Towards the end of 2016, Dell EMC announced that it would contribute its CoprHD SouthBound SDK (SB SDK) to the Linux Foundation’s OpenSDS project.

This is a significant move on the part of Dell EMC. It extends Dell EMC’s commitment to the open source world, and opens the ability for third-parties to write drivers and code that can be leveraged by Dell EMC’s ViPR software-defined storage solution.

OpenSDS is supported by some notable storage vendors including HDS and Fujitsu. Since the code is from Dell EMC, the drivers for Dell EMC storage products are being made available to the open source.

Neuralytix believes this is a strategically positive move by Dell EMC as it allows more vendors to be able to take advantage of its legacy storage systems. At the same time, Dell EMC can leverage the open source community to build drivers for it to support non-EMC storage systems. This represents a win-win to both Dell EMC and the rest of the community. It will be interesting to see how this develops: will there be more development around bringing third-party legacy storage systems to CoprHD, or will there be more deployments of CoprHD across non-legacy Dell EMC environments?

In the end, Neuralytix believes that Dell EMC will benefit greater than others, from having others develop the code necessary to support third-party legacy storage systems so that it can be managed with ViPR and CoprHD. Nonetheless, it is positive to see more vendors acknowledge the capabilities and contributions of the DevOps community to accelerate time to market, and/or to address areas that they may not be as strong in developing.