Ask the Expert: EMC ViPR Controller Open Source Development Model via Project CoprHD

Good Morning!  Thank you for joining our Ask the Experts session. Our SMEs are now standing by to take all your questions. Let’s make of this thread an informative and productive resource so that it could help ECN members today and in the weeks to come.

At this point I would like to get this discussion kicked off. Your questions are now welcome!

Hello and welcome to our Ask the Expert event today, which is focused on the recent EMC ViPR Controller announcement at EMC World…EMC ViPR Controller will now be developed in the open source community, code named CoprHD.  This discussion will help you better understand what open source is, and what this means to EMC and to the future of ViPR Controller.

So let’s get started.  First let’s start by our subject matter experts to describe how they became involved with this project?

Hi Julio Colon here...

I became involved in the project given my long time involved with ViPR.  I have touched many areas of the product (provisioning, security, UI and APIs), the later been the one that have got me in front of many large customers in need for a solution like the one we are offering with ViPR.  I got asked to help with CoprHD and I think is one of the most exiting news we delivered at EMC World.  CoprHD is what has been needed for a very long time in the storage work.  A single open solution that will remove the complexity of managing heterogeneous storage arrays.   I can't wait to see what the development community will do to make storage management one of the most attractive area to be involved today.

Hello all -

I was very excited to see this announced during the keynote at EMC World, great decision!

I'm wondering if the final decisions have been made about exactly which ViPR components are included in CoprHD.  Are things like the SMI-S provider going to be open source as well?  If so, what's NOT included?

Thanks,

Mike Horgan

We're pretty much opening up everything in the controller that we can.

The SMI-S provider is not part of ViPR so we can't open that up. We'll open the source for the SMI-S driver, which is part of ViPR.

Also, there are a few things that won't work the same since it wouldn't really apply. For example, licensing, and the call home functionality should not be the same as in ViPR since this is CoprHD. Also, we can't legally give out libraries that we use that are not open source.

I'll make sure to update the FAQ in the wiki (https://coprhd.atlassian.net/wiki/) and add a full list of anything that doesn't end up being open for whatever reason.

Thanks!

Great, thanks Ura. It sounds like EMC is really going about this the right way.  And the wiki page looks like it will be a great resource as well.

Best Regards,

Mike Horgan

Ura,

is this EMC's first "official" foray into open source realm ? How do you perform QA on code committed by outside contributors ?  Security concerns ?

Thank you guys for the awesome questions.

I wanted to ask about the name Project CoprHD.  What is CoprHD?

CoprHD (pronounced copperhead) is basically the open source version of ViPR Controller. We wanted to differentiate it enough so that there's no confusion with ViPR controller, but it's still a snake, so they are at least related to each other.

In June, we're going to take the ViPR controller code and copy it over to our CoprHD GitHub.com repository. This will then allow anyone to take a look at the code, download it, install it, add to it, etc...

Thanks!

Yeah, this is pretty much our first go at it.

As far as QA and security, these are definitely some of the first areas that we'll need to figure out as a community. One thing we're doing is setting up a continuous integration environment so that at the very least, pull requests will have to pass some level of sanity tests before they are merged.

As new members and companies come into the project, they can also have CI infrastructures to run tests against. If all the member companies run all tests against their own hardware, then we get even better coverage.

On top of that, I'm sure some of our contributors will be from QA groups across the different companies that join and will be able to contribute testing as well.

At some point in the future I'd love to be able to have a dedicated lab in the open that we can all use. I'm probably dreaming here, but hey, you never know.

Needless to say, EMC will always do a full QA cycle on any code that is pulled up to ViPR. Any issues found and fixed will of course be contributed back to CoprHD.

Thanks!

Thanks Ura!

mr.jc

Have you been involved in an open source project in the past?  Why is the EMC engineering team excited about development moving into open source?

I have worked with Open Source Software (OSS) licensing more than its development in the past. It happened back when EMC started to use it in our tools and we needed to create a software to track which OSS licenses where use in which applications. It was a good experience and exposed me to OSS concepts. I am a Software Engineer and the use of OSS across so many industries is really exciting news and it’s really an achievement that we are all in one way or other contributing blocks of code to build larger and more complex solutions to our challenges.

There are some new tools that we'll need to get used to, but they are not the majority. For the most part, we'll be using the same tools in CoprHD that we use internally. For example: JIRA, Jenkins, and Confluence.

I'm sure the processes will continue to evolve as the community grows and morphs. We'll be adding a section in the wiki to explain all the processes and keep things updated as they evolve. Stay tuned.

Regarding the culture change, yeah, there may be a little bit of shock as is common with any big changes in general. But, we're going into this with out eyes open and willing to learn. It is all very exciting! And, it is my hope and expectation that we will learn from the community as we go.

Thanks!

does it mean you have to upgrade your development tools, your development processes and procedures ? Is that a big culture shock going for closed source environment to OSS model ?