Storage Nation

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

Hamlet was depressed when he posed the question, “to be to not to be”. There was no questions in Barry Burk’s mind when StorageNerve asked Michael Hay “ Where is the Hitachi BINfile” and Michael answered “Hitachi doesn’t have the concept of a ‘BINfile’.” Barry’s immediate response was that “EVERY intelligent storage array has the equivalent of a Binfile”. Barry also makes the correction that the correct name is .BIN file.

Folks – these webcasts are very popular.   Some of you missed the Symmetrix/V-Max one, and wondered if it was recorded.  They are all recorded, and just take a few days to get posted. You can see the recording of the Symmetrix/V-Max one here: http://www.emc.com/events/2009/q4/10-01-09-oct-vmware.htm The CLARiiON/vSphere one was on the 8th, and should be posted soon. The next up to bat is the Celerra webcast (Oct 15th 11-12 EST) which will cover best practices in NFS, iSCSI and FC use cases, latest testing results, how to leverage snapshots and replication as easily as possible.   Remember that whatever you hear/learn, you can try for yourself using iSCSI/NFS on the Celerra VSA which is openly available here.  Register for the Celerra webcast here: http://www.emc.com/events/2009/q4/10-15-09-vmware-oct.htm For those of you that don’t see the pattern, Thursday at 11-12 is “EMC/VMware webcast thursday” – every week, we’ll have a topic.   You can see upcoming topics here:  http://www.emc.com/events/events-calendar.esp   (you can filter on Live Webcasts).   Upcoming topics include vSphere management integration, and also the updated validation results of Oracle on vSphere (both performance, as well as test/dev recovery models and more).

So, youve got a million dollar storage box standing there and want to make sure that it’s secure? Sure thing you want to do that! And you ask your vendor “What can I do?”.

It’s interesting to people watch at a conference.  You get to appreciate the reach and depth of EMC ’s product portfolio which is represented best by the customers and employees that both use and create this technology.  Sometimes, it’s hard to segment the two.  But, at the end of the day, it’s incredible to be able to put faces with names, voices with the inevitable typing foibles and prose that we’ve all come to know and love. So, why is this a cultural shift? In some of my conversations with both old guards and new, it’s amazing to see the diversity of opinion on how EMC is approaching the social media scene.  We, of course, embrace technology and it’s inherent capabilities for promoting a message (look at our recent Symmetrix V-Max launch for an exemplar), but in the same sense, we’re oftentimes afraid of what the end result can be.  Does more customer engagement necessitate an openness that requires us to “bare all” or do we evaluate and control the message that we’re sending?  These type of questions are inevitably answered by trial and error.  We try process A, we determine its failure and time of death, and move on to process B.  At EMC World, we’ve actually brought a new vigor to Process A (i.e. the Blogger ’s Lounge) and to be honest, it’s a HIT.  Rubbing elbows with some of the “internal greats” like Chuck Hollis, Barry Burke , David Spencer, Len Devanna , Stu Miniman, Jeff Browning is an awesome opportunity, to say the least.  Learning at the collective “feet of the masters” in this regard is an opportunity seldom gained.

Well, it's been a while since we announced the new Symmetrix V-Max.  Industry watchers realized that there was a new way of thinking about enterprise storage: delivered by EMC.  Customers and prospects have been deluging our web sites and sales organizations wanting to know more. And competitors?  My impression is that they're figuring out what to do next.

In view of EMC’s  recent earnings report, Barry Burke, an EMC blogger also known as “the storage anarchist”,  posted an April Fools parody to deflect attention away from their earnings results and poke fun at an HDS promotion that any savvy storage customer would value. On the other hand, the timing of the HDS promotion to provide free software to attach third party storage systems to the USP V storage virtualization platform was right on the money. While the promotion is not targeted at the EMC install base, it most certainly bodes well for timing since EMC abandoned their DMX users with the announcement of the Symmetrix V-Max — and someone had to rescue them (which is what HDS is happy to do). While V-Max added features like dynamic migration, it did not add storage virtualization so that these features could not be extended to existing DMX and Clariion arrays

Here are some additional links to Symmetrix V-Max coverage.  I’m trying to go for a healthy blend of EMC insiders, customers, external bloggers.  If you see something that should be here, let me know

EMC was very liberal with the V word during their announcement of the Symmetrix V-Max. They talked about virtual data centers and virtual servers, but the Symmetrix V-Max was just another big monolithic storage system. You can start with one V-Max engine with two directors and scale out to 8 V-Max engines with up to 128 host or backend connections, 1 TB of global mirrored memory, 2400 disks or 2 PB with 1TB disks

Short of calling this a holiday, i figure that we should probably commemorate this somehow. feel free to use this as a desktop background.