Although its merger into Dell Inc. is still about a year from completion, EMC Corp. is already starting to redraw the competitive lines of the data center. The company took another step outside its home turf in the storage layer today with the launch of a new open-source project called RackHD that aims to provide a centralized API for administrating  the growing variety of commodity hardware finding use among enterprises. The technology offers the same value proposition as the “composable infrastructure” model that rival Hewlett-Packard Enterprise has been touting for the last six months.

The vendor introduced the first implementation of the architecture last week in the form of a hyperconverged appliance called HPE Synergy that likewise exposes a unified programming interface to help manage the servers, storage and networking equipment included inside. The API shares RackHD’s goal of making it easier to configure and provision disparate resources that historically had to be handled individually but does not currently go very far beyond Hewlett-Packard Enterprise’s own hardware, whereas EMC is focusing on third party gear from the outset.

The project offers support for a variety of x86 servers on launch that is set to be extended to switches in the foreseeable future to allow computing and network resources to be managed in the same place. The integration effort will likely place a particular emphasis on equipment from Dell, which competes with HPE in both segments and offers a unified administration platform of its own that will be able to plug into RackHD to take advantage of its capabilities. The commodity storage component of a customer’s environments, meanwhile, can be handled using EMC’s ViPR management stack.

The open-source edition of the platform, CoprHD, also received an update as part of today’s launch that introduces integration with the company’s Elastic Cloud Storage appliances and the latest iteration of its XtremIO scale-out flash array series. Third party vendors can extend that support to their own hardware using a new development kit released in conjunction that is already finding use as part of a student project at the University of Oregon to add compatibility with EMC’s ScaleIO software for managing server-attached storage.

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