Storage Nation

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.

So here , we showed how vSphere 4.1 SIOC and EMC FAST can work together to make DRS for storage possible today.

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

How’s that for a headline?

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”.

My team have something cooking I have NO IDEA about…   Nothing like a surprise! ( I love it gang!) This is some sort of teaser video… For what it’s worth – the whole crew is rolling in…  If you see someone that looks friendly, say hello, and ask them if they are part of the VMware Affinity team at EMC (vSpecialist = field people, but there are others), if they say “yes”, ask them to buy you and your friends a round Here’s a small group of us at the Marriott Marquis – having a good time before the marathon starts…   What’s cool (if you ask me – ever country, continent, role and responsibility – ranging from people who write IETF/IEEE drafts to people who sell are actually in that one shot – and they are all having fun together.  LOVE IT.

Obviously, VMworld is all consuming for me right now, but this crossed my path.  A killer set of engineering opportunities in our kick-a$$ BRS team, and on projects that I know are really cool.  Here’s the scoop: Looking for software developers with VMware domain experience for work in Irvine California. There are 2 Principle Engineer and 3 Senior Engineer recs open now

…how’s that for a headline? A big part of today’s announcement (just warming up for VMworld that might have gotten buried underneath all coolness of: 1) Unisphere ; 2) sub-LUN FAST, 3) FAST Cache, 4) Compression ; 5) VAAI firmware support ; 6) and a huge performance boost at the high-end of the Celerra with new Westmere based gateways; 7) New lower cost 100GB and 200GB solid state flash drives… was big news.. EMC supports simple, non-disruptive hot add of Native 10GbE FCoE to the huge installed base of EMC CLARiiON and EMC Celerra customers – opening up the converged storage network market like crazy

To celebrate the close of VMworld 2010, there will be a best 5 of 9 match to the death between @Beaker – Chris Hoff, aka hohoff from Cisco and his army of vSquirrels vs @sakacc – Chad Sakac, aka “Mr VMware at EMC” and his squad of vSpecialists. So – a little more detail?