EMC confirms release date for ViPR storage management controller

EMC has confirmed its pooled storage management tool ViPR will enter general availability later this month, as part of the firm's push to help customers build web-scale datacentres.

The product was first unveiled by the storage giant at its EMC World conference in Las Vegas earlier this year, and is a core component of the vendor's software-defined datacentre strategy.

It provides users with a self-service portal where they can view available storage resources, allowing them to provision the applications and services they need.

It also allows users to pool resources from a variety of different storage arrays, including those made by rival vendors, and boasts support for standard APIs from the likes of Amazon Web Services, OpenStack and Atmos.

The product will be available to buy on 27 September, with EMC offering evaluation copies from 1 January 2014.

The product's automation element has repeatedly been flagged by EMC as an important part of its push to help enterprises build out large-scale datacentres, similar to those employed by consumer cloud companies like Facebook and Google.

Speaking at the vendor's Speed2Lead event in Milan, Italy, Jeremy Burton, executive vice president of product operations and marketing, said it should also reduce the amount of manpower required to build a datacentre on that kind of scale.

"We think it's going to enable folks, regardless of whether they're in an IT department or a service provider, to build a web-scale storage infrastructure without hiring thousands of techies to do it," he explained.

It was also suggested the product's release date was several months earlier than many were expecting.

The vendor's Speed2Lead event centres on the work EMC is doing to help enterprises take advantage of industry megatrends cloud, big data and mobile.

As well as the ViPR announcement, the company also used the event to announce the expansion of its mid-range family of VNX unified storage arrays that the company claims deliver huge performance and efficiency benefits.

It has also set out plans to be the first to market with a complete web-scale storage infrastructure for the datacentre, an initiative it has codenamed Project Nile.