Storagezilla

London VMUG, EMC and PowerCLI Goodness

During the recent EMC London VMware Users Group (VMUG) PowerCLI aficionado Alan Renouf and I presented a (that ended up over running as we kind of had too much to say) session on ‘Why EMC for VMware’.  This was basically outlining many of the cool VMware related features and products that we liked and found interesting (eg: plug-ins and Vblock) since starting as vSpecialists with EMC.  I always like talking about tech particularly things that have caught my eye or I consider useful or innovative.  The session was well received with plenty of questions during and after the presentation.  Alan has done a good write up on the event on his blog (virtu-al.net) and also includes the slide deck that we used so if you were unable to attend check out the deck here…

via www.techhead.co.uk

They're both nuttier than a squirrel in winter but I like them.

Spring into Atmos

This article demonstrates one way of using the Spring framework and EMC Atmos cloud storage.

 

To do that we decided to extend the SpringSource sample Developing a Spring Framework MVC application step-by-step and use the EMC Atmos cloud storage service to store things like images and videos. The inventory management system manages products and adding images or video helps to showcase the products. In effect Atmos externalizes the BLOB storage of this binary data.

 

In this article will review the additional features mainly the addition of Atmos and the changes to the business logic, web, service and repository layers

required to support Atmos.

via community.emc.com

Hey look at that, next generation Application development with next generation Object Storage Services.

EMC has provided object storage systems for coming up on ten years now. Wow.

Application level integration used to be the exception, it won't be the rule as there's too much immutable application code out there but it will become more and more important.

SQL Data Warehousing with Fast Track

Put simply, Fast Track is a program launched by Microsoft that targets Data Warehousing workloads with a goal of achieving incredible performance with low-cost hardware.

These prescriptive configurations include a blend of resources and best practices that really leverage the latest features in SQL 2008 Enterprise:

• CPU/Processors
• Memory
• Networking
• Storage

EMC has helped to build out solutions that leverage the CLARiiON AX4 series.  You can read more details here.

via powerwindows.wordpress.com

The linked presentation is pretty good even for someone such as I who knows this > < much about Data Warehousing.

Good job EMC Consulting.

Notes On A Quarter

While watching last night’s episode of Covert Affairs I spotted VMAX light strips reflected in a closing glass door.

Not usually one to mistake minor details like that (Just like Gil Grissom I also like rollercoaster's) I freeze framed it, sure enough the glass in the background was picking up a reflection of a VMAX door. A couple of minutes later when Piper Perabo and Christopher Gorham walk into the CIA lab there’s this...

VMAX isn’t only showing up on TV, from today’s earnings announcement it appears to be transferring market share away from it’s competitors in the high end and the high end of the mid-tier through consolidation. 32% year over year revenue growth on top of the growth from last quarter. What with a System z refresh due this week I’d expect more customers turning to VMAX’s scale out design to meet their needs.

Mid-Tier.

As we’ve been telling customers for months now and have been showing them behind closed doors at EMC World, there’s a new product family coming next year.

I know what it looks like, I know when it’s out. It won’t be available this year we’ll talk about what it looks like when it is available.

Clariion isn’t going away, Celerra isn’t going away. Sales of each increased last quarter and the code for both of those products had a major upgrade announced at EMC World and will be delivered this quarter.

This will be...something new. 

vBlock.

Sales are well ahead of plan. Demand for meetings about vBlock were so high that at one stage I was talking to CxOs about the Journey to Private Cloud. (Don’t tell my boss) Hiring the right people is crucial for it’s success going forward and explains why EMC is bringing onboard as many smart people from different specialities as it can find to staff up that organisation.

BRS.

Moving like a rocket. I’m sitting in the nose cone of that rocket so I’ll choose my words with care but BRS is a Billion Dollar volume business for EMC. Not a Billion Dollar business, a Billion Dollar Volume Business. I’ve been in competitor stronghold accounts who wouldn't take a meeting with EMC previously but they're buying BRS products. 

Hiring.

Joe said R&D are being too slow in hiring extra heads as they’re too picky. Well, you can’t be too picky about smart people. I was sitting at a table of new hires a few months ago and the question came up where did you work previously? I was the only person at the table who hadn’t been writing code for Sun or Oracle. When I asked them what they had worked on my brain induced a coma to protect me from the depths of kernel development.

Acquisitions.

EMC is sitting on the economic firepower to buy a Symantec or the like. It won’t. Big acquisitions are how companies choke to death but it could do so it if it chose to.

Right now the list of people and technologies I’d like EMC to bring in house is pretty short. I had been pushing hard for Greenplum only to find that was nearing completion by the time I started making real noise.

We might need a new crop of start ups to appear in order to bulk that list up.

Overall?

A strong quarter, blew past expectations by about $40M, new products in the pipeline, enhancements for existing ones (Array based encryption with RSA Key Manager), and hiring as many smart engineers as EMC can get it’s hands on.

Now back to Q3…

Zilla’s Top Ten Reasons Moshe Yanai is leaving IBM

What with all the rumours I thought it was time to have a little fun.

