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EMC pulls the ViPR’s fangs, eases internal competition

Maybe it bit off more than it could chew

EMC is now stopping ViPR controller support for Object and HDFS data services, and no longer supports object storage on file or commodity storage.

The upshot of all of this is that ViPR cannot provide these services on storage arrays that don’t provide them natively.

This means that individual EMC II product teams building object or HDFS storage systems will no longer face competition from ViPR, thus enabling other EMC hardware or third-party and/or commodity hardware providing the same data services.

Internal points of contention concerning ViPR’s direction have now, in our understanding, been removed.

With the latest version of ViPR, 2.2, there are a raft of new hardware features:

  • Data Domain (as a filer)
  • VNXe and IBM XIV arrays using ViPR’s REST API
  • VMAX3, and XtremIO with VPLEX and with VPLEX and RecoverPoint
  • AIX and AIX VIO servers
  • With HDS storage ViPR 2l.2 supports auto-tiering and port usage collection metrics, also thin image and shadow image HDS features
  • VCE Vblock support, with ViPR being used to “provision and manage the compute and storage components of a Vblock system”
  • ScaleIO 1.31 is supported

ViPR 2.2 also supports;

  • MetroPoint configs that include RecoverPoint for both legs of a VPLEX Metro
  • Supports continuous copies (mirrors) for both legs of a VPLEX Metro
  • Existing block volumes can be brought under ViPR management by ingesting them using services provided in the Service Catalog
  • Can only ingest volumes on VMAX and VNX arrays, not from other block storage arrays, such as VMAX3 or XtremIO.
  • Can ingest VPLEX Local and VPLEX distributed virtual volumes
  • In a VPLEX environment, back-end storage is not ingested when you ingest the VPLEX virtual volume
  • ESX cluster datastore information is not ingested into ViPR when the volume underlying the datastore is ingested; only the volume presented to ESX is ingested
  • Volume ingest is done over either Fibre Channel or iSCSI, not both Fibre Channel and iSCSI
  • More ViPR ingest notes here
  • ViPR supports SRDF split function

ViPR 2.2 is now a much smoother fit alongside EMC's other products, specifically the object storage and HDFS ones (think Isilon, specifically). With ViPR and Isilon both being in CJ Desai's Emerging Technologies unit inside EMC II, we can see why this has happened.

Find out more by following the links here. ®

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