EMC's big bet on software is likely to get even bigger at this week's EMC World conference in Las Vegas. A year ago, the company announced ViPR, a storage virtualization and management platform designed to span hardware from across EMC and other vendors. This year, EMC may make that platform do even more, and it will showcase another concept for so-called software-defined storage even as it continues to rely on dedicated hardware systems as a mainstay of its business.