EMC's ViPR: It's genius, but not as we know it, Jim

What is EMC's ViPR about? Is it really the first all-singing and all-dancing storage management and virtualisation product EMC claims it is? ViPR is a combination of a file, block and object storage virtualisation suite and a storage management product. It is broadly similar to several other storage virtualisation products, …

[EMCwatcher]

This is Exactly in LIne with My Thoughts....

I don't understand how EMC will make money with Vipr? It wont help sell their own hardware, so cross that off. How much will Vipr actually cost? And any real competitor wont be writing to the Vipr interface. So now we are left with the JBOD world. Will EMC write the interface to connect cheap storage ? Why would they unless the cost of Vipr somehow overcomes the lost revenue of an Isilon or Atmos or VNX array? Its great that EMC will write the NetApp interface to help them sell more Filers! Still not seeing the real money maker here. If EMC's own software / hardware combo isnt worth what they charge, then how is the software + JBOD gonna cut it?

One Correction - Invista was out of the data path, that was the big value AND it at least offered virtualization. But just like VPLEX, clones and snaps were promised but never appeared. Vipr isnt even promising that much. Just some FUD about automated provisioning but only for VMWare. Any AIX customers excited about Vipr ?

[Radek]

Re: This is Exactly in LIne with My Thoughts....

"Invista was out of the data path" - nope, not true. This product is long gone, so discussion is purely academic though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMC_Invista :

"Invista relies on Split-Path Architecture (SPA) to manage data flows. The intelligent switch redirects all control commands (e.g. SCSI Inquiry, Read Capacity, or Report LUNs) to a pair of redundant external controllers called Control Path Cluster (CPC), while the stream of I/O transactions flows directly from the host to the appropriate physical storage array via the intelligent switch hardware"

StorAge (also dead) was out of data path, as splitting of the IO was done in the host, via special driver

[Anonymous Coward]

Is EMC so hard to manage...

.... That you can justify paying for another EMC tool to manage the stuff more efficiently?

I'd love to see a business case justifying time spent/money saved on investing in a better that standard EMC management tool to manage EMC stuff only.