EMC brings Hadoop into ViPR upgrade and unifies SRM modules

EMC has launched version 1.1 of its software-defined storage/big data product ViPR, alongside an Hadoop overlay that can allow any existing storage to be accessed for big data analytics.

The Massachusetts-based storage giant has also announced a significant revamp of its Storage resource management (SRM) product, revising it from three separate modules to a single architecture.

ViPR is EMC’s software-defined storage platform. It combines storage virtualisation, providing a common pool of storage from multiple arrays from different suppliers, with big data capabilities.

ViPR was launched last year at EMC World in Las Vegas. It is a fundamental part of EMC’s vision for the so-called “third platform” of business computing, which it sees as comprising vast amounts of users and apps with dispersed and disparate underlying storage.

ViPR is EMC’s answer to such a scenario – one that will tie together disparate storage systems and ultimately provide an overlay for hyperscale storage/compute as used by Google, Amazon et al.

In the newly-released version 1.1, EMC has incorporated an HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) overlay that will allow existing storage to be interrogated by Hadoop analytics engines.

Amitabh Srivastava, EMC president for advanced software (pictured), said: “It layers an HDFS interface on existing storage arrays and allows the analysis engine to do its work. Sure, it will not provide as good performance as a dedicated Hadoop environment but will be good for those that want to carry out analytics in place.”

EMC bills ViPR as providing a link for customers between the “second platform” – client/server – and the third. But currently ViPR only acts as a storage virtualisation layer, allowing customers to pool capacity on existing arrays. So, when will ViPR be a true “third platform” product?

Srivastava said: “When we support commodity hardware and provide the persistence layer – the data protection features currently provided at array level – that’s when we can say we support the third platform and will give the customer the option to switch between the two. That’s something we’ll be talking about in 2014 at EMC World.”

Version 1.1 of ViPR also introduces support for EMC Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF) to allow remote replication in enterprise environments under ViPR management.

The 1.1 ViPR controller element, but not the data services component, is available now as a free download for non-production use.  

Meanwhile, SRM version 3.0 takes three existing modules – ProSphere, Storage Configuration Advisor and Watch4Net – and pulls them into a single architecture with, says EMC, lower demands on system resources.

SRM focuses on monitoring, reporting and analysis and works across multi-vendor storage environments and now integrates with ViPR.

Srivastava said: “It was three products but now it is a brand new single product with a single architecture and UI. It is more lightweight with fewer resource requirements.”

SRM has also added support for EMC’s backup monitoring tool Data Protection Advisor as well as Virtual Instruments’ Virtual Wisdom SAN monitoring product.