EMC has made its ViPR controller product available for free through an open source licence in response to customer demand.
The software-defined storage product will become the first software solution belonging to EMC to become an open source project, dubbed Project CoprHD (pronounced Copperhead).
It will be made available on GitHub for community-driven development under the Mozilla Public License (MPL 2.0).
This includes all the storage automation and control functionality that separates the data and control planes for operation.
Among other firms supporting the initiative are SAP, Verizon and Intel.
Speaking at EMC World, the firm said it wants to encourage all storage vendors to contribute to Project CoprHD, "further expanding the ecosystem and embracing open and standard APIs".
With the project, "customers, partners, service providers and system integrators can develop new service catalogue offerings with automated workflows to meet their customers' specific needs", said EMC.
"Building a strong developer community is crucial to the future success of EMC's software-defined storage and storage automation and management products," the firms added in a statement.
Both Project CoprHD and ViPR Controller will share core features and functionality, but ViPR Controller customers will get support and services from EMC.
Meanwhile, any changes made to Project CoprHD by the community will get fed back into ViPR, if EMC likes them.
EMC also offered its ScaleIO software as a free download for non-production use, without any time or capacity restrictions. It said the move would allow customers to create full-fledged ScaleIO environments for free non-production use before upgrading to a paid production licence.
"For anyone left confused, today's announcements prove this is not your father's EMC," said Jeremy Burton, president of products and marketing at 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."
