Storage Nation

Steve Taylor, one of our SEs, created an animation that shows the multiple layers of virtualization that create the natively wide-striped data layout on a 3PAR storage server.  I think it's the coolest thing I'd seen since joining the company that quickly summarizes the multiple layers of virtualization in a 3PAR array.  All the functions shown are automatically done for the customer with minimal administrative effort.

There's a veritable river of information, perspectives and opinions coming out of EMC World this week.  Not to mention about a bazillion tweets on the #EMCworld hashtag. While all the keynotes were excellent, the one that I thought really stood out came from the EMC IT organization.  Sanjay Mirchandani and his team did an excellent job of bridging the gap between theory and practice while adding a healthy dose of pragmatism to the whole private cloud discussion.

Was a fun week last week – we’re onboarding so many fantastic people so fast, we’ve needed to develop a custom onboarding process.  Not enough time to do blog posts   Keith Coughlin, the vSpecialist leader for the Americas call is it the “Emersion” program.  The use of “Emersion” as opposed to “Immersion” is intentional As people are coming from all sorts of backgrounds, we are trying to cram them full of stuff and build a sense of camraderie.

 Hitachi Data Systems was the first vendor to deliver a switch based storage  architecture over ten years ago. Recently we are starting to see storage vendors deliver storage systems that include a switch in their architecture. However, the new switch architectures are designed for loose coupling  of modular storage nodes while the Hitachi architecture is designed for tight coupling of storage resources. In 2000, Hitachi Data Systems introduced the Lightning 9900 storage subsystem with an internal switch that tightly coupled Front End (FE) and Back End (BE) port processors through a global cache. This enabled any to any connection between the FE storage ports and the BE disk controllers.

I agree that breaking the storage encapsulation in Virtual Machines is generally a bad thing.  What do I mean?   That the entirety of the Virtual Machine is not contained in VMDKs stored on some datastore.   Examples of this are RDMs, iSCSI in guest and NFS mounts in guest. In general, breaking the encapsulation model is something to do rarely, not frequently.  Why?  It makes management more complex, makes certain operations impossible (ergo you can’t do a storage vmotion for a device that is mounted via iSCSI in a guest). But – just like all things – there’s a couple reasons why the purists who say “Never!” should be walked away from… slowly… Real world example from yesterday.  A customer is using Oracle 11g on an NFS datastore and has 1GbE connectivity.   For those of you who read the blog post that Vaughn and I wrote here , you immediately see that you will be bound by the bandwidth (MBps) of a single vmnic on the NFS datastore, as the TCP/IP hashing used for link aggregation only applies if you have multiple TCP sessions, and NFSv3 uses only 2 TCP sessions (control and data) per datastore. So, in the spirit of being a purist, the answer is: Switch to a block datastore (which can parallelize across multiple links via RR or PowerPath/VE) Switch to 10GbE (drive more bandwidth down a single link – a lot more) And if you’re SUCH a purist that you would rather throw out the baby with the bath water rather than compromise dramatic principles: dont’ visualize that workload until a future vSphere release that supports NFSv4 or pNFS.

VCE work continues along furiously…. We have just published more detailed documents outlining how to: Deploy a full Vblock (for delivery) as an integrated whole (Deployment Guide) Simplify Rapid Provsioning across the entire stack whether you are a service provider or an enterprise customer (Rapid Provisioning Guide) Detailed configuration specification, how it is tested, etc

Who would that be?  Well EMC of course Our Fortune 500 standing: http://www.hoovers.com/company/EMC_Corporation/rfcsri-1.html Our Newsweek “The Green List” ranking: http://greenrankings.newsweek.com/companies/view/emc We have a VERY aggressive use of technology within our own IT shop to hit efficiency, cost savings, and flexibility goals.   If you’re interested – join this webcast on Thursday ! Thursday, December 10, 2009 – 8 am PT / 11 am ET Learn More: http://info.emc.com/mk/get/DBM5457-1923_raf_lp?reg_src=WEB Topic: Exclusive, inside look at EMC's virtualization status—from challenges faced, lessons learned and best practices developed, to future plans. Leverage EMC's own project to transform your data center

 One of the most interesting parts of today’s VCE announcement is the Vblock – pre-integrated infrastructure for virtualization at scale.   Today, I thought I’d go behind the scenes, and interview one of the primary architects behind the Vblock – Jim Dowson (EMC Distinguished Engineer & CTO, Global Services).

SearchStorage ANZ’s Simon Sharwood posted an article referencing a NetApp presentation which was posted on a public RSS feed that NetApp provides for its user community. According to Sharwood’s article, the presentation was dated 2008 and published October 28, 2009