Storage Nation

There are three new white papers available on the site that may be of interest.  They are: Create a Smarter Storage Strategy http://thestoragearchitect.tradepub.com/free/w_fnet24 Availability and the Cloud http://thestoragearchitect.tradepub.com/free/w_fnet22/ The Economic Impact of File Virtualization: Reducing Costs and Improving Efficiency for File-Based Storage http://thestoragearchitect.tradepub.com/free/w_fnet09/ As usual I welcome any feedback as to whether this part of the site is useful. Disclaimer:  For each subscription I receive a payment which goes to fund the running of this site and www.thevirtualisationarchitect.com.  This includes covering the costs of trial subscriptions to cloud services.

Phew – I hate tap-dancing around things, and I’ve been saying “project Redwood” for too long.  I’m glad the name got changed to vCloud Director – “vCloud Service Director” was a mouthful (note that the builds right before VMworld still have the old name).

Customer interest in active/active datacenters is through the roof – it’s a compelling idea. We’ve got a little pile of VPLEX/vTeleportation sessions at VMworld – I’m doing PC8051 with Beth Phalen, who is the VP who owns the product (which covers practical questions, how it works, but also shows where we are going).   Scott Lowe is doing session TA8101 (which is very focused on do’s, don’ts and best practices in these active/active datacenter use cases. The VMware KB article that covers how EMC VPLEX supports VM HA stretched cluster also went up, you can read it here . I remain convinced that we (VMware and the storage community) have more work to do (specifically around VM HA details discussed in our sessions, as well as partition handling at the VMware and storage layers) before I would personally do this myself.  But we decided that people were going to do stretched clusters, so it was more useful to be explicit about how to do it, pitfalls to be aware of.   The solution spot that is a rock right now is VMotion between clusters.

DRS is not only a critical feature in vSphere, but also a critical IDEA for virtualization and cloud models (private or public).   The idea is basic: Virtualization encapsulates compute, and vMotion liberates those encapsulated objects, but VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) is the thing that actually turns the cluster of servers in a dynamic pool of resources. Not only is this important for efficiency, but prioritization and QoS are critical as everyone starts to virtualize things that come with SLA requirements

With VMworld in San Francisco this week, it's only fitting that Michael Haag is on the Hotspot discussing 3PAR's support for server virtualization . If you are at VMworld this year, please stop by our booth, #313, to see what all the commotion is about and why 3PAR storage is so popular for cloud computing .

Lots of activity at VMworld this week, plus the predictable flurry of vendor announcements.

The ongoing battle for 3Par by HP & Dell tells us much more about the state of the IT Industry than just the desires of two companies to acquire some interesting storage tech.  It signals an acceptance that storage is a key feature in the future direction of the IT industry – more important than networking and almost as important as the virtualisation platform itself. This may seem like a bold statement to make, however we need to look forward to where the industry is headed.  First of all, vendors want us to buy their unified hardware stacks; it represents that move back to a consolidated architecture that kept one vendor dominant in the mainframe days – IBM.  “No-one gets fired for buying IBM” the saying goes (or used to go), demonstrating how IBM was seen as the data centre supplier for all things computing in the 70’s and 80’s.  Of course we know that politics within organisations and the cost of IBM hardware eventually broke the monopoly, but the status quo worked well for many companies for many years.

So – today RSA, the security division of EMC announced a very cool capability – a simple VMware security dashboard that integrates with vCenter, ESX/ESXi, with vCenter, RSA Data Loss Prevention suite, VMware’s vShield family (more on that soon), VMware vCloud Director, VMware vCenter Configuration Manager, EMC Ionix portfolsio, and HyTrust appliancevShield family of products (along with other partners).  It brings everything up to a high level dashboard which continuously assess state – and helps remediate (aka “fix”) problems.   It’s a solution for Cloud Security and Compliance. We also showed the next step of the evolution of “Project Roswell” – an ongoing effort between VMware/RSA/Intel to bring an unbelievable set of compliance capabilities to public clouds, enforced in a hardware root of trust. There will also be an RSA Securebook on Cloud Security published in October that covers these topics for people who are in the security business… Ok a bit of background… So – I asked in the open “VirtualGeek 2010 Survey” (full results here ) 2 basic questions.   “Is security an issue for you”.  Of the 121 respondents to that question – it turns out it is (to varying degress) to 71% of the people. Then I asked people to be a bit more specific about degree of “security pain”.

It’s crazy to see how focused we are, and how many folks we have working day in day out on being the best partner for VMware – for VMware themselves, their partners, and their customers. This is the 2nd inaugural “EMC/VMware pre-VMworld meeting” – we share/learn/warm up for the event.

Just wanted to share the most recent (and the funniest!) EMC 20% Guarantee video, this one starring Oggie — The Prince of Dataness.