Storagezilla

FastScale: Dump the duplicates

My incredibly quick take on FastScale is that it allows you to dedup at build time. Before you deploy anything you pull the duplicate data out of the operating system images before they're even built. It never touches disk as it was never there in the first place.

You're not going to deploy VDI or a Private Cloud using multiple guest operating systems, you're going to do with Just enough OS (JeOS) while dumping unnecessary software components and libraries as you deploy the image files.

If something requests a component you've stripped out it and it's dependencies will be dynamically loaded from a centralised repository of components and away you go.

This is capacity optimisation before deployment. Deduplication at installation.

What I learned from Dick Egan.

He's been in my thoughts over the weekend as I remember the few times he took the time to speak with me. Not because I a had a profile inside the company or was "somebody", I wasn't, but just because I was an employee of the company.

I once asked him numerous questions in a row at an all hands and not once was there a flash of "Who's this weirdo?" because he was eager to tackle to complex questions on company strategy, policy, values, the works. Basically all the questions you'd ask the CEO or the heads of the various functions. They weren't standing in the canteen in front of us, he was and he didn't blink on a single question.

I think it made the person I was working directly for at the time nervous as I had even less tact than I have now but Dick played it straight so I asked straight.

There were things the room was thinking but wouldn't say to the Chairman. He knew it, in some way I think it bruised him that he was seen as something more than "the boss" and I think he was glad to see someone open things a crack.

He gracefully moved from topic to topic with an engineers mind for fanatical detail and the language of an accomplished schmoozer. The schmoozing was the sugar coating on a razor sharp mind. You were not smarter than he was no matter how much he might make you think you were.

When it came to Cork he was usually around somewhere, always sharply dressed as Maureen wouldn't have let him be seen any other way and while always open that doesn't mean he wasn't hard. He was a scrapper. More fool you to cross him or not deliver on what was agreed. He was always straight in how he played things and expected no less from those who worked for him.

This is going on too long but one of the the lessons I picked up from him was to welcome change with open arms and never allow pride or ego to stand in the way of changing your mind and/or course of action.

If the call turns out to be a bad one drop it like it's on fire and get working on the proper solution. Whatever anyone else thinks be damned.

It's fine to say I was wrong but the EMC way is to say I was wrong but I've been working on the right answer and here it is...

EMC founder Richard Egan passes away.

Dick Egan, the E in Egan's Many Children (EMC) passed away earlier today.

Dick was an Irish American hard ass with a filthy mouth and a great sense of humor. He did a lot for EMC employees. He did a lot for Ireland. And he did a hell of a lot for Cork.

There's an Irish pub in heaven Dick.

Iomega ix4-200d replicates to Celerra. Perhaps beyond?

The Iomega StorCenter Pro ix4-200d (I'll not be typing the long name again) desktop NAS system launched this week. It is a very competitive box in it's segment with up to 8TB of RAW capacity from 2TB drives, I like the dual network interface card set up as I can load balance across them, set them up for failover or give them separate IP addresses but it has something others do not have that I like much more than that. 

The ability to not only replicate between other systems but also to replicate CIFS file systems to and from EMC Celerra.

Yes you can replicate CIFS shares between the ix4-200d and the Celerra VSA, the NS series of Unified Storage platforms and right way up to the NS-G8 attached to a V-Max. If you're so inclined to use it to move file system data from one Celerra to another you can do that too, even though there are faster ways of doing that in the EMC product portfolio. :-)

It does work and has been tested, while you might not be using it as a copy device in your data center this certainly makes data migration between those Celerra Virtual Storage Appliances you may have at home a lot easier.

So what does this mean? Well think of it this way, numerous ix4-200Ds can be positioned at Remote Office Branch Offices (ROBO) where they replicate data to or from Celerra deduplicated CIFS volumes at your central location. The data on the ix4-200d units won't be deduplicated, and at these price and capacity points 2TB drives are cheap anyway, but the data on the Celerra in the glass room will be.

So, now it's not only Certified for VMware, Citrix Ready, Certified For Windows Server 2003/2008  but it's also certified for device to device and device to Celerra replication.

I don't think supported heterogeneous replication configurations will end with Celerra.

EMC IT heads to the Private Cloud

Talk, talk, talk, talk. People say a lot of things be that online, in the room during a sales vist, in marketing materials but the cold hard reality is this.

If you're not building and running these things yourself you have no right whatsoever to declare yourself an "expert".

-If your customer is building and running hyperscale applications you're only credible if you are building or you have built and run hyperscale applications.

-If they're moving to VDI you're only credible if you're moving or have moved to VDI.

-If they're looking at deploying a Private Cloud you're only credible if you are in the process of deploying a private cloud.

And so on.

Anyone can claim that they're an "enabler" or are "helping" but they're an enabler the same way a Turnip farmer is an enabler to a master chef.

There's nothing wrong with Turnip farmers they just tend to focus on the turnip crop and don't spend time working on recipes and cooking cooking cooking until they have Michelin stars. The question is who would you want your meal cooked by?

These videos will be updated once a month by on the ground members of EMC IT giving you a report on the progress of their projects.

It won't happen overnight but you'll get to go along on their journey.

Be a Backup Admin. See the IT world.

