Storagezilla

CA, HP, BMC, IBM this note's for you.

Let me be clear: our goal is to simplify management of IT as customers move to an increasingly dynamic and virtualized infrastructure. However, our customers have varied needs and have also made significant investments in management platforms and tools from our partners.  As we integrate the Ionix products into the vCenter family and accelerate innovation towards a new more agile management model, we remain committed to open APIs, and co-operation and integration with our partners.  This approach has allowed us to jointly provide robust solutions for our customers and we will continue to lead in this area.

via blogs.vmware.com

That's nice and all but cutting to the quick VMware’s infrastructure partners will have access to some incredibly nifty products and technologies which previously were only available through an EMC Sales Rep.

If you’re an EMC competitor it’s not rocket science to figure out you’d go running to one of the big four IT management companies when you found yourself competing against these when they were part of an EMC solution.

Now you’ll be able to position them as part of your VMware solution as they're now part of the VMware core product set.

The big four is about to become the big five.

CA, HP, BMC, IBM & VMware

Iomega Helps the United States Ski and Snowboard Team Win Gold!

Jon Larson, Information Technology Director for the USSA, said finding the right networking storage solution was the final element in putting together the IT backbone of the USSA’s new Center of Excellence.

"During the transition from the old facility, the IT department was able to update the majority of the infrastructure including phone, network, audiovisual and security systems," said Larson. "The missing piece was finding a cost effective storage solution that would allow us to consolidate our backup solutions, provide mass storage for our content repositories, and provide compatibility with our existing VMware virtualization systems. This is where Iomega's NAS storage solutions shine, exceeding my expectations with features like replication, active directory integration, and media serving."

To manage all of the digital data coming from the action on the slopes as well as USSA's strength training systems, computer lab, multimedia rooms for performance analysis, equipment workshops and a full sport science lab, Larson is utilizing several units each of Iomega's StorCenter™ ix4-200d 8TB* Desktop NAS Server and Iomega's StorCenter™ Pro ix4-200r NAS Rackmount Server, in 2TB and 8TB capacities.

via www.emc.com

I'll admit to finding the Iomega division fascinating. It's a small team with a massive volume business and it's building everything out of commodity hardware and software components.

They're answering a question I asked back in 1997. Could we compete in the low end of the storage market with Intel processors in one hand and Linux in the other?

You'll have to remember back then it was the Symm4 days and I'd never even heard of Data General so the answer I got at the time was "Well if it can be priced at $1M a box sure"

I think it's better it took this long to get something like that on the road as the company now has no qualms about looking beyond itself for whatever tech is required to solve a problem.

But these days just like Honda: Everything we do, goes into everything we do.

Win Chad's stuff.

Contests and prizes… And here’s the first.   It’s right there on the column on the right of the “Everything VMware at EMC” community… Share your story of how you use VMware, EMC, and Cisco technology together and win (not “enter to win” in the sense that you statisically may or may not based on chance, but until I run out – every story wins) an Iomega ix2 or ix4.   We have loads of customer success stories, but each “lights up my life” a bit – after all, it’s the customers that make the world go round….

via virtualgeek.typepad.com

And when Chad runs out we'll just rob his house to ensure everyone gets a prize. You'll have to collect it in Canadaland though...

Virtual Winfrastructure

When I moved into this role responsible for connecting all the dots in EMC's Hyper-V world and helping to drive new products and solutions for our customers and to the field, I knew we had done some work as a company around Hyper-V but I can admit that I didn't truly know to what extent.  A recent assessment of our published technical guides (best practices, proven solutions, blueprints, etc) resulted in a list of several existing documents showing how to run Hyper-V using a variety of EMC products including how to virtualize various application workloads.  Here's a sample of just some of the technical guides I found interesting and currently available on EMC.com:

via vwin.typepad.com

Adrian is the EMC Hyper-V Tsar.

Computer jargon baffles users, hinders security

“In an ideal world you would change your password every day. You would have 14 characters and no more than two would repeat themselves. No one can live with that,” said Chertoff.

via www.wired.com

It's called Two Factor Authentication but unfortunately it's been slow leaving the Enterprise and the Payment Card Industry.

I'd much rather not have to keep dozens of passwords squirreled away, Yes I do write them down (Oh the horror), and would prefer to use my SecurID Token for everything but that's just not the case.

I accept the jargon thing for end users. When IT people complain about jargon there's an aspect of what are you paid to know? For end users users and security you'd have thought we'd have had a few He's not a Nigerian Prince it's a scam or Don't open that zip file ads on TV by now.

The home computer security market may be growing at a glacial rate but it's a massive money maker, you'd think they'd advertise their offering with a bit of customer education attached.

Virtual Vs Static Provisioning

I don’t have to tell anyone that Tom Georgens was spouting nonsense with respect to tiering as end users are telling people he was spouting nonsense with respect to tiering.

But I do think it shows up a dipolar view of how people provision their storage.

In Georgens Static Provisioning model you get what you get and that’s all you get. It may grow or shrink but it’s never going to be anything other than what it is.

In the Virtual Provisioning model as your requirements and the nature of your information changes the system changes with it. Today is not assumed to be the same as tomorrow or the year after that.

For EMC it is Virtual Provisoning which enables Fully Automated Storage Tiering and will enable FAST to the FULLEST with Deduplication, Compression and Spin Down.

FAST V1 shipped when EMC said it would. V2 is right on track for delivery and it’s something end users obviously want.

The Road To EMC World 2010

Unless my boss says otherwise I’ll be there.

The session catalogue is up so go browse.

EMC Live Webcast: VMware on EMC Celerra NFS

Deploying VMware on NFS has never been easier with the new capabilities of EMC Celerra.

Attend this webcast to find out more about VM storage capacity optimization with deduplication and virtual provisioning, improved manageability via vCenter integration, information protection with EMC Replication Manager, and VMware SRM integration for disaster recovery including fail-back automation.

via www.emc.com

Should be interesting to some of you.

File Management Appliance: Virtual Edition

I’ve mentioned this already but now the team have an area set up on the EMC Community Network for users who’d like to download and run FMA/VE.

What’s the difference between FMA/VE trial edition and the full edition? The number of files it’ll move. 5000 for the trial edition, which should be enough for you home lab Vs 75 Million for the licensed version.

Otherwise the functionality is the same.

Check it out over on ECN.

Atmos 1.3 with GeoProtect Erasure Coding

Atmos 1.3 is being announced sometime later today and besides the capacity and performance increases the big thing about this release is GeoProtect.

GeoProtect uses erasure coding to reduce the amount of overhead required to protect your information without having to have another complete copy of the information in the system somewhere.

With GeoProtect you distribute fragments of the data throughout the system, locally or distributed remotely to mitigate the effect of failures. Atmos provides two polices with either a 33% overhead or a 60% overhead allowing you to distribute the fragments and get excellent space utilisation Vs fault tolerance in comparison to the overhead of making multiple copies.

Like BitTorrent for your data.