 1 cent/Gbyte/month at the lowest tier, dropping to half that as clients reach the top tier. The Object Data Service is priced separately, so ViPR plus the Object Service costs about 2 cents/Gbyte/month at the lowest tier, reducing to 1 cent/Gbyte/month at the highest tier.

However,EMC only charges for commercial use of ViPR. IT shops, of course, will want to try out the technology in the lab and develop internal familiarity and expertise in this new way of managing their storage before using it in production environments. They can do that totally without charge. Also universities and other research institutions can use ViPR to support their research without charge. In the new year EMC plans to publish a Web site that will allow users to download free copies of ViPR for non-commercial uses.