Las Vegas: EMC is hoping that its ViPR storage platform will catch the attention of third-party vendors who want to integrate their products.

Speaking to V3 at the EMC World conference, president of advanced software Amitabh Srivastava said that the company was seeking to build an ecosystem around ViPR rather than keep the platform closed off as an entirely proprietary offering. The company is seeking to balance its open approach while still offering a focused enterprise platform.

“The public cloud did try to solve this problem but they simplified it substantially, they homogenised,” said.

“If you are really going to build a system for the enterprise, you have to go and really tackle the hard problems of storage.”

Unveiled by the company earlier in the day, ViPR aims to provide a software-defined storage platform which can manage storage clouds both on-premise and remotely. The platform will support both EMC’s own storage appliances and those offered by outside vendors.

Srivastava said that the company also hopes its offering will catch the imaginations of firms who will find new ways to integrate with their own products.

“We are going to open up the APIs,” he said,”anyone can build the adaptor, you are not at our mercy in any way.

“We want to really build an ecosystem where anyone can do it.”

In addition to supporting storage appliances, the company is also working to get ViPR on emerging platforms, such as HDFS and cloud computing initiatives with OpenStack integration. While service providers are the obvious early target for ViPR. Srivastava noted that the platform could also help some of the smallest vendors bring their own products to market.

“It is a great tool for startups, because startups have all these cool ideas, but now they don’t have to worry about all the grungy details of how you manage these arrays,” he explained.

“These startups can come in and build right on top of ViPR.”

Las Vegas: EMC has launched ViPR, a software-defined storage platform aimed at helping firms better manage virtualised storage.

The company said that the ViPR platform would allow firms to pool multiple hardware units and appliances into a single system which can be centrally controlled. In doing so, the company believes it can better enable firms to manage private clouds.

“What we are essentially doing is providing a layer of software that is going to allow you to manage our existing arrays, third-party arrays and, increasingly, commodity storage,” EMC executive vice president for product operations and marketing Jeremy Burton told attendees at the company’s annual EMC World conference.

The company said that ViPR would operate with two different ‘planes’ for storage management. The control plane will handle high-level management and automation, allowing administrators to perform basic management tasks.

Additionally, ViPR will provide customers with a second, lower-level management layer known as the data plane The company said that the plane would allow for interaction with individual blocks of data, giving a more granular control for administration and management of databases.

Burton said that as applications have changed their approach to handling and utilising object storage, a new system such as the data plane is needed to adapt.

“We think a lot of the new apps that are going to be developed are gong to be built in a different way,” he said.

“We need new controillers for these new content types.”

ViPR is currently undergoing closed tests with customers and is set for general availability in the second half of the year.

Central to the company’s philosophy with ViPR is a push for horizontal integration and the ability to combine multiple platforms from multiple vendors. Chief executive Joe Tucci said that EMC is looking to present its platforms as a counter to the vertical integration approach of rivals such as Oracle.

“Some companies say; use my applications, my operating system, my middleware, right down to the hardware. We are doing it very differently,” Tucci said.

“Yes, we re going to put those technologies together, but you can also piece-pick, you can partner in any place on the chain.”

The government has officially adopted a “cloud-first” policy at both a central department level and among the wider public sector as part of the ongoing overhaul of the government’s use of IT to drive savings and improve efficiencies.

The government had announced its intention to do this back in March but has now made this a central tenet of its strategy. Whitehall will expect departments to purchase from the G-Cloud as the main resource, with departments having to make a case for any non-cloud deployments.

Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude said: “Many government departments already use G-Cloud, but IT costs are still too high. One way we can reduce them is to accelerate the adoption of cloud across the public sector to maximise its benefits. The cloud-first policy will embed the skills a modern civil service needs to meet the demands of 21st-century digital government and help us get ahead in the global race.”

As part of the announcement, the government has also launched the third version of the G-Cloud framework, adding 368 new firms to the programme, bringing the total number accredited to sell services to the public sector to 708, of which over 80 percent are SMEs.

The government is hoping to use the G-Cloud to boost spending with SMEs after years of public sector IT being dominated by large firms on hugely expensive contracts. G-Cloud programme director Denise McDonagh said the to date the majority of the £18m spend on the CloudStore has been with SMEs, and hopes are that this will continue to rise.
 
“This is still small relative to overall government IT spend, and the transition to widespread purchasing of IT services as a commodity won’t happen overnight,” she said.

