EMC ViPR

Last updated

ViPR Controller is a software-defined storage offering from EMC Corporation announced on May 6, 2013, at EMC World. [1] [2] ViPR abstracts storage from disparate arrays into a single pool of storage capacity that "makes it easier to manage and automate its own data-storage devices and those made by competitors." [3] ViPR became generally available September 27, 2013. [4]

Contents

Description and core components

ViPR is deployed as software-only virtual appliances on ESX servers and does not require the installation of new hardware. [5]

ViPR separates the data plane from the control plane. The control plane is a software layer that manages storage; the data plane is the storage infrastructure, including networks, where storage devices perform reads and writes to disks and/or memory. [6]

ViPR enables management of multivendor platforms, including third-party storage. [7] With the ViPR Controller, users abstract physical storage into virtual storage pools, create storage categories or classes (such as high-performance file or "gold/silver/bronze" block), and automate storage delivery to users to access through a self-service catalog. [8]

Enterprise Management Associates states "the underlying idea of EMC ViPR is to deliver enterprise storage similar to the way Amazon offers virtual machines, enabling corporate developers to provision storage in a self-service manner." [9]

REST APIs provide a central access and control point to manage storage arrays or devices. REST APIs are used to integrate ViPR with third-party applications and management tools, as well as cloud stacks such as VMware, OpenStack and Microsoft Hyper-V. [10] [11]

In addition to the ViPR Controller, ViPR includes ViPR Global Data Services, which enable combinations of data type (e.g. block, file, and object), protocols. [12] EMC supports object files and Hadoop using a software overlay based on ViPR. [13] The ViPR Object Data Service exposes REST APIs for Atmos (EMC's object storage appliance), Amazon S3 and Swift (the native OpenStack object store service), which means that pools potentially use both cloud services and local [EMC] VNX and Isilon arrays. [13] ViPR's prestidigitation enables data written as objects by cloud applications to be accessible as files by legacy apps. [13]

Similar to the way ViPR provides object support, it can provision pools as a Hadoop file system (HDFS). [13]

This is significant because it means data stored in a traditional block storage VMAX array can be exposed to big data Hadoop applications without moving it to a separate file repository. Theoretically, this could allow the same set of physical data to serve as a traditional transactional database while simultaneously incorporating into a big data analytics system, in place. (Network Computing.) [13]

Architecture

ViPR is a distributed scale-out software platform. [1] It uses cloud technologies such as Cassandra, an open-source distributed database management system, to handle large amounts of data, workflows and workloads from one management point. [14]

ViPR is a software solution, not a hardware offering, running on a virtual machine. When compared to other solutions, it stands out because those are platforms that provide automation stacks whereas ViPR provides a storage platform that plugs into all of these stacks. (SiliconAngle.) [15]

Integration

In version 1.0, ViPR supports EMC arrays and storage devices and non-EMC arrays such as NetApp. [16] ViPR users have the ability to virtualize, provision, monitor, and report on storage use from additional vendor arrays integrated through third-party developed adaptors written to the ViPR REST-based APIs. [17]

See also

Related Research Articles

VMware Multi-cloud service provider for all apps

VMware, Inc. is an American cloud computing and virtualization technology company with headquarters in Palo Alto, California. VMware was the first commercially successful company to virtualize the x86 architecture.

Quantum Corporation is a data storage, management, and protection company that provides technology to store, manage, archive, and protect video and unstructured data throughout the data lifecycle. Their products are used by enterprises, media and entertainment companies, government agencies, big data companies, and life science organizations. Quantum is headquartered in San Jose, California and has offices around the world, supporting customers globally in addition to working with a network of distributors, VARs, DMRs, OEMs and other suppliers.

NetApp American technology company

NetApp, Inc. is an American hybrid cloud data services and data management company headquartered in San Jose, California. It has ranked in the Fortune 500 from 2012–2021. Founded in 1992 with an IPO in 1995, NetApp offers cloud data services for management of applications and data both online and physically.

