Storage Nation

Folks – we spend so much time fighting, so much seriousness in things that in the end, while important aren’t as important of the lives of people, in particular the lives of children. A friend and colleague at NetApp let me know they were doing a drive for St. Baldricks – a campaign where people shave their heads to help raise funds for fighting cancer in children.   So, in the spirit of competition driving positive things and staying above the fray, we made a little wager

Happy day for EMC unified customers.   A whole bunch of new integration, additional cost savings – all for existing and new EMC customers.   Oh, and it’s all free Here’s the PR , but in usual fashion, I tend to like the nerd version. Read on for more! So – without further ado, what’s new and GA?

These webcasts which EMC and VMware are doing jointly on tier-1 apps in the VMware context are generally very popular.

The Cisco guys do a killer job on these tight, concise TechWise TV episodes… The one this Thursday is on Vblocks.  Hari is the main man in the VCE solutions squad in Santa Clara, and Vblock builder – a great resource to listen to, talk to and get to know. You can register here: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/ns340/ns339/ns638/ns914/html_TWTV/twtv_episode_62.html?sid=188290_26

My hat’s off to all the Olympians – was a great Olympics. It’s strange for Canadians to celebrate success and achievement.  Strangely – it’s a cultural attribute to downplay competing and winning. To end the way it did – with a GREAT hockey final against a great competitor in the US team – and to come down to a nail-biter..

Recently was working a customer case with my VMware colleagues where a customer was seeing that cloning operations were taking a lot longer on their V-Max than it was on their mid-range CXes.   Turned out to be a tricky case, and taught me something new. This experience would apply across more than just EMC arrays, so I thought I would share what we found, how we found it, and what we did about it – in the hopes of helping folks our there. If you’re interested – read on…. I’ve got a mixed readership – some very VMware-centric, some storage-centric, and some brave open minded souls who span both.   Storage-centric folks – bear with this for a bit, as you likely know this, but important to have the VMware-centric folks understand

These EMC IT webcasts are fantastic, and customer feedback has been very positive.   They break down the good/bad/ugly of our journey to the private cloud. This week’s session (Thursday, 8am PT/11am ET)  is on EMC’s own deployment of View 4.   I’m using it right now, and love it!  Of course, there’s still a long way to go (check-in/check-out is big for me).   I use it all the time to access my lab on the corp network – fire up the View client and I am in the core network (extra secured via RSA, which integrates with View Manager). We’re still in the pilot stages with our View 4/Windows 7 activities (hundreds of clients), but so are a lot of customers.   Join in for a perspective (and the upside of the EMC IT folks presenting themselves is it’s not a salesperson   on a 40K employee company’s deployment of client virtualization. http://info.emc.com/mk/get/DBM6065-3450_raf_lp BTW – this is part of a large series.   EMC IT is a massive consumer of the technologies we develop, and is rapidly approaching the 100% virtualized mark for our x86 workloads.

As discussed here , in VI3.x, any VMs deployed on VMFS via “clone” or “deploy from template” by default use the “eagerzeroedthick” format.  This was the case all the way up to update 5, which fixed this behavior.   vSphere 4 “clone” and “deploy from template” operations have always used the zeroedthick format (exception is a VM configured for Fault Tolerance, or where the administrator forces the eagerzeroedthick option – for a MSCS/WSFC device for example). This is important for the reasons covered in that post ( check it out ) – but the key is that it means you use more storage (a lot more) than needed. I’ll add another reason – it literally doesn’t just consume more storage, but it makes takes that do this “zeroing” (clone, template) take a lot longer than they need to.

EMC solutions enabler 7.1 is out and directly available as a vApp. If you login to Powerlink (EMC partners, customers, employees) you can find it here: Home > Support > Software Downloads and Licensing > Downloads S > Solutions Enabler Here’s a screenshot of the download link.  Personally, I’ve found the vApp package makes deploying solutions enabler (set of tools, public APIs used by many storage-related management tools) much easier.   Remember that if you are using a Symmetrix with Solutions Enabler that you can easily configure gatekeeper LUNs (small LUNs used for inband communication to the Symmetrix) using physical mode RDMs.

There’s so much fud that gets slung around these days (not implying EMC is immune!!!) that rather than get frustrated by it, my team tries to have a bit of fun with it.   I think the game is fun enough to share out there Ok, this first variant we call “name that vendor”.   A question comes in from a customer, which is clearly a “list of ‘unique's’” that was sent by a vendor.  By “unique’s” I mean a list of pithy points where a vendor makes a grandiose claim of uniqueness on a given feature in the hopes the customer makes that one thing on that list a buying requirement. What we like to do is strip out the customer name, and the vendor source, and play “name that vendor”.  It’s always fun because it’s usually from sales, and they so mangle what the product actually does do that’s cool, or make just flat out incorrect or silly claims.    Since VMware is one of the most popular customer use cases of infrastructure, we get to see some fun ones… Here’s the first Virtual Geek episode of “Fun with Vendor FUD – Name that Vendor”! (I’ll answer the source after a week of polling) Q: Which vendor do you think said the following: The only SAN with vSphere vStorage Fault Tolerance support included at no extra charge Full Application aware API integration with VCB at no extra charge Clustered SAN architecture to match your ESX server cluster Fully integrated MS VSS apps with API hooks Full Synchronous replication software included at no extra charge The only SAN platform which supports SRM for both automated failover and FAILBACK   There’s all sorts of vendor craziness out there.   My advice?   Ignore claims of “uniqueness” (heck, even from EMC in general, or me specifically).   Look at the product on it’s own merits.   What problems could this help you solve today?  Does it have value that is greater than it’s cost.   Does it align with where you see IT going?   “uniqueness” in any industry is hyper-transient.   “Different”, well – every product has architectural elements that mean that it can do things differently – and that’s legit, and customers should consider them.   My other advice?  Have some Fun with Vendor FUD If you think this is funny like I do, I’ll keep posting more episodes…