… As Well as CloudFounders

CloudFounders NV, developer of cloud software, has welcomed the announcement that EMC Corp. is planning to launch ViPR, its first software defined storage product during the second half of 2013.

"For the last four years, we’ve been working on a software defined storage layer and the arrival of EMC ViPR is fantastic news," explains Joost Metten, CEO for CloudFounders. "When we started creating the elements of Open vStorage which we released recently as open beta, the notion of software defined software simply didn’t exist. As we look over the announcement from EMC and to see so many similarities between its platform and our own, it validates what we have believed for a long time – the next evolution in storage will be open standards based and use highly flexible software."

Open vStorage is a centric storage architecture that combines the function of a SAN, high speed SSD caching, offsite replication, encryption and compression. Open vStorage software defined storage layer installs on x86 hardware or as a Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA) bringing storage intelligence into software that runs closer to compute with the ability to use multiple storage back ends.

"However, we differ from EMC in a couple of points, the first is the statement that ViPR is ‘the world’s first Software-Defined Storage platform’, it is not and our guys working in our labs for the last few years and our existing beta customers can attest otherwise. We also believe that performance and reliability through the use of integrated caching technologies and forward error correction such as erasure coding is essential for the software defined storage layer to truly break the dependency on hardware," Metten adds.

Open vStorage works with a fast location based storage model close to the hypervisor by making use of a two-tier de-duped cache running on flash or SSD to deliver high performance storage characteristics. In addition, the scale-out architecture offers extended reliability by moving HA into software with N+1 failover with optional erasure encoding to remove the dependency on dual hardware controllers or complex backup strategies.

"In our view, EMC clearly understands that current storage technology doesn’t sit well with cloud interoperability and true data mobility," said Metten. "The move to software defined will finally allow organisations to overcome the hardware limitations and cost constraints inherent within the legacy NAS and SAN and allow the creation of new hybrid models that better match emerging use cases that arise through the use of cloud, virtualisation and big data."

"Both vStorage and ViPR support VMware, OpenStack, Amazon S3 and commodity hardware, but it will be interesting to see if EMC chooses to make the product a truly vendor independent platform or if instead uses ViPR to protect its critical storage hardware revenue – only time will tell …," he concluded.