Tag Archives: ViPR

ViPR – Frankenstorage Revisited | Architecting IT

Fellow blogger and keen dissector of fluff Chris Evans really hit the nail on the head with this one.

ViPR – Frankenstorage Revisited | Architecting IT:

Even after reading the announcement from EMC a couple of times I really struggle with finding out what is actually announced. It looks like they crammed every existing technology available in the storage-world and overlay that with every other piece of existing technology in the storage world.

I am wondering if EMC market watches have been under a stone for the past 6 years but the ability to virtualise storage in multiple north-south bound manners have been done by HDS for a long time. With the introduction of HCP (Hitachi Content Platform) HDS introduced multiple access methods (http/NFS/REST) to object based storage which can retrieve and store information from multiple sources including block/nfs/etc. HNAS added a high performance file based platform to that. The storage virtualization stack was invented by them and the overall management is a single pane of glass to manage all of this even from three generations back. The convergence of storage products and protocols and making them available to hook into cloud platforms like OpenStack, vSphere, EC3 etc is a natural evolution however it seems that EMC needs an entire marketing department to convolute the fact they have a very disparate set of products which were either designed by themselves thru different engineering teams who do not talk to each other or, and that has been the prefered way for EMC, by obtaining foreign technologies via acquisitions which by design never ever talk to other technologies to make sure to have a market differentiating product.

As Chris said, for years EMC have been contemptuous around storage virtualisation and didn’t have an answer to what the rest of the industry, most notably HDS and IBM, were doing. The fact that cloud platforms ramp up significantly left them in a state where they would lose out on customers who were looking into this for their next generation cloud and storage platforms. The speed in which is now brought to market is almost evidence that the quality of the whole is severely less than the sum of its components which leads you to ask “Do I really want this?”

ViPR needed a significant project (Bourne) to a.) try and tie all this stuff together from all the EMC product dungeons and b.) ramp up the entire marketing department and create a soup which has been stirred long enough to look massive and new but leaves a very bitter after-taste.

I would go for some nice Japanese sushi which is well balanced, thought through, looks greats and prevents the need to take stomach pills.

Cheers,
Erwin