Storagezilla

2010.

Instead of boring myself recounting what’s gone on at EMC since this time ten years ago, when I was working the night shift playing GameBoy getting ready to shepherd some people through Y2K (I had one phone call and it involved someone forgetting to renew an SSL cert), I’ve been reading up on what’s coming in 2010 and firing off a snowstorm of ideas far and wide across the company.

It doesn’t matter if they’re acted upon, they’ll be read. Ten years ago I couldn’t be sure of that. Today I am.

Looking forward just over 24 hours into 2010 there are new products available literally in week one. Most of them won’t be publically discussed until later in the quarter but they are there none the less.

If there’s a larger change from the two pieces of hardware and six software products available ten years ago that’s probably it.

Having met someone recently, who when I was working for him a decade ago had a lot of juice at the company before he bailed, he voiced the opinion that he was interested in coming back.

I wouldn’t hire him.

Not because he wasn’t good at what he did but because he has too small a scope to operate inside the company EMC has become at any reasonable position of power.

Today and tomorrow belongs to those with an expansive view of not only the industry but of their workplace.

Don’t ever forget that.

Get a job.

Michelle Flynn's story on page 14 shows why doing a job interview after too much festive cheer is a very very bad idea.

We were very excited about a candidate who was highly qualified, according to her CV. She arrived at 10 a.m. for her interview, looking very professional, so it was off to a good start … or so we thought. First, when I went to say hello to her and to introduce her to Gary, who would be interviewing her, she greeted me with a kiss (I had never met her before)  on both cheeks. She then proceeded to stagger down to the interview room. During the interview, she made it clear to Gary that she was single and referenced several times that she was adventurous. … Gary at this point thought we must be playing a practical joke on him. Her breath smelled of alcohol, and it became obvious she was drunk! After the interview, when Gary brought her back to me to show her out, she proceeded to ask me when she could start. It is no surprise we did not invite her back for a second interview.

You can read more in the 100 Job Search Tips eBook. 

The High Density Clariion

Since I'm waiting for the house alarm installer to relieve me of the burden of sitting alone in the dark night after night with a shotgun in one hand and half a bottle of Whiskey in the other, forever vigilant and just waiting to empty two rounds into some Burglar who doesn't know what trouble he's wandered into, I suppose it's time to end the year with another product offering.

The High Density Clariion.

 

Using technologies from Infinflex, the hardware under pinning Atmos, High Density Clariion configurations allow for the delivery of the same number of drives but using only half the space.

Disks can be installed and replaced online, the Disk Array Enclosure rolling out and then moving out of the way to allow access to a second DAE which has rolled forward behind it.

When you consider a small number of Enterprise FLASH Drives an a hell of a lot of low power 2TB SATA drives with FAST and Spin Down you can see how close we are to FAST to the FULLEST.

High Density configurations for Clariion systems are available today and I'd expect high density configurations to pop up elsewhere across the line sooner rather than later.

I came, I saw, I reduced storage utilization.

Veni, vidi...errrmmm verygoodforstorageadmins?

People say to me via the written communication (Don't think too hard about that one) that is email "Zilla you charismatic stallion of man, can I use the CIFS compressed file attribute in conjunction with Celerra Data Deduplication to space reduce structured data? DB files and the like?"

And in my ruggedly masculine way I respond to them by saying "Why yes. Yes you can."

Celerra Data Deduplication: Phase 2

At the end of February 2009 the Celerra team introduced Celerra Data Deduplication, the design precept of EMC's data reduction strategy being how you can decrease storage requirements without negatively impacting operational requirements.

As stated in a previous blog post, compression was found to be an effective general purpose data reduction technique for unstructured data but ultimately it isn't a case of favoring one reduction technology over another, it's about using the correct data reduction technology (or technologies) on the right data.

The idea being to make data reduction intelligent and not brute force. Take the savings where it makes sense and not burn resources trying to reduce something which won't reduce well if at all.

Building on the work already in place this latest release removes the 200MB max file size ceiling allowing active files and files sized in Terabytes to undergo space reduction.

NDMP tar & dump backups will now output space reduced data during backups thereby cutting down on the the amount of data transferred during a backup and reducing your backup's time to completion. In the previous release only Volume Based Backup (VBB) preserved the space savings and only allowed for volume level restores. NDMP tar/dump now will not only maintain the space savings but will allow for individual file restores back to their originating production file systems while maintaining the initial space savings.

Along with increasing the range of files in a file system which become candidates for Celerra Data Deduplication, how files are identified as candidates has also been extended. Previously the options were to use SHA1 hash values or disable deduplication and just apply compression, as of this release a byte by byte comparison may also be selected.

Since Celerra Data Deduplication works on a per file system basis not only can you exclude specific file types but you can also exclude specific pathnames on individual file systems. So if your file system structures have directories containing data you don't want to deduplicate you can specify them for exclusion and they will not be processed for deduplication.

