Storage Nation

The sub-title of my blog is “an insider’s perspective, technical tips n’ tricks in the era of the VMware Revolution”.  I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again – I think I’ve got the coolest job on the planet    I’ll give you a couple “insider” hints.   2010 will be a very big year on the VMware front – loads of big releases, new functionality and expanding use cases.   Likewise, it’s shaping up to be a block-buster year on the product front at EMC.   The number of “headline” level things down the storage and security fronts between now and EMC World (May) are huge.   Between now and the end of the year – massive. So today, a big move occurred on the management side of the house that’s been underway for a while.   You can read more here . For more detail, and that “insider perspective”, read on… My blog posts are long, and I’m long-winded by nature – so here’s the conclusion before the detail: This is a move where VMware in an instant, makes a quantum increases the depth of resources, tools and capabilities in things that are focused on server-layer and up.   This expands the vCenter family of management capabilities, and the teams that develop them, and the teams take them to market. This is a move where EMC, in an instant, can focus ongoing management M&A and R&D and go to market on the things that focus on UCS, networks, and storage – the server layer and down.  This accelerates EMC’s management efforts

A neat, short demonstration we did for a customer showing how they could leverage EMC Replication Manager for VMware-integrated snapshots of their NFS datastores for an Oracle use case. In this scenario, EMC Replication Manager is doing a VMware-integrated NFS datastore (on an EMC Celerra) snapshot for a simplified, non-disruptive test/dev use case of an Oracle VM – while it’s doing about 6300 transactions/min generated by swingbench.   Like all EMC platforms, the Celerra can create simple, fast, writeable snapshots.   Like all EMC platforms (both block and NAS), it can be managed by EMC Replication Manager with VMware integration (correlation of objects with vCenter, and leveraging transient ESX snapshots as an intermediary step).

This week HP demonstrated several of their technology offerings to the storage community, and as a part of this event HP provided a hands on lab where attendees to ‘kick the tires’ of their storage technology offerings.

It’s been a busy 3 days, after 3 panels (one on what VMware/Cisco/EMC are doing for service providers, one for customers, and an open panel (VMware, Cisco, EMC, Oracle, Emerson, APC, NetApp and Panduit)– which was a gas around the “Next Gen Datacenter”.   I got to poke the Oracle guy (in a nice friendly respectful way) around their VMware support policy. Great team effort to support the event – both before and at the show itself.   On top of the overall show team, there are a few folks worth calling out for a pat on the back: 1) Martin Glynn – pulled out the stops to provide overwhelming equipment for the show.  In the Datacenter of the Future area, there were all the things that EMC does, including two V-Max arrays.   We had the same in our booth, and also in the Intel booth.   It was literally TONS of gear – and was everywhere.   Martin – you were a big part of getting a lot of V-Max in front of a lot of people for real hands on. 2) Hariharan (Hari) Harikannan – was the man behind huge chunks of the VCE  demo in Padmesree Warrior’s day 2 keynote.   You wouldn’t believe the last minute gyrations and effort if I spelt them all out here, but anyone who has supported an event knows how that goes down If you’re interested to get a feel of the event, see what was on the expo floor, and the demo from the day 2 technical keynote – at least from one person’s perspective, read on! A busy 3 days indeed…