I like reading Preston from down under as he's a dyed in the wool backup admin through and through.

Is being a backup administrator a rewarding career? 

Most certainly. 

While you might toil away in the IT engine room forgotten about until a lovely email or a winning smile arrives asking you to pull various backsides out of the fire with a restore you'll have access to forces so powerful they're the IT equivalent of creation.

Here's a hint for all the high riding network designers and technology architects out there. Want to test your unique little snowflake of a design? Get the backup team to run their workload through it. 

Backup is the most intensive IT operation. You're moving the bulk of your data from point A to point B in a limited amount of time. No excuses it works or it doesn't.

If you've built correctly the throughput requirement for backup will be a unifying force.

If built incorrectly the throughput requirement for backup will be a destructive force.

Your design is flawed if you can't achieve the backup requirements

The other good thing about being a Backup Admin is that you get into everything. Networking, performance, operating systems, applications, storage technology, the works.

While we will always need Senior Backup Administrators I think everyone should spend a year early on in their career as a Junior Backup Admin. You'll see the IT world and can then decide what field you'd like to settle in.

For now. 

Last year's model

I must be off the crazy pills as no one else has mentioned it but since when do modes mean "convergence"?

I had two Operating Systems with different capabilities I now have two Modes with different capabilities?

This is obviously the "For goodness sake ship something! It's been years now could you please ship something. For the love of God all you have to do is ship something. I'm begging you, just ship something!" release.

Effectively what we have here is an integrated washing machine and dryer or integrated television and VCR if you're of a specific age. Two different things which have been glommed together as they're complimentary but really have little in common.

But when one of them fails they both screw you!

There's a good reason for purpose built over general purpose. It involves not rinsing your clothes again when they should be drying, but they're wet because the dryer is busted and the washing machine thinks it's doing you a solid. Or the broken VCR taking out your entire TV viewing for the night even though you had no plans to use the VCR at all. Failure domains matter. You go down the general purpose path too far and all of a sudden you've brought back modes or you start thinking that a clock radio is a good music system.

No, it's a good clock. It's a very bad music system.

Why not throw a VTL-OS in there as well and go for the hat trick? It's converged, but only so long as you run one of them at a time. You make your choice and if you chose the wrong one you break out your backup app because your way to move between modes is backup and restore. There's a nuke and pave right before the restore part.

As for taking a marketing paint brush and painting the word "Cloud" across last year's model that's fine for selling what you have to the same customers you've been selling to already but it sure as hell won't win you back the business you lost to the object storage systems customers started building themselves when they were tired of paying for NAS boxes.

In this case convergence obviously means something different to the other party. It's more like co-habitation or co-mingling, or a timeshare or multiple personality disorder.

One of the above but it's certainly not convergence.

And the cloud doesn't have modes.

Machines in Motion

Back when the bindings between compute and storage were static you didn't have to do too much worrying with regard to if what was currently connected and running right this minute was going to still be connected a minute from now.

And then server virtualisation came along and decoupled open systems operating systems from the hardware they ran on.

Now we have machines in motion on a regular basis and with the growth of Virtual Machines (You're allocating them as Linked Clones, right?) that's a lot machines in motion.

What's a storage admin to do?

Upgrading to FLARE 29 would be a good place to start. Included with FLARE 29 at no additional charge is automatic discovery of virtual machines and ESX servers, giving you an end to end view of the virtual to physical mappings in your environment.

With so many Virtual Machines you might need search. That's there too.

To illustrate the labor saving consider this. For an environment with ten ESX systems with 10 VMs per system that was over 200 screens of information you had to manually parse and record. We counted each one of them.

To make matters worse should things change, machines in motion, you started all over again.

With Virtualisation Aware Navisphere Manager it's two screens to create a detailed report and a mouse click to export to either to Excel Spreadsheet or a CSV file.

It's the nice touches like that which can make a huge difference to the work day of a Storage Administrator.

Go to VMworld 09. Get a great job.

Chad's team are hiring at VMworld.

I've worked alongside members of his team and not only are they wicked smart but they truly madly deeply love what they do. It'll be a fun, foot on the accelerator traveling at supersonic speeds gig if you get it. 

As you'll see from the EMC sessions (and some dropped hints) at the show EMC has an incredibly full new technology pipeline between now and VMworld 2010. If you want in on all that, if you want to be at the forefront of Private Cloud thinking this is the best way to get it.

It's always better to work with people who do these things and learn from them than hang out with the gum flappers who just talk about it.

The TelePresence Tardis.

Len has a fun post up about our use of TelePresence.

For anyone who hasn't used it I found it to be a very 24 like experience and since we were three way calling it was interesting to watch screens on the system jump from location as the microphones zoned in on the current speaker.

Would I use it again? Most certainly. I walked into an empty room after 5:00pm hit one button on the touchpad and was interacting with co-workers in two different time zones thousands of miles away in what appeared to me to be real time or a very good approximation of real time.

There wasn't even a dialling/loading/connecting screen like LiveMeeting or WebEx. I hit the call button and I before I had moved my hand away I was staring across the table at Len.

Okay, so that part was horrifying but the rest of it was cool.

I wonder how much Cisco would charge to put one of these in my house?