The biggest bombshell of EMC World 2015 dropped Tuesday morning when the storage giant pledged to release the code for its software-defined management stack under a free license that will enable unrestricted use and modification. The move represents a bold attempt by EMC to differentiate itself from rival vendors with similar technologies for decoupling capacity and the underlying infrastructure.

Opening up ViPR, which launched in 2013 with the promise of providing such abstraction across the full gamut of enterprise storage systems, promotes that goal in two ways. It first and foremost creates a channel to the development community, the driving force behind many of the most important trends to have emerged in the data center over recent years, from OpenStack through containers to Hadoop.

EMC hopes to take advantage of that disruptive potential through a recently launched community initiative aimed at encouraging greater external involvement in its most strategic software efforts. Any improvements to CoprHD, as the new community release of ViPR is referred to, made through the program will help strengthen its value proposition.

That is set to benefit mainly the commercial version, which will presumably incorporate enhancements contributed from the ecosystem. After all, most of the traditional organizations that EMC is targeting are much more likely to choose supported software for their production implementations over deploying and maintaining the open-source code on their own. CoprHD will, however, provide that segment with an economic way to try out the capabilities of the platform.

That should help broaden the reach of the technology and thereby increase the number of prospects for the company’s sales representatives to turn into paying customers, which is also the purpose of the new the free edition of its ScaleIO software, which was introduced in conjunction. Gained through EMC’s acquisition of the startup of the same name for $200 million around the same time ViPR made its original debut, the software offers to aggregate server-side drives into a highly-reliable pool of block storage.

Joining the release is an online exchange that the company says provides a platform for customers to seek out support from its technicians and find ancillary material such as documentation and installation guides. Along with CoprHD, the service heralds an intensifying effort from EMC to engage members of its extended ecosystem as the open-source movement assumes an increasingly important role in driving purchasing decisions among enterprise technology buyers. The competition will no doubt follow close behind.
Photo courtesy of EMC