Storage Nation

I've been going slightly nuts since yesterday after Cisco announced the CIUS.  It looks like the perfect tablet for the sorts of things I really want a personal screen device for – communicating with other people.  This review by Erik Parker of InfoWorld is a pretty good read and it summarizes key advantages and disadvantages of CIUS.  If it can make the technology of video conferencing transparent to end users, it will be a big deal.  But the hidden story to this is that Cisco is also making a play to get into the corporate desktop/laptop business with the CIUS.  The idea that companies could deploy these with VDI is definitely part of Cisco's grand plan for world domination . Whether or not the CIUS could replace laptop or desktop computers remains to be seen, but there are reasons to think they could eventually if the stars align.  The arguments for VDI are strong, but there are still a lot of hurdles to overcome, such as back end storage performance to support boot storms . By the way, people looking at large VDI implementations might want to look at 3PAR's wide striping storage systems to get the sort of affordable IOPS needed to support large VDI environments. My previous post illustrates our design for massive throughput, which supports a huge number of IOPS without needing SSDs or requiring storage administrators to create special disk pools to isolate the VDI workload from other applications running in the same storage array.

Here I am again on the start of another vendor blogging day.  As the title of this post suggests, this will be a trip to see Hitachi, or HDS (Hitachi Data Systems) if you prefer.  The Bloggers Day is taking place over two days and is located in San Jose, just south of San Francisco in California.  I’ve previously posted a list of the attendees, both from the blogging community and the Hitachi itself. The IT world has changed since I first encountered Hitachi 7700E, 9900 and the recent USP/USP V ranges of Enterprise storage arrays that typify Hitachi’s hardware portfolio.  Enterprise and Modular storage now take equal billing and many of the features that were once Enterprise-only have migrated to the modular products, blurring the lines between the two platforms.  In addition Hitachi have offerings for NAS and object store.  They also sell servers (believe it or not). Is this a scenario that has occurred because of customer demand?  Is it more likely that reliability and the virtualisation of everything means that the original premise of the enterprise array is no longer valid?  I believe that we are seeing a gradual move from the network-centric data centre, via the storage-centric data centre to what will become the hypervisor-centric data centre and eventually application-centric cloud.  Storage devices are no longer the place where data functionality is focused and it will be less so as time goes on.  The logical place for data mobility will be in the hypervisor (at least the hypervisor will be the controlling entity) and storage will become a feature as networks are today.  If this is right, then the concept of and need to differentiate Enterprise and Modular arrays will cease to exist

Image via Wikipedia Just a quick note from the field (as it were).  If you’ve been blessed enough to get a Cisco C-series server, there’s a nifty new Cisco Integrated Management Controller (CIMC) release available as of today’s writing. Version 1.0(1e) was the shipping release as of January 2010. Version 1.0(2) is the latest point release available as of March 2010

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.

Given all the things that I'm engaged with these days, it was rewarding to see our friends at Cisco make a good set of announcements around enabling service providers with IaaS — Infrastructure as a Service.  And I'm a bit embarrassed that I didn't catch this earlier … But — at the same time — as I digest this announcement, I'm torn. There's a lot to like here.  But it also reinforces my notion that we — as an industry — have just started to travel down a rather long road …

The UK-based charity, Comic Relief , is once again using 3PAR storage as part of its IT infrastructure for raising millions of Pounds during it's nationwide Sports Relief campaign the weekend of March 19-21.  StorageRap spoke with Comic Relief's Web Technology Manager, Charlotte Melen recently about the intangible benefits of working for Comic Relief and what technologies they use for their donations platform.   Besides 3PAR, other key vendors include HP, Cisco, VMware and Oracle along with payment services from Paypal and RBS.

Image via Wikipedia I finally received some new servers in the Atmos lab and…well, I thought I’d share with you!!!  These are Cisco C200 M1 servers and they’re loaded out in the following config: Processors :  Intel Xeon 5520 (2.27Ghz quad cores w/Hyperthreading) Memory : 4Gb DDR3 ECC/Registered x 12 for a total of 48Gb memory NICs : Dual ServerEngines Gigabit Ethernet NICS + dedicated IPMI ‘ KVM -over- IP NIC Enjoy the video!!!! UPDATE :  YouTube does SD (standard definition) processing first and HD processing second.  if it looks terrible now, just wait and it’ll look better. Related articles by Zemanta Storage/data convergence: Cisco stands alone (computerworld.com)

For those of you who have been following what’s going on – there are large investments being made in EMC and Cisco personnel to support our VMware-focused go-to-market (if they strike you as large, they are DWARFED by investments on the engineering side).   Note that this doesn’t mean we don’t have a go-to-market around Hyper-V (see my post on that here ), and that you won’t see activity with other partners (e.g. Dell for EMC, other storage and management vendors with Cisco)  but rather that there is overwhelming customer demand for more “VMware/Cisco”, “VMware/EMC”, and “VMware/Cisco/EMC” (VCE) resources. The way this works is that at EMC we have a team we call “vSpecialists” that focus exclusively on VMware/EMC.   People colloquially call the vSpecialist team other things: “Chad’s vArmy” (I’m not a super-fan of this one – not because I don’t support the military, but rather because the analogy is a bit off: one is recruited or is conscripted into an army – whereas on our team one volunteers; the military thrives on hierarchical structures – whereas on our team there are leaders, not managers) “vGeek Squad” (more my cup o’ tea as I’m a geek These operate at a theatre level, but are tightly aligned with our divisional resources.  They support engagements with customer that center around VMware/EMC – working to make sure our technologies come together to help the customer, and outside/before any “paid professional services” (there are literally more than a thousand VCP certified at EMC now if you include delivery).   They get to play/use all the latest technologies, in fact, are mandated to be using those that are 6-12 months ahead of GA. The goal by the end of 2010 is that there are roughly 304 of these vSpecialist folks around the globe

I’ve been pondering Cisco and their Unified Computing System (UCS) and decided to finally blog on it. I participated in a InfoSmack podcast that included a brief discussion on UCS and recently talked to Cisco’s Jesse Freund – who manages analysts relations for the Cisco UCS.

Ok, ok….I know I should actually write stuff out from time to time, but, seriously, the Flip UltraHD makes this waaaay too easy… In any case, here’s a quick (11 minutes…sorry…) video with my DataCenter wish list….(some of these items have already been answered, but, I’ll let you discover that in some of my postings in early 2010). Flickerdown.com: Xmas Wishlist from Dave Graham on Vimeo . Of course, my wishlist is full of cool things like Cisco UCS and C-series servers, Nexus and Arista Networks switching, Qlogic CNAs and switches, Mellanox and Qlogic QDR infiniband switches and clusters, and EMC V-Max, CLARiiON , and Celerra (of course Atmos is implicit) storage systems.