EMC's Project Bourne morphed into ViPR at the EMC World 2013 event at Las Vegas last week. It seems like everyone has a different take on what should be included in SDS, and my definition and implementation guidelines can be found in this report. Like other vendors, EMC is promising to revolutionize the way customers will provision, manage and create storage resources using ViPR, which will become a key component in the vendor's Software Defined Data Center strategy for virtualizing compute, networking, and storage resources.  Unlike other years, where EMC bombarded its attendees with dozens of product launches, this year's show focused almost entirely on ViPR, which makes sense given the importance of this technology. ViPR is expected to become generally available in the latter half of 2013, and like all other SDS implementations, ViPR is designed to reduce the number of administrators it takes to manage rapidly growing data repositories by using automation and self-service provisioning. So what's under ViPR's covers?

For the vast majority of Forrester customers who I have not had the pleasure of meeting, my name is Henry Baltazar and I'm the new analyst covering Storage for the I&O team. I've covered the Storage industry for over 15 years and spent the first 9 years of my career as a Technical Analyst at eWEEK/PCWeek Labs, where I was responsible for benchmarking storage systems, servers and Network Operating Systems.  

During my lab days, I tested hundreds of different products and was fortunate to witness the development and maturation of a number of key innovations such as data deduplication, WAN optimization and scale-out storage.  In the technology space "Better, Faster, Cheaper - Pick Two" used to be the design goal for many innovators, and I've seen many technologies struggle to attain two, let alone three of these goals, especially in the first few product iterations.  For example, while iSCSI was able to challenge Fibre Channel on the basis of being cheaper - despite being around for over a decade many storage professionals are still not convinced that iSCSI is faster or better.

Looking at storage technologies today, relative to processors and networking, storage has not held up its end of the bargain.  Storage needs to improve in all three vectors to either push innovation forward, or avoid being viewed as a bottleneck in the infrastructure.  At Forrester I will be looking at a number of areas of innovation which should drive enterprise storage capabilities to new heights including: