Companies today are facing an increasingly competitive environment and continue to look for points of differentiation in their markets. The SAN/Storage continues to play a vital role in enabling businesses to adopt new technologies and applications to help them grow.  Software Defined Storage (SDS) / Software Defined Network (SDN) is positioned as one of the approach to gain efficiency and increase service velocity in the data center. SDS/SDN helps customers to keep up with the pace of change made possible by the virtualization of other data center resources and is a perfect complement to SDN.

EMC introduced their Software-defined storage, EMC ViPR - that offers a revolutionary approach to storage automation and management to transform existing heterogeneous storage into a simple, extensible, and open virtual storage platform.

Cisco is working closely with EMC to integrate Cisco MDS 9000 platform with EMC ViPR Software Defined Storage platforms. Cisco MDS 9000 provides industry leading performance, reliability, multiprotocol storage and supports extensive set of open API -those set of open API's enable tight integration with EMC ViPR, as a result provide operational flexibility and agility by pooling storage assets, centralizing storage management, automating provisioning and delivering open API's for our common customers.

To learn more, please view this video -where Rajeev Bhardwaj, Vice President of Product Management of Data Center explains the tight integration between Cisco MDS and EMC Viper and helps our common customers to simplify storage.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUkUeIBXaAE&feature=share&list=PLbssOJyyvHuW1TAxMzVd8PF4aQPZk5Mb6

EMC ViPR SDS Platform Highlights.

• ViPR is EMC's platform that turns storage infrastructure into a simple, extensible and open software-defined storage solution.
• EMC ViPR, enables their partners to extend programmability of virtual environments into storage thus providing customers with more choices.
• Key features that SDS bring to the table
  • Abstracting storage from physical arrays into a single pool,
  • Centralization of storage management across virtual infrastructure,
  • Automating provisioning, orchestration and change management
  • Delivering self-service access to storage on existing infrastructure

EMC ViPR, provides an open, API-driven storage platform and integrates well with Cisco MDS storage networks.  The customers can start using this solution today with more advance features and functionalities planned for future releases.  The integrated solution enables Global Data Services that span block, file and object storage and provide a seamless scalable and open platform to dynamically manage and deploy end to end solutions.

To learn more:

EMC ViPR : http://www.emc.com/data-center-management/vipr/index.htm

CISCO MDS: www.cisco.com/go/mds

Tony Antony
Cisco DC Products and solutions Marketing
Sr Marketing Manager DC Solutions