EMC's ViPR: Is it really that venomous?

There’s a lot of discussion about what EMC's ViPR is and what it isn’t. How much of this confusion is deliberate and how much is simply the normal of fog of war which pervades the storage industry? Firstly, it's a messy announcement; there’s a hotch-potch of products here, utilising IP from acquisitions and from internal EMC …

[Mk4]

EMC late to the party?

NetApp has WFA which seems to be doing something at least similar to ViPR and of course there is also CDMI to stitch together heterogeneous storage subsystems into a coherent service. Having VMware in your back pocket is a nice way to make a link between the storage and application platforms, but then again VMware has an API too, which could just makes it an orchestratee rather than an orchestrator.