EMC has unveiled a new software-defined management tool that lets users treat storage arrays from rival vendors as a single pooled resource and draw on this to run cloud applications.
The EMC ViPR Controller is set to enter general availability during second half of this year, and was announced by the storage giant during the first day of its EMC World conference in Las Vegas.
The product provides IT admins with a self-service portal where they can view the available storage resources to provision applications and services they need.
Amitabh Srivastava, president of the advanced software division at EMC, told delegates ViPR addresses four common customer concerns.
Anytime a human touches something, it's just a matter of time until something goes wrong.
"[What users are] asking for is an effective way of monitoring opex...a seamless path to the cloud...and the last thing they want is an open environment," he said.
"They want to plug in, but not get locked into any one of those infrastructures. Those were the key things we heard consistently from all our customers."
Speaking to IT Pro, Chris Ratcliffe, vice president of marketing in the advanced software division at EMC, said ViPR will allow users to pool the resources of storage arrays made by a variety of different vendors.
This is important, he said, because many of the firm's customers operate heterogeneous storage environments that are very difficult to manage, and ViPR means many of these processes can be automated.
"Storage management is generally full of people doing the same tasks over and over again, and they're very repetitive and manual tasks," Ratcliffe explained.
"When you automate and you take out all those manual steps, you get less human intervention, and the less likely it is that something will go wrong.
"Anytime a human touches something, it's just a matter of time until something goes wrong," he added.
These automation capabilities will also allow enterprises and service providers to build large-scale datacentres and infrastructures similar to those employed by consumer cloud services.
This was a theme touched on during the event's opening keynote by former VMware chief Paul Maritz, who was recently installed as the CEO of EMC-backed Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) player Pivotal.
During the address, he urged delegates to take note of the technology strategies employed by the likes of Google, Facebook, Twitter and Amazon and use them to develop their own.
"We need to learn from the pioneers here [who are] the consumer internet giants...because the way they do IT is very different to the way the average enterprise does," said Maritz.
"[We need] to interpret it and deliver it to a broader set of people... and we need to learn from those experiences and turn them into something our customers can do."