Apache Hadoop is a collection of open-source software utilities that facilitates using a network of many computers to solve problems involving massive amounts of data and computation. It provides a software framework for distributed storage and processing of big data using the MapReduce programming model. Hadoop was originally designed for computer clusters built from commodity hardware, which is still the common use. It has since also found use on clusters of higher-end hardware. All the modules in Hadoop are designed with a fundamental assumption that hardware failures are common occurrences and should be automatically handled by the framework.

Dell EMC Isilon Network-attached storage

Dell EMC Isilon is a scale out network-attached storage platform offered by Dell EMC for high-volume storage, backup and archiving of unstructured data. It provides a cluster-based storage array based on industry standard hardware, and is scalable to 50 petabytes in a single filesystem using its FreeBSD-derived OneFS file system.

Ceph is an open-source software-defined storage platform that implements object storage on a single distributed computer cluster and provides 3-in-1 interfaces for object-, block- and file-level storage. Ceph aims primarily for completely distributed operation without a single point of failure, scalability to the exabyte level, and to be freely available. Since version 12, Ceph does not rely on other filesystems and can directly manage HDDs and SSDs with its own storage backend BlueStore and can completely self reliantly expose a POSIX filesystem.

Microsoft Azure Cloud computing service created by Microsoft

Microsoft Azure, often referred to as Azure, is a cloud computing service operated by Microsoft for application management via Microsoft-managed data centers. It provides software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and supports many different programming languages, tools, and frameworks, including both Microsoft-specific and third-party software and systems.

EMC VPLEX is a virtual computer data storage product introduced by EMC Corporation in May 2010. VPLEX implements a distributed "virtualization" layer within and across geographically disparate Fibre Channel storage area networks and data centers.

OpenStack Cloud computing software

OpenStack is a free, open standard cloud computing platform. It is mostly deployed as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) in both public and private clouds where virtual servers and other resources are made available to users. The software platform consists of interrelated components that control diverse, multi-vendor hardware pools of processing, storage, and networking resources throughout a data center. Users manage it either through a web-based dashboard, through command-line tools, or through RESTful web services.

EMC Atmos is a cloud storage services platform developed by EMC Corporation. Atmos can be deployed as either a hardware appliance or as software in a virtual environment. The Atmos technology uses an object storage architecture designed to manage petabytes of information and billions of objects across multiple geographic locations as a single system.

Pure Storage is an American publicly traded technology company headquartered in Mountain View, California, United States. It develops all-flash data storage hardware and software products. Pure Storage was founded in 2009 and developed its products in stealth mode until 2011. Afterwards, the company grew in revenues by about 50% per quarter and raised more than $470 million in venture capital funding, before going public in 2015. Initially, Pure Storage developed the software for storage controllers and used generic flash storage hardware. Pure Storage finished developing its own proprietary flash storage hardware in 2015.

Software-defined storage (SDS) is a marketing term for computer data storage software for policy-based provisioning and management of data storage independent of the underlying hardware. Software-defined storage typically includes a form of storage virtualization to separate the storage hardware from the software that manages it. The software enabling a software-defined storage environment may also provide policy management for features such as data deduplication, replication, thin provisioning, snapshots and backup.

Network functions virtualization (NFV) is a network architecture concept that leverages the IT virtualization technologies to virtualize entire classes of network node functions into building blocks that may connect, or chain together, to create and deliver communication services.

Data defined storage is a marketing term for managing, protecting, and realizing value from data by uniting application, information and storage tiers. This is achieved through a process of unification, where users, applications and devices gain access to a repository of captured metadata that empowers organizations to access, query and manipulate the critical components of the data to transform it into information, while providing a flexible and scalable platform for storage of the underlying data. The technology abstracts the data entirely from the storage, allowing full transparent access to users.

Object storage is a computer data storage that manages data as objects, as opposed to other storage architectures like file systems which manages data as a file hierarchy, and block storage which manages data as blocks within sectors and tracks. Each object typically includes the data itself, a variable amount of metadata, and a globally unique identifier. Object storage can be implemented at multiple levels, including the device level, the system level, and the interface level. In each case, object storage seeks to enable capabilities not addressed by other storage architectures, like interfaces that are directly programmable by the application, a namespace that can span multiple instances of physical hardware, and data-management functions like data replication and data distribution at object-level granularity.

Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration system for automating software deployment, scaling, and management. Google originally designed Kubernetes, but the Cloud Native Computing Foundation now maintains the project.

Dell Technologies PowerFlex Software-defined storage product

Dell Technologies PowerFlex, is a commercial software-defined storage product from Dell Technologies that creates a server-based storage area network (SAN) from local server storage using x86 servers. It converts this direct-attached storage into shared block storage than runs over an IP-based network.

ONTAP or Data ONTAP or Clustered Data ONTAP (cDOT) or Data ONTAP 7-Mode is NetApp's proprietary operating system used in storage disk arrays such as NetApp FAS and AFF, ONTAP Select and Cloud Volumes ONTAP. With the release of version 9.0, NetApp decided to simplify the Data ONTAP name and removed word "Data" from it and remove 7-Mode image, therefore, ONTAP 9 is successor from Clustered Data ONTAP 8.

Datera was a global enterprise software company headquartered in Santa Clara, California that developed an enterprise software-defined storage platform. Datera went into liquidation in February 2021.

References

  1. 1 2 Adshead, Antony (6 May 2013). "EMC unveils ViPR software-defined storage platform" . Computer Weekly. Retrieved 4 December 2013.
  2. ↑ Adshead, Antony (8 May 2013). "EMC ViPR software-defined storage: Why, and can it succeed?" . Computer Weekly. Retrieved 4 December 2013.
  3. ↑ Bass, Dina (6 May 2013). "EMC Introduces ViPR Storage Software to Manage Multiple Devices". Bloomberg.com. Retrieved 4 December 2013.
  4. ↑ Donnelly, Caroline (4 September 2013). "EMC confirms release date for ViPR storage management controller". ITPro. Retrieved 4 December 2013.
  5. ↑ Heath, Nick (6 May 2013). "EMC targets the scale-out datacentre with ViPR". ZDNet. Retrieved 4 December 2013.
  6. ↑ "ViPR drill-down: Data plane and control plane". Web site article. SearchStorage. Retrieved 4 December 2013.
  7. ↑ Latamore, Bert (1 October 2013). "EMC Releases ViPR, Supports EMC and NetApp, Structured and Graph Data". DevopsAngle. Retrieved 4 December 2013.
  8. ↑ "EMC ViPR Software-Defined Storage Platform Available". StorageNewsletter.com. 5 September 2013. Retrieved 4 December 2013.
  9. ↑ "EMC ViPR: Software Defined Storage with No Hardware Required" (PDF). Analyst report. EMC.com. Retrieved 4 December 2013.
  10. ↑ Lucchesi, Ray. "EMC ViPR virtues & vexations, but no virtualization". Blog post. RayOnStorage Blog. Retrieved 4 December 2013.
  11. ↑ Dotson, Kyt (9 May 2013). "EMC's ViPR Fits Nicely into the API Management Ecosystem for Solutions #EMCWorld" . Retrieved 4 December 2013.
  12. ↑ "Simple. Extensible. Open" (PDF). White paper. EMC. Retrieved 4 December 2013.
  13. 1 2 3 4 5 Marko, Kurt (6 May 2013). "EMC ViPR Goes All In on Software-Defined Storage". Network Computing. Retrieved 4 December 2013.
  14. ↑ Hogan, Cormac. "A closer look at EMC ViPR". 4 November 2013. CormacHogan.com. Retrieved 4 December 2013.
  15. ↑ Craft, Valentina (2 June 2013). "How ViPR Simplifies Data Management". SiliconAngle. Retrieved 4 December 2013.
  16. ↑ Matchett, Mike. "Storage Virtualization Meets Software Defined Storage: EMC ViPR 1.0". Blog post. Taneja Group . Retrieved 4 December 2013.
  17. ↑ Sverdlik, Yevgeniy (31 July 2013). "EMC AND NETAPP – A SOFTWARE-DEFINED STORAGE BATTLE". Datacenter Dynamics. Archived from the original on 20 June 2014. Retrieved 4 December 2013.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.