John Furrier and Dave Vellante of theCUBE talked to Chad Sakac, EMC Global SE, at EMC World 2014. Sakac was there to showcase several up and coming technologies from EMC and their subsidiaries, such as XtremIO, Isolon, and Pivotal. He also talked about EMC’s work with data stacks, including the ViPR controller software, which enables the management of multivendor platforms, including those from third-party storage solutions.

The infinite flexibility that ViPR offers allows users to deploy it however they want (with ViPR software). “But, if you want it in the form of an appliance,” according to Sakac, “we have the EMC Elastic Cloud Storage appliance, which is the same software stack, but on EMC-provided commodity hardware.”

When asked about how EMC could court Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), something it has trouble with in the past, Sakac answered citing HDFS as an example. For instance, if ISVs and developers want to go with LibHDFS, vendor and developer needs can best be met by interfacing directly with LibHDFS.

And, when asked about XtremIO and its efforts in developing all flash arrays, Sakac stated that the days of that flash array’s only requirement being low latency performance were over. The heavy workloads typically found on the disk arrays of the past belong on today’s all flash arrays. XtremIO has the only flash array that has consistent low latency write behavior under all conditions.

Another area of development for EMC is the VVOLs, or Virtual Volumes, project. VVOLs helps make storage VM-centric, allowing users to snapshot, clone, or replicate from the storage array on a per VM basis. And while VVOLs has taken longer than expected to go GA, Sakac was quoted as saying, “We are looking good and with a firm committed date for VVOLs coming soon to a theater near you.”

When asked why at this point in time everyone is abuzz and exited with opportunity, Sakac responded by saying that it was exciting to be at the forefront of innovation. “Building new applications that can change the world is pretty exciting,” he said. “All of the diversity of the persistent ecosystem is fun and exciting because you get to learn, play, and do all sorts of cool stuff.”