“The adoption of a cloud-first policy will give added impetus for Whitehall and the wider public sector to move in this direction – complementing our ongoing work to encourage cloud adoption and to help buyers adapt to this way of purchasing IT, which is already showing results.”

Earlier this year the government celebrated the one-year anniversary of G-Cloud’s launch, although industry watchers said uptake on the platform remains minimal. The government will be hoping its new policy changes that.

Remote support specialist iYogi is launching a cloud computing platform designed to let companies and service providers deliver their own remote management services.

The company said that its Digital Services Cloud customer relationship management (CRM) offering would allow customers to utilise the iYogi support network in their own services. Based on the Yogi support network, the service will allow enterprise and home service providers to offer in-house branded support for end-user PCs.

Larry Gordon, iYogi president of global channel sales, told V3 that the cloud service is a response to demand the company has seen from its partners to open up various components of the iYogi support network, which utilises a combination on locally-installed software and a remote support network to allow technicians to diagnose and repair systems through the cloud.

“The platform we run our comp on has been improving over the last five years,” Gordon explained.

“Some customers want to just buy that for less.”

Though Digital Services Cloud will technically be part of a cloud CRM space dominated by Salesforce.com, the company hopes that the service will become a more specialised platform, fine-tuned specifically for the process of remotely managing PC maintenance. Service providers would be able to increase revenues by offering their support services using the iYogi platform and network.

“What we layer on top of that is this enormous knowledge base built on particular analysis of what tech support is,” Gordon said.

“It layers in that entire layer of big data we have collected on how to monitor these technology problems.”

The company also plans to remain flexible with its pricing. Gordon said that in addition to the traditional cloud subscription offering, customers can opt to purchase access to platform with a one-time fee or pay based on number of users or a portion of the revenues they draw from their own deployments.

VMware sees the hybrid cloud as a key step towards the holy grail of delivering IT as a service (ITaas) for its customers, but organisations must fully automate their own data centres before they can make that step.

At the VMware Forum in London, chief technologist Joe Baguley outlined VMware’s view of the hybrid cloud, and how it proposes to take customers on the journey towards implementing an ITaaS strategy.

Baguley said: “IT is struggling to keep up in the modern era. There’s a growing chasm between the line of business that wants to be agile and the IT department that wants to keep control of everything.”

The solution to this is not only to fully automate the data centre to make it easier to deploy new services, according to VMware, but also to exploit publicly available cloud computing services and integrate these with your on-premise IT.

“We think you should be looking at using public cloud as a natural extension of your own data centre. It should be free and easy to move workloads between those clouds as it is to move them from one rack to another in your data centre,” Baguley said.

However, as Baguley conceded, many firms are a long way from realising this vision, and are still using VMware technology for server consolidation, if they have even got that far.

“The journey to ITaaS is one that many are just beginning. I still get IT guys coming up to me and asking how to virtualise their servers,” he said.

However, if organisations need a good reason to start down this path, VMware can give it to them; its customers have so far saved an estimated total of $10 billion through server virtualisation, Baguley claimed.

“And as you continue to build out the software-defined data centre, we believe you can turn those cost savings back into investments in the business,” he said.

The software-defined data centre is VMware’s existing cloud computing pitch to customers; virtualise everything and then build policy-based automation and orchestration layers so that departmental users do not have to wait for weeks to get a new service provisioned.

VMware customers can get there gradually by incrementally adding layers on top of vSphere, according to Baguley. “Or for those who can’t wait, you can jump straight in with vCloud suite as a single managed package,” he said.

Meanwhile VMware is set to launch on May 21st its vCloud Hybrid Service, which will see partners offer public cloud services based on VMware’s platform.

This will enable VMware customers to realise the hybrid cloud, as they should then be able to move workloads seamlessly between their on-premise vCloud infrastructure and the public cloud operated by providers such as Savvis.

“What we’re doing with partners is enabling a rentable extension to your data centre,” explained Baguley.

However, as Gartner analyst Chris Wolf warned at the time of the vCloud Hybrid Service announcement, VMware could be seen as trying to restrict the public cloud choices its customers can make.

This is a charge that VMware denies, of course, with Baguley stating that it has to be open to keep its customers happy.

“Technology has to be non-disruptive to the customer, but disruptive to the market. It has to be open to everything, even OpenStack,” he said.