At EMC World in Boston, Mass, Pat Gelsinger, EMC’s president and COO for infrastructure products, announced a big move toward the “private cloud”: the ability to federate globally distributed storage arrays into a single system using the companies VPLEX appliance technology.

But the first steps are modest. VPLEX Local , which is for individual data centres, and VPLEX Metro, which will allow two data centres to connect at distances up to 100 kilometres, are available now. Next year, EMC plans to release VPLEX Geo, enabling connections anywhere around the world. After that will come VPLEX Global, which will allow multiple data centres to function as a single large data centre.

For now, however, a VPLEX Local cluster is designed for a single data centre (working across both EMC and non-EMC technology), with VPLEX Metro linking two separate clusters across data centres. VPLEX Metro has round trip latency of 5 milliseconds, which means the 100 kilometre limit could be stretched depending on the quality of the connection.

“This will change how people think and plan about data centres,” said Brian Gallagher, president storage virtualization product group.

Pricing for VPLEX local starts at US$77,000. It can also be purchased as part of a software subscription for US$26,000.

The eventual goal is to be able to move thousands of virtual machines representing petabytes of data around the world. 

The competition is taking note: HDS has said that it can already federate, and NetApp is arguing that this is the wrong approach. IBM has been silent – so far.