Technology companies have shifted focus to forming strategic partnerships as stakeholders realize the value of collaboration and facilitating best practice discussions. One of the advantages to working with players in the same market is that supporting other platforms gives customers greater freedom in their IT choices. Nexenta, a Seagate Cloud Builder Alliance partner, recently showed its support for customer empowerment by welcoming EMC Corporation into the software-defined storage market.
“This is an exciting day for Nexenta and our solution partners,” said Nexenta CEO Mark Lockareff. “Having a company like EMC enter our market certainly validates what we have been saying all along; namely, that the old storage model is broken. Customers deserve to have a choice when it comes to selecting the hardware solutions that best fit their needs, and not be held hostage by their primary storage vendor.”
Software-defined technology has emerged at both the network and storage level as a way to give customers the ability to use the hardware they want without losing investment in software. Separating physical drives and firmware often results in long-term savings and performance benefits, since customers have more control over which hardware components they use. The emphasis on interoperability and choice has gained momentum among cloud infrastructure providers, particularly with the increasing popularity of platforms like OpenStack.
EMC’s entry into the SDS market comes with the announcement of its ViPR platform. According to to The VAR Guy, the technology communicates well with leading cloud services. By using industry-standard application programing interfaces, ViPR supports integration with VMware’s Software Defined Data Center while being interoperable with Microsoft and OpenStack. Existing storage infrastructure can be used for legacy workload environments, while ViPR’s new Object Data Services are designed for modern IT tasks.
