EMC open sources more storage software

EMC, recently bought by Dell, has launched an open source project focused on making the management of commodity storage hardware easier.

Originally launched as Project OnRack in May, RackHD is an open source physical hardware management and orchestration (M&O) layer that automates discovery, description, provisioning and programming across a broad range of commodity servers, switches and storage.

According to EMC, the technology provides an API as a component in a larger orchestration system or creates a user interface for managing hardware services, regardless of the underlying hardware in place.

It said that this would help firms accelerate their deployment of modern applications that rely on large numbers of commodity servers and heterogeneous infrastructure.

Its CoprHD automation software has also been open sourced, as has its Project Rex-Ray technology.

CoprHD centralises commodity storage into a "simple and extensible platform", and the new CoprHD Community made its first official release with CoprHD 2.4 to include new features, projects, community contributors and a new licensing switch to Apache License, Version 2.0.

The latest version expands the scope of CoprHD to include EMC ECS object storage, as well as a new REST API for EMC XtremIO 4.0 software.

EMC's open source community for CoprHD has also developed a Southbound Software Development Kit (SDK) designed to allow storage vendors and other third parties to more easily add support for other storage systems to CoprHD.

Students at Oregon State University are developing the first plugin using the SouthBound SDK for a new EMC ScaleIO driver.

EMC said that this will eventually replace the ScaleIO driver in the current release and will serve as a test case for further development of the SouthBound SDK.

The company also announced a new release of its REX-Ray storage orchestration engine, containing a variety of new updates through community contribution including expanded storage platform support for GCE (Google Compute Engine) as well as EMC Isilon and EMC VMAX storage systems.

John Roese, senior vice president and CTO of EMC, said his firm hoped "that by making these technologies open and accessible that our collective efforts with the development community will benefit a broad range of organisations and applications".