Storage Nation » EMC

A Minor Milestone

admin — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 14:57:23 +0000

I'm on vacation this week — no blogging, no twitter, etc. — but I did manage to get around to checking my blog for any interesting comments.

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A Minor Milestone

Now THIS is going to be a party :-)

admin — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 03:47:09 +0000

Sure, VMworld is about learning. It’s also about networking with people – friends, colleagues, customers, and even respected competitors. Heck – I’m in full on cram mode now. We are prepping content, kit to support the hands-on-labs, finalizing face-melting demos, giveaways (1 iPad per hour), and much, much more. Hey, I’m getting daily “where is your content” nag emails (well deserved!) from the VMworld crew. but – it’s also about having a little fun while saying THANK YOU to the customers Since I started being “Mr. VMware at EMC” – one thing I said to Joe was “I want EMC to not only win in the VMware context on our own merits, but have fun while doing it!” So… here are details on the VMworld 2010 EMC/VMware customer appreciation party… Read on (including how to get an invite)… Where : (Temple) 540 HOWARD ST (2 blocks from Moscone Center) When: Tuesday August 31, 2010 6:30-10:30pm What: EMC’s Customer appreciation party – our chance to have fun, and thank EMC customers and partners. There will be great food, two open bars, and in general – a good fun time Who: It’s by invite – only up to 500 people – have your EMC team reach out to their vSpecialists and Brittany Coulson.

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Now THIS is going to be a party

From viral spam to virulent sham

admin — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 20:18:22 +0000

The twitterverse is busy again today with discussions surrounding EMC's us of spambots to generate views of videos they are trying to make viral. If you are interested in seeing what is being said, check out these people's tweets and you'll be off on a trip down a dark hole. @ johnful , @ dvellante , @ sfoskett , @ valb00 , @ furrier Here are a couple cartoons I made about it last week from my new cartoon, Ineption : Netapp's Val Bercovici suggest this viral spamming as the end of innocence in social media, but innocence exited the social media stage long ago. I'm much more concerned about how large companies like EMC can use social media to suggest product and customer relationships that stretch the truth well beyond the impressions that a reader might take away from reading suggestive blog posts from respected corporate voices. As "unofficial company statements" that are more influential than press releases, social media pieces can distort things in a way that more-accountable corporate marketing are not allowed to. Last week, Chad Sakac and Chuck Hollis published blog posts that pointed to an EMC white paper about details of a VMAX implementation at Terremark, an excellent 3PAR customer. Readers of these posts would probably think that VMAX was being used as the storage behind Terremark's multi-tenant, Enterprise Cloud service offering. That would be stretching things more than just a little bit. I commented on both blogs and the responses to my comments were interesting. I guess I feel a little kinder towards Chad as a result. It is possible that somewhere in the world, a VMAX is being used by Terremark. One would expect Terremark to be looking at various storage platforms as a matter of course, it only makes sense for them. After all, VMware made a significant investment in Terremark last year and we all know who owns VMware.

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From viral spam to virulent sham

vSphere 4.1, SIOC, and Array Auto-Tiering

admin — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 22:06:04 +0000

So – do these ideas work together? Do they complement each other or compete? What’s the source of these questions Chad – and why are you asking them? (BTW – this topic is one I’m covering at VMworld, along with some of the testing data) If you’re interested, read on… Storage IO Control (SIOC), along with Network IO Control (NIOC) represent VMware’s first forays into expanding the IDEA of DRS (which is in essence distributed resource prioritization) beyond CPU cycles and memory – and into storage and network IO subsystems.

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vSphere 4.1, SIOC, and Array Auto-Tiering

VCE, Private Clouds And The Agenda For Change

admin — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 04:15:13 +0000

As some of you know, I'm over in Rome for a few days of meetings, to be followed by a week of overdue vacation time. Much has been said about EMC and VMware's recent strong quarters, including this unique perspective from Storagezilla , but I wanted to share one big thought that stood out above all else. All About Earnings Calls Earning calls in our industry are mostly about economic results — how well did you do, how well do you expect to do, etc. All of that is pretty standard fare. You can listen to EMC's here , or get a transcript here .

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VCE, Private Clouds And The Agenda For Change

Getting Ready to Re-Launch IT Sense.org

admin — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 14:26:58 +0000

I have been heads down building out a couple of websites. In addition to adding a lot of new content to C4Project.org (fresh interviews with Fujifilm, CA, and Xiotech), I am re-doing IT-Sense.org and will shortly tackle my main homepage and the Data Management Institute site. The objective is to freshen content and update code that has proven hacker-porous. Stand

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Getting Ready to Re-Launch IT Sense.org

The Netapp vSphere 4.1 decoder ring

admin — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 02:31:34 +0000

There was a lot written last week surrounding VMware's release of vSphere 4.1 . Netapp appeared to have a lot to say, but it was confusing to figure out what they were really talking about. I think I've got it now. It's unusual for a company to be invited as a centerpiece of high-visibility festivities and then mysteriously decide not to follow through

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The Netapp vSphere 4.1 decoder ring

Oh if ONLY there was a way to

admin — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 13:15:12 +0000

The lament of many cloud compute providers as we engage with them… “I wish someone would offer a storage subsystem:” Was transactional (which VMware needs today to host VMDK storage) – but scaled, so I could manage at scale with less: scaled out linearly to large clusters (lets say 16 nodes – for a total of 128 intel cores for dealing with the IO load), using commodity x86 servers, but commodity components built for a service provider. where any resource in that cluster – brains, ports, caches could all service any IO – meaning it’s one big pool. A datastore literally is everywhere, but also dependent on no one element. that could scale up to huge capacity (let’s say petabytes) without increasing my FTE cost because it’s designed for management at scale (hey, just like Cisco UCS!) where everything could be wide-striped across the entire backend of the array – so it acts as one big aggregate pool of ports, IO, brains, IOps and GBs

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Oh if ONLY there was a way to

Robert Cockerill from Thames River Capital: A man with broad responsibilities and 3PAR storage

admin — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 20:46:23 +0000

3PAR customers like that fact that 3PAR arrays are so easy and fast to manage. In this video, Robert Cockerill from Thames River Capital in London talks about all the various things he does, his Windows-based infrastructure, how 3PAR’s thin provisioning helps him manage it all and how simple it was to protect it with 3PAR Remote Copy.

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Robert Cockerill from Thames River Capital: A man with broad responsibilities and 3PAR storage

Speed Bumps Along The Way To The Private Cloud

admin — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 16:58:24 +0000

Many of the IT organizations I speak with have started their journey to a private cloud model. Every road has its speed bumps: knowing what they are likely to be helps a great deal. I thought it'd be useful to simply share my perspectives of likely issues, concerns and challenges that tend to show up in each phase of the journey

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Speed Bumps Along The Way To The Private Cloud