Storage Nation

Lots of back and forth with various folks internally on this in the last couple of days, and thought I would just put it out there: Despite the obvious simplicity that would come from directly connecting a UCS to an iSCSI, NFS, FC or FCoE target, this is currently (as of this posting on March 3rd, 2010) not possible with just a UCS chassis and UCS 6100 series fabric interconnect. I’ve had a couple people ask me “why” – after all, they’re just standard SFP+ connectors – you should be able to “plug Tab A into Slot B”. This is not new info (Scott and Rick have hit on this), but since I got asked so much (twice last week at different customers in a New York City tour), I thought I would summarize it here, as our readerships are not the same

Yesterday, I posted on how clouds need to be better than the traditional physical environments they replace.  I made a long list of areas where that was either the case today, or would be relatively soon.

The headlines reads: " VMware To Acquire Certain IT Management Products and Software Expertise from EMC Corporation ". People will perceive this story one of two ways, depending on their perspective. The first (and most common) perspective will be "so what?" The second (and less frequent) perspective will be "this might be a big deal …" And I'd like a chance to share why I think this is more of the latter, and less of the former.

As technologists, we all sort of know that traditional tape-oriented backup is rapidly being supplanted by newer forms of disk-based backup, usually in conjunction with data deduplication. But quantifiable data on the size and speed of this trend is notoriously hard to find. This latest result from TheInfoPro helps to frame just how quickly this trend is moving.

It's most definitely an uncomfortable topic for many of the IT organizations I meet with on a regular basis. More often than not, I find myself asking how IT governance is done in their organization? And I've begun to see a very strong correlation between good governance and good IT.

Netapp has been on the hot seat ever since Tom Georgens, their CEO commented that tiering would soon be obsolete . Since then, a number of people have called him out on it, including yours truly (in a steering wheel cam), StorageBod , The Storage Architect , StorageZilla , a storage blogging wannabe , and last but not least, the Storage Anarchis t .  To be fair, Georgens DID get support from the contrarian Drunken Data.  At the end of his post, the Storage Anarchist asks: Are they just defending their chosen path of Flash-as-cache instead of –as-a-tier? Or is it deeper than that? Is there something inherent in WAFL that makes it different to implement multiple different tiers within a single array

In all seriousness – there’s a ton of going on at EMC focused on Hyper-V, and while I don’t want to help him too much, I do want to make the introduction I mentioned him earlier – Adrian Simays.   Adrian is “Mr Hyper-V” at EMC – and has now been gathering his strength to emerge publicly.   You can read up on EMC stuff focused on Hyper-V here:  Virtual Winfrastructure There’s a great post on all the technical docs on how to leverage Hyper-V on EMC kit which I’m grabbing the links. EMC Symmetrix with Microsoft Hyper-V Virtualization EMC CLARiiON with Microsoft Hyper-V Server Best Practices: Using EMC Celerra IP Storage with Microsoft Hyper-V R2 over iSCSI EMC Replication Manager for Virtualized Environments EMC Blueprint:  Backup and Recovery for Microsoft Sharepoint Server Enabled by EMC CX, Replication Manager and Microsoft Hyper-V EMC Backup and Recovery for Microsoft Sharepoint Server with Hyper-V EMC Networker: Complete Protection for Microsoft Hyper-V Proven Solution: EMC Backup and Recovery for Microsoft Exchange 2007 Enabled by EMC CX, Replication Manager and Microsoft Hyper-V using iSCSI Reference Architecture: EMC Backup and Recovery for Microsoft Exchange 2007 Enabled by EMC CX, Replication Manager and Microsoft Hyper-V using iSCSI Reference Architecture: EMC Solutions for Microsoft SQL Server on EMC Unified Storage Platforms Reference Architecture: EMC Virtual Architecture for Microsoft Sharepoint Server 2007 Enabled by EMC CX and Hyper-V Disaster Recovery in a Geographically Dispersed Cross-Site Virtual Environment Enabled by EMC CX, RecoverPoint and Microsoft Hyper-V BTW – if you’re a Microsoft IT user interested at the intersection with infrastructure, another great technical blog to follow (IMO) is Brian’s Power Windows Blog .   Brian, for an example recently posted on all the cool sessions at EMC World that touch on Microsoft technologies. Now, of course, we have MORE of all of this on VMware – a lot more!   It’s just proportionally more based on how often our customers ask for VMware-specific content and integration rather than Hyper-V, but now I’m just smack-talkin’…   Adrian, it’s on  

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.

Phew – after 5 days in Vegas, you get pretty cooked.   At home now finally and love seeing my family.     Well – a quick little summary of the week, and what we announced, showed, and discussed. Was a GREAT VMware Partner Exchange (PEX) – thank you VMware! So – what did we see and do? VMware’s continued growth is one of the largest drivers for partner growth.   PEX attendence was up 77% over last year.    VMware is super-focused on the partner community.  This came through loud and clear in Carl Eschenbach’s keynote. We saw this too in the EMC bootcamp.   We held a bootcamp on the Monday of the event for the EMC partners present.   There were almost 200 people there all day long.   Thank you EMC partners!  Would love your feedback on the event.

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…