On the topic of intelligently specifying which files to deduplicate and which files not to, using the CIFS compressed file attribute Windows clients can enable and disable deduplication on a per file or per directory basis directly from Windows Explorer. When set the Celerra will attempt to always ensure the file or directory contents are deduplicated as new or modified data is written to the files or directories specified.

So if you don't like how the policy engine is deduping files automatically you can simply select which files and directories you want deduplicated and choose in what fashion they are deduplicated.

All in all advancements which lay the groundwork for the next set of improvements which will follow soon.

My thanks to the Celerra team for answering my questions and supplying technical input on this post.

Winning with SourceOne

What's more, ICI has an amazing 950 percent winning batting average on SourceOne proposals, nailing 21 of 22 deals. The lone deal lost was not to another company but rather because of a lack of funding, he said.

via www.crn.com

I like it when I see partners willing with SourceOne. In this case this partner is winning a lot with SourceOne.

FAST to the FULLEST

Today EMC delivers FAST V1 across Symmetrix, Clariion and Celerra Unified Storage.

As promised V1 has been delivered in Q4 and is available right now. As previously stated FAST V2 is on track for mid-2010. You'll find a lot of content about putting the right data in the right place at the right time in the materials here but right now we'll look forward for a moment so you can see how FAST is developing. 

After FAST V2 EMC will introduce FAST to the FULLEST.

The core concepts of FAST to the FULLEST being Small, Green and Gone.

  

Small and Green. Having isolated active (or hot) data from inactive (cold) data across the storage array and automatically placed it on the correct performance tier FAST will then apply deduplication, compression and spin down to reduce the storage footprint and the power requirement.

 

Gone involves deeper access into the systems to deal with the increasing or diminishing value of information over time. It is not enough to just move inactive data onto high capacity lower performance disks which you then spin down. You need to be able to move those files or records out of the database, or objects out of the content management system and place them on archival storage, upload them to your chosen cloud storage provider (Internal or external) or delete them as the information ages, if that's your policy.

FAST Small, Green and Gone. 

Less resources used to manage more information occupying less storage capacity.

Non-CDP

Carrying over from my Parting Shot entry on the topic one of the most bogus terms in information protection is “Near CDP”. Indeed it’s so moronic, pretty much meaning you have more than one snapshot taken at intervals no matter how long or irregular, that it’s technically indefensible.

Continuous Data Protection provides you an application or crash consistent image at the point in time you specify inside a protection window correct to the state of individual blocks at that point in time. It allows you to roll forward and back through changes exactly as they happened on the volumes being protected.

The bogus Near-CDP on the other hand is like if your Digital Video Recorder only recorded one image frame of a TV show at regular or irregular intervals but never continuously. Those intervals could be one frame a second one frame an hour but never every frame.

Sorry if you wanted to see the sports star score for you team or see who slept with whom this week on your favourite trashy Soap Opera. It had better have happened when there was some recording going on or otherwise you’re out of luck.

It Nearly-Recorded the entire show but it never will record an entire show.

If your Digital Video Recorder started acting like technologies with the Near-CDP sticker on them you’d throw it out immediately. There aren’t any Near-CDP technologies, there are Non-CDP technologies.

Near-CDP is a marketing invention of people who don’t offer Continuous Data Protection but are trying to repackage Non Continuous technologies as “kind of being the same thing”.

The word Continuous matters and you’re either continuous or you’re not.

Near-CDP is not continuous and never will be. It is Non-CDP.

Check that Replica

If you're tasked with protecting information that is something which doesn't begin or end with performing a live backup, that being where a copy of the data is rolled off the production system to a different system usually ending up on disk or tape. You're also responsible for the consistency of data copies subject to the various array based functionality used to create copies. Be those copies local such as Snaps, Clones and CDP or remote replication at the block or file system level.

Storage Admins will tell you that Snapshots/Checkpoints/Clones and array to array replication is their bag. 

It's not. Well not entirely. 

Any copy of production data is something the backup team requires insight into if not management of and there's some cool new functionality in EMC Data Protection Advisor (DPA) specifically focused on array based information protection technologies.

DPA Replication Analysis maps application structure on your hosts and all the storage and replicas associated with that structure right down to the tablespace or file system. You can then see what applications or file systems are using what array resources and monitor them to ensure to ensure you're meeting SLAs. DPA's existing auditing and reporting infrastructure will flag invalid configurations, orphaned replica resources and report on the protection status in the same fashion that DPA can report on the backup,VMware or NAS infrastructure.

So when it comes to dropping a report into someone's inbox you can slice and dice all the protection analysis information to suit who ever is reading and generate the reports they need to see. 

There's a bunch of new features in there as well focused on RecoverPoint and Celerra but we'd be here all night.

Instead download the DPA 5.5 release from Powerlink request an eval license and try it yourself.

Symantec Enterprise Vault & EMC Centera

Hot on the heels of scaling out the virtual archive here's a new Best Practices White Paper on deploying Symantec Enterprise Vault and EMC Centera in a turn key building block deployment for the archiving of email and other unstructured data. The digital ink hasn't dried on this yet and it's only in the process of being published so it contains the freshest information.