Project CoprHD, Open Source Version of ViPR Controller …

EMC Corporation announced Project CoprHD (‘copperhead’), an open source version of its ViPR Controller embracing open development and a free ‘no restrictions’ download for non-production use of its ScaleIO software.

EMC also previewed future enhancements for ScaleIO.

The world is undergoing change that is disrupting businesses, even those born of the Internet and e-business eras. This is having a dramatic effect on the expectations of consumers who expect faster, more personalized digital experiences and 24×7 access on all devices. To embrace disruption and be prepared, organizations need to redefine themselves and adopt a digital mindset. The challenge this presents for CIOs is twofold. First they must start by driving out cost from existing IT without compromising service levels, while then using those savings to innovate quickly and enable the building of new transformative and application-centric business models using open development.

This EMC news is focused on the second challenge.

Open source software is becoming a focal strategy for enterprise organizations to retain control of their business and innovate quickly to respond to changing demands in the market. Open source software and open development practices enable organizations to avoid platform lock-ins, participate in projects and modify software to suit their needs while enjoying the benefits and access to a community of like-minded developers. Commercial software developers can benefit through leveraging an ecosystem of developer partners to help stimulate community-driven innovation around their existing platforms.

Project CoprHD Offers Choice, Flexibility, Security and Transparency
Since its launch in 2013, customers, partners and industry analysts have hailed ViPR Controller as a vendor-neutral control point for software-defined storage automation. It is storage automation software that centralizes and transforms EMC and third-party storage into a simple, extensible and open platform and EMC will continue to sell the commercial version of Project CoprHD, the ViPR Controller, as a fully supported offering. ViPR Controller is offered as a key enabler for Third Platform applications that require integrated, next-generation scale-out storage architectures.

Project CoprHD makes the code for ViPR Controller – all the storage automation and control functionality – open for community-driven development.

Planned for availability on GitHub next month, Project CoprHD is expected to be licensed under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 (MPL 2.0) and enables customers, partners, developers and other storage vendors to access, expand and contribute to Project CoprHD’s breadth and depth of features and functionality.

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.

Building a developer community is crucial to the future success of EMC’s software-defined storage and storage automation and management products. To ensure support for this effort, EMC is investing engineering and community resources to contribute and support Project CoprHD. In addition, EMC also recently launched EMC {code}, the Community Onramp for Developer Enablement. It is a technical evangelism team focused on enabling the DevOps community with EMC technology by contributing to open projects and DevOps events. Project CoprHD and EMC {code} are two essential components to EMC’s overall open source strategy.

Free ScaleIO Version Offers Unlimited Capacity
and Time for Non-Production Use
ScaleIO offers a software-only solution that turns existing server storage into shared block storage to help empower IT organizations with flexible and scalable performance and capacity on demand. This hardware-agnostic, software-defined converged storage platform has been designed with enterprise-grade resiliency to power next-generation applications requiring hyper-scale and lower operational cost. Its scale-out server SAN architecture enables customers to grow from just a few servers to thousands of servers with linear performance scalability.

EMC also announced the ScaleIO Product Community on the EMC Community Network (ECN). The ScaleIO Product Community is designed to be an interactive information exchange platform for technical support, questions for ScaleIO experts, product documentation, downloads, user guides, FAQs and training. Through this community, EMC will allow customers, partners and developers to download EMC ScaleIO software for free for non-production use, without restrictions on time or capacity. Users will experience EMC’s philosophy of ‘free and frictionless’ downloads with a few clicks – no registration required. This is designed to enable customers to create full-fledged ScaleIO environments for free non-production use before upgrading to a paid production license.

EMC Previews New ScaleIO Enterprise-Grade Features
EMC also previewed future enterprise-grade enhancements for ScaleIO to power critical business applications and large-scale, rapidly growing infrastructures.

The ScaleIO enhancements, which will be made available later this year, are planned to deliver new features to meet the emerging needs of enterprise customers and service providers deploying Third Platform applications. These enhancements will expand upon ScaleIO’s enterprise-grade capabilities to support strategic priorities for IT organizations and help assure the availability of the applications that power their business. New features are planned to address the areas of HA, security, resiliency and supportability.

EMC also anounced a new deployment option and alternative consumption choice for ScaleIO – customers can now choose to utilize ScaleIO as a software-only solution from EMC, or as a fully integrated Hyper-Converged Rackscale System through VCE. A VxRack system leveraging EMC ScaleIO software-defined storage offers flexible choice of hypervisor, including the vSphere, or KVM or bare metal, enabling enterprises and service providers to simplify the deployment of next-generation scale-out mobile, cloud and distributed tier 2 applications.

Urban Konrad, head of cloud technology management, Swisscom SA, said: “ScaleIO enabled us to build a transversal layer between different platforms and leverage commodity hardware in an open and agile way – a must for our cloud initiative. The scalability, linear performance and non-disruptive life cycle options in ScaleIO enables Swisscom to leverage the promise of Software-Defined Storage, and make a real impact with management of our cloud storage resources. EMC has brought Software-Defined Storage to the big leagues with this groundbreaking software.“

David J. Sampson, EVP, Itrica Corp., said: “ScaleIO expands our storage resources without expanding our footprint-a must for our organization. The free and frictionless download brings the benefits of ScaleIO to companies hoping to realize the promise of Software-Defined Storage, enabling them to realize hyperconvergence, scalability, redundancy, and performance. Software-defined storage is a must-have in our data center, and Itrica’s 18+ months of testing and production use continues to prove that ScaleIO is a bulletproof solution.“

Jeremy Burton, president, products and marketing, EMC, said: “For anyone left confused, today’s announcements prove this is not your father’s EMC. By offering access to Project CoprHD, the open source version of EMC ViPR Controller and free downloads of EMC ScaleIO – two key enabling pieces of our Software-Defined Storage portfolio – EMC has turned a corner by delving more deeply into open, collaborative software development with our customers, partners, developers and competitors. This represents a massive shift in our strategy that we believe will help accelerate our customers’ efforts to develop new application-centric business models.“