EMC ViPR as a Part of a SDDC

At EMC World 2013, EMC announced ViPR as the answer to storage within the software defined data center. ViPR presents multiple types of storage while segmenting the control plane from the data plane. In addition, ViPR is a head end, fronting traditional storage arrays as an automation and control point and does not replace any array, but, possibly, makes it easier to use those arrays as we move to the software defined data center. Yet, ViPR also raises several questions about how storage will be accessed by the software defined data center, is ViPR the future or is there more to happen?

Is Automation Killing The Engineering?

Is automation killing the engineering? When MTV first appeared on air, the first video it played was, “Video Killed the Radio Star.” Fast forward a few decades and I have to wonder if automation is killing the engineering. In the early days of virtualization the administrators were expected to be proficient via the command line and to be honest if you wanted to really understand how things worked, command line administration was an absolute must have skill. Virtualization has evolved from those early days with more and more features and services getting added to the infrastructure that the need for the vast command line skills seem to be fading as the technology continues to mature. Looking forward where cloud computing is working to achieve complete and total automation, I have to wonder how administrators will handle the stress of getting issues resolved when automation is not an option.

What is the Future of Virtual Storage in a Software Defined Data Center?

What is the future of virtual storage in a Software Defined Data Center (SDDC)? As more and more technology gets moved from hardware to software in the SDDC, I have to wonder which direction virtual storage will go.

If we use networking as an example, the technology has evolved from setting up local virtual switches on each of the hosts to a virtual distributed switch (VDS) model where all the individual host-level virtual switches are abstracted into a single large VDS that spans multiple hosts at the Datacenter level. In this design, the data plane remains local to each VDS, but the management plane is centralized with VMware vCenter Server acting as the control point for all configured VDS instances.