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Dell EMC World tease: What does 'composable' mean to you, readers?

People are 'working on something cool' - EMC converged man

Analysis A symphony of manageable and composable stuff is coming to Dell World next week; that's if EMC Converged Systems president Chad Sakac's hints are to be believed.

Writing in his Virtual Geek blog guise, Sakac says: "At Dell EMC World in a week – we will unleash the next volley in our ongoing journey to total HCI market leadership – stay tuned!"

We will Chad.

The next volley includes this:

As the product and engineering teams work on the next-generation Management and Orchestration stack (code-named “Symphony”) that we will use across blocks/racks/appliances – the idea of a common programmable and open “CI/HCI API” for Dell EMC could be a game-changer – particularly if we can pull this off across CI, HCI, and even into the component elements of the portfolios of servers, networks, storage – and do it in a cool way.

So we have Symphony software coming to manage and orchestrate elements in Converged Infrastructure (CI - like Vblocks), hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI - like VSAN/VxRail stuff) and composable infrastructure - portfolios of servers, networks, storage.

Hold on there. Dell EMC has no composable infrastructure. Are we talking composable like HPE Synergy? And using NSX, VSAN and vSphere for networking, storage and servers?

The EMC man adds: "We do not believe that this is about creating a proprietary API that is 'bound' to proprietary hardware (storage, network, or servers in rack mount, modular, blade or composable system form – hint, hint, hint) – but rather doing something that is open. I don’t want people to get too excited, we have a ways to go, but if you find yourself in a CF Dojo in Cambridge or the Bay Area – you might find people working on something cool."

There's that "composable" word again... and "a proprietary API that is 'bound' to proprietary hardware" sounds like a dig at HPE's Synergy to me.

So ... we may be hearing about a Symphony manager to dynamically carve out and monitor sets of virtual server, storage and networking resources from a pool of Dell, and others' hardware products. In other words, kind of a software-defined Vblocks or VxRails which you provision and de-provision on the fly. ®

PS We understand a big Isilon announcement may be coming too.

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