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Now THIS is going to be a party :-)

admin — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 03:47:09 +0000

Sure, VMworld is about learning. It’s also about networking with people – friends, colleagues, customers, and even respected competitors. Heck – I’m in full on cram mode now. We are prepping content, kit to support the hands-on-labs, finalizing face-melting demos, giveaways (1 iPad per hour), and much, much more. Hey, I’m getting daily “where is your content” nag emails (well deserved!) from the VMworld crew. but – it’s also about having a little fun while saying THANK YOU to the customers Since I started being “Mr. VMware at EMC” – one thing I said to Joe was “I want EMC to not only win in the VMware context on our own merits, but have fun while doing it!” So… here are details on the VMworld 2010 EMC/VMware customer appreciation party… Read on (including how to get an invite)… Where : (Temple) 540 HOWARD ST (2 blocks from Moscone Center) When: Tuesday August 31, 2010 6:30-10:30pm What: EMC’s Customer appreciation party – our chance to have fun, and thank EMC customers and partners. There will be great food, two open bars, and in general – a good fun time Who: It’s by invite – only up to 500 people – have your EMC team reach out to their vSpecialists and Brittany Coulson.

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Now THIS is going to be a party

Oh if ONLY there was a way to

admin — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 13:15:12 +0000

The lament of many cloud compute providers as we engage with them… “I wish someone would offer a storage subsystem:” Was transactional (which VMware needs today to host VMDK storage) – but scaled, so I could manage at scale with less: scaled out linearly to large clusters (lets say 16 nodes – for a total of 128 intel cores for dealing with the IO load), using commodity x86 servers, but commodity components built for a service provider. where any resource in that cluster – brains, ports, caches could all service any IO – meaning it’s one big pool. A datastore literally is everywhere, but also dependent on no one element. that could scale up to huge capacity (let’s say petabytes) without increasing my FTE cost because it’s designed for management at scale (hey, just like Cisco UCS!) where everything could be wide-striped across the entire backend of the array – so it acts as one big aggregate pool of ports, IO, brains, IOps and GBs

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Oh if ONLY there was a way to

vSphere 4.1 Cross-EMC support whats the good/bad/ugly?

admin — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 01:52:51 +0000

Whenever there is a major VMware release, a common question from EMCers, EMC customers, and EMC partners is: “what is supported day one, and what will break if I upgrade?” Any vendor who tells you “nothing will break” is either: lying (lying maliciously) delusional (lying, but unintentionally) – if you’re a competitor that piles on to this post, remember I have most competitor’s products myself, and I’ll call you on it a one-product company As soon as you have a broad portfolio – getting everything to line up is impossible. As we near major VMware releases, as the “face for VMware inside EMC”, I rally across the product teams to make sure we’re aligning. We all work hard, and push as much as possible – but inevitably there are little time gaps. They are all on eLab and the VMware HCL – but I’ve found it’s useful to have it integrated in one place. So – I’m taking the high road here and being as explicit as possible – even with gaps . Read on for details, but in a nutshell – core storage support is a rock on day one, and almost everything else lands within Q3, with some Q4 stragglers. BTW – also getting the inevitable “can I get a Vblock with vSphere 4.1?”. That one is a firm NO right now. Remember – the core idea of a Vblock is that it’s all integrated and tested so you don’t need to. That means that by definition it will always lag any given component a little bit – and that’s a GOOD thing. Of course, expect an update soon Remember everyone – always test before putting anything into production!!!! Read on for details… Storage: Platforms = YES. Day 1 support is perfect – and you can see it here . Every EMC storage platform target (Iomega, CLARiiON, EMC Unified/Celerra, Symmetrix and VPLEX) is on the VMware HCL day one across all protocols. This was a chunk of work – so thank you from me to the VMware and EMC teams that made that happen

vSphere 4.1 – What do the vStorage APIs for Array Integration mean to you?

admin — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 12:03:36 +0000

Well – in a nutshell – more, for less. The vStorage APIs for Array integration (or VAAI) have been something that we previewed back at VMworld 2009. Now that vSphere 4.1 is officially out, we can now talk about it without tapdancing around a lot of stuff

More here:
vSphere 4.1 – What do the vStorage APIs for Array Integration mean to you?

A bit of insider perspective part I: my take on the Greenplum deal

admin — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 18:08:51 +0000

Normally, I try to keep the discussions on the blog technology focused, but getting questions on this one, so wanted to put my 2 cents out there, just like I shared with the vSpecialist team internally. What is going on here? Well, here are my cliff-notes on it.

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A bit of insider perspective part I: my take on the Greenplum deal

My Friday Rant — Transparency

admin — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 18:10:25 +0000

Four things happened this week that sort of bothered me, and it finally struck me that all four revolved around the concept of transparency. Transparency is one of those things I didn't realize was truly important until later in my personal development. Once I learned of its importance, though, life became better for me and those around me. I can only hope that others aren't as slow as I was to catch on ..

Excerpt from:
My Friday Rant — Transparency

Understanding what were doing with Atmos

admin — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 13:10:37 +0000

I suppose it’s inevitable that the EMC competitors would attack as EMC has decided to make things clearer by not being in the business of OFFERING Atmos as a service for any additional customers (it is staying up for existing users). So – why did we do it? Well – in basic terms, we made a mistake, and are correcting it. (BTW – that’s **MY** view – another valid view is that it was a necessary step to get the ball rolling). In more detail… People had a hard mental time understanding whether EMC was positioning Atmos as a: An EMC PRODUCT – as a Virtual Appliance on top of traditional storage models, or as physical appliance designed for maximum scale and lowest cost. OR….

Update on EMC vSphere plugins

admin — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 16:57:48 +0000

Folks – these plugins rock, and are free. They are all FULLY SUPPORTED – just like any EMC product. As an EMC customer or partner, you can call 1-800-SVC-4-EMC on them. They are simple, and take almost no time to install. If you’re an EMC customers – there’s NO reason not to be running these. There are some great recent updates to EMC’s plugins I want people to know about: EMC’s Virtual Storage Integrator 3.0 This is the “big daddy” of EMC’s plugins – provides visibility/mapping of all sorts of things and some provisioning capabilities.

More here:
Update on EMC vSphere plugins

Another Take At Integrated Vs. Best-of-Breed

admin — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 18:22:46 +0000

I was locked away in meetings most of this week, and didn't have a chance to participate in a flurry of posts and discussions on this important topic. Scott Lowe got the latest wave going with his prognostications on a certain vendor , Marc Farley added a thoughtful post , and Chris Mellor joined in the fun , as well as Storagebod. But the topic isn't done yet — we'll be arguing this one for decades to come

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Another Take At Integrated Vs. Best-of-Breed

Charlotte VMUG vExpert Panel

admin — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 21:19:42 +0000

Thank goodness someone (David Davis here ) recorded this panel. Except for me talking WAY to much (sorry guys, sincerely!) I think there was good dialog, and interesting topics (from what people are doing, the move from “silos” to horizontal models, to vStorage APIs for array integration, to the cold war on the vCenter plugin race

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Charlotte VMUG vExpert Panel