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By Stephen Lawson

April 30, 2014 06:34 AM ET

IDG News Service - EMC will give users a peek at its progress toward software-defined storage next week at EMC World in Las Vegas, demonstrating a virtualized VNX array developed under a program called Project Liberty.

The demonstration will show software from the company's VNX hybrid array running separately from the array itself, pointing toward the ability to deploy EMC storage smarts on less specialized hardware. EMC hasn't given many details about Project Liberty, which will be showcased in a section of the show called Area 52, but it said it's going through evaluations with customers for various use cases.

"It's not a product, it's a project," said Jonathan Siegal, senior director of product marketing at EMC.

EMC is announcing Project Liberty on Wednesday in advance of EMC World, along with an entry-level version of its VNXe platform for midsized customers and new encryption technology for the VNX line. VNX is a series of hybrid flash and hard-drive arrays for enterprises.

Storage, like networking, is becoming more software-centered as enterprises look to standardized hardware and cloud services to power their data-center operations. The Project Liberty stack could run on commodity hardware, in a cloud or at a remote site, Siegal said. "It's really about giving our customers more options," he said. An initial use of Project Liberty might be to spin up virtualized instances of the VNX software on a platform separate from an array, for purposes such as testing and development, Siegal said.

The dominant enterprise storage vendor is hitching its future to software because it doesn't get as much advantage from maintaining several different hardware lines anymore, IDC analyst Ashish Nadkarni said. Ultimately, EMC is heading toward selling different software that can all run on the same standard hardware, including systems from other vendors, he believes. Yet it will probably take five years to reach that point, partly because the company still relies on hardware sales for much of its revenue, he said.

Project Liberty could help EMC to head off startups that sell virtualized gateways between storage systems on premises and cloud services off site, Gartner analyst Gene Ruth said. They include Panzura, Avere and Ctera Networks, Ruth said. A virtualized VNX stack could give enterprises a way to replicate a physical VNX array on site with a virtual one in a public cloud, giving enterprises more flexibility.

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EMC says Project Liberty could free storage software from hardware