… For Community-Driven Development

EMC Corporation plans to release an open source project based on its ViPR Controller, Project CoprHD,c.

It is EMC’s first open source project based on one of its commercial software products. The project will make the code for ViPR Controller-the storage automation and control functionality-open for community-driven development. Source code is planned be available on GitHub shortly in June 2015.

Project CoprHD is set to be licensed under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 (MPL 2.0) to enable customers, partners, developers and other storage vendors to access, expand and contribute to Project CoprHD’s breadth and depth of features and functionality. All storage vendors are encouraged to contribute to Project CoprHD, further expanding the ecosystem and embracing open and standard APIs.

Project CoprHD APIs are engineered to provide developers a single, vendor-neutral control point for storage automation. Just as with the ViPR Controller, with the commercial version of Project CoprHD, customers, partners, service providers and system integrators can develop new service catalog offerings with automated workflows to meet their customers’ specific needs. Positioned in the data center as a single, open control plane for multivendor storage, Project CoprHD offers the same level of flexibility, choice, security and transparency as ViPR Controller, while adding the ability to create new services and applications.

ViPR Controller was created to provide simple storage management for both EMC and third-party arrays, and the company will continue selling ViPR Controller as a commercial offering. ViPR Controller and Project CoprHD share the same core features and functionality. ViPR Controller customers benefit from access to EMC’s support and professional services.

Customers value plug-and-play architectures driven by software-defined solutions and standardized infrastructure. In the modern data center, storage vendors compete on the merits of their solutions to deliver compelling customer experiences.

As Project CoprHD and ViPR Controller expand to support more features and more storage platforms, benefits are offered across multiple constituencies:

• In open source software projects, customers typically realize the benefits of vendor neutrality, flexibility, better and more frequent enhancements, and more choice.
• EMC partners can develop and deliver new service offerings for their customers and expand storage coverage to offer more choice for their customers and additional revenue opportunities.
• Storage vendors are invited to plug into software-defined storage frameworks where they can gain access to a growing Project CoprHD ecosystem and participate in helping to drive the overall increased adoption of software-defined storage.

While EMC supports and contributes to the open source community in a number of ways, Project CoprHD is a critical step in EMC’s open source strategy. EMC is a founding member of – and chairs – Cloud Foundry Foundation and recently announced the EMC OpenStack Reference Architecture Partner Program and EMC{code}, the Community Onramp for Developer Enablement. This open source model of open, collaborative development is crucial to help drive broader enterprise adoption of software-defined storage and storage automation and management. EMC is invested in supporting community-driven development for technologies like Project CoprHD to continue enabling innovation.

Dr. Dietmar Reinelt, VP infrastructure services, foundation services, SAP SE, said: “ViPR Controller is a proven, critical solution for our business, and opening it up to community collaboration is an interesting way to help it grow and continue to benefit users like us. The ability to automate delivery of policy-based storage services ensures best practices are followed each and every time, eliminating risk and freeing up manpower, to help us become more efficient‹lowering costs and allowing us to apply our resources more strategically.”

Laura DuBois, program VP, storage practice, IDC, said: “Software-defined storage is still solidifying as a market-and the term means different things to different people. EMC’s customer-centric approach to transparency, automation and simple management encompasses several key tenets of software-defined storage, and releasing its ViPR source code to the open source community extends its benefits and use cases to a larger set of both customers and partners.”

CJ Desai, president, EMC emerging technologies division, said: “ViPR Controller was the perfect candidate for open source contribution. As fully transparent software focusing on storage automation, both the software and its users will benefit from community contributions. It’s an exciting time at EMC, and we’re looking forward to seeing the new ways Project CoprHD will evolve in the open source community.”

Bev Crair, VP, data center group GM, storage group, Intel Corp., said: “IT managers need a more intelligent, flexible framework for dynamically managing multi-vendor storage resources. Open solutions and standards will simplify storage management and interoperability to the benefit of end users, which is why Intel is looking forward to collaborating on the open source CoprHD project with EMC.”

John Zannos, VP cloud alliances and channel, Canonical Ltd., said: “Canonical and EMC are working together to extend the Ubuntu OpenStack Partner ecosystem with the Software-Defined Storage automation capabilities from the EMC ViPR Controller. Customers will be able to capitalize on the rapid innovation and collaboration that comes from Ubuntu OpenStack and the open source community.”