Zilla’s Top Ten Reasons Moshe Yanai is leaving IBM

10. He doesn’t look good in that shade of blue.

9. He accidently landed on a HP campus and was impressed that Dave Donatelli was there to wash his Helicopter.

8. People keep asking him about that two drive failure thingy…

7. Diligent was never supposed to be taken seriously. Ever.

6. When he introduces himself people ask “Where’s that Bus based Symm 6 you promised us last time you were here ten years ago?”

5.When asked who he disliked more, the IBM System Storage folks in the Ivory Tower at Tucson or the IBM System Storage folks in Ivory Tower at Hursley, he choose both.

4. They both agreed he was right.

3. He finally ran out of chairs to destroy.

2. 85% discounts on your first few XIVs and he thought they were still ripping people off.

1. Figured he’s hired so many ex-EMC guys from the early 2000’s it was only a matter of time until Joe Tucci showed up and fired him again.

ECN: RSA Share: Developer's Diary

My name’s Tom Fowler and I’m a senior software engineer in RSA's BSAFE C Roadmap team - this means that at any given time I’m generally working on new releases for the BSAFE C product line. This includes: Share for C/C++, Micro Edition Suite (MES), Share Adapter and other products.

 

This post is the first in a weekly series that I want to use to informally diarize what is happening (and what will be happening) on my current projects.

via community.emc.com

Only security developers can get away with this because they have an academic culture of sharing deeply ingrained.

I like it, it's how people learn.

Big Data, Big Growth, Big M&A - WSJ

Aster Data Systems Inc., Vertica Systems Group Inc., Netezza Corp., and even the larger Teradata Corp., are potential targets. The interesting question is: Who are the buyers? The database powerhouses–Oracle, International Business Machines Corp. and Microsoft Corp. are not the leading candidates. Instead, EMC’s move will inspire other non-database firms to use the warehouse market as a forum to challenge the database leaders.

Simplistically, the data industry faces three issues. The first is volume: As more transactions are conducted and recorded on the Web, and more data are collected automatically rather than manually entered, the greater the need for data companies to find storage space.

Secondly, the data being collected are more diverse. Rather than just focusing on easily organized transaction-ledger information, companies are collecting more so-called “unstructured” data: information about how customers behave, how they use products and Web sites, and how they interact. Third, analytical demands are greater. Company strategists now need to ask more sophisticated questions of their databases, and they want their questions answered faster and the answers to reflect the most recent data inputs.

Warehouse firms are well positioned to tackle all three problems. Database vendors have traditionally concentrated on collecting data and making subsets of it available for relatively straightforward queries. Vendors specializing in warehousing and analytics focus on making huge volumes of data–especially those generated by temporally and operationally disparate business processes–immediately available to be examined and analyzed.

via blogs.wsj.com

I don't think we're going to see a big bang consolidation of that market. There are three big entrenched players in Teradata, Oracle and IBM and now the sticker price of everyone else who isn't Microsoft has just had a few zeros added before the decimal point.

But the more information created the more information will end up in Data Warehouses meaning the larger the share of the database spend will be available for something like Greenplum.

Geek week : How to build an empire in 6 days | Nickapedia

15 EMEA based vSpecialists, too much caffeine, the smell of last night’s pizza, and a seemingly impossible list of tasks to accomplish – that was Geek Week Q2 2010.

via nickapedia.com

I made sure to show up as close to them being finished as possible so they'd have some time to talk and even then they'd do something interesting and all conversation would stop as everyone else opened up sessions or went across for a look.

They're now hiring across EMEA. (Email nicholas_travers AT emc DOT com)

Another post from Evan (a partner) talks about his visit to Cork focusing on the campus SST organisation. 

Greenplum 101

What’s the most interesting thing to happen to software development in recent years?

No it’s not your phone or oversized tablet it’s writing code and having it execute in parallel across tens, hundreds or even thousands of Intel CPU cores in an organised and controlled fashion.

That’s how the Googles and Facebooks of the world do it and that’s how the EMC Data Computing Product Division will do it.

The great thing about the Data Computing Product Division is that it will bring Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) of huge volumes of structured information, leveraging multi-socket and multi-core technology, right into the existing data centres of non-webby industries allowing them to analyse their data via things like Structured Query Language, MapReduce, the R programming language and so on and so on.

You take your data, load it into the Greenplum Database and it automatically distributes that data across all the nodes and processes it in parallel running whatever level of sophisticated analysis you require.

You don’t need to partition or tune it and scalability is linear in accordance to the number of nodes you add.

So you have this fault tolerant MPP database and you’ve run huge data sets through it. It’s the engine that powers your analysis efforts. Brilliant. Where’s the value to different levels of the organisation?

That’s where Greenplum Chorus comes into play. Chorus provides a self service analytic infrastructure using the GreenPlum Database as the parallel processing engine.

Your Data Warehouse is the single source of truth for your entire organisation but it probably isn’t the only data source in the organisation. Load all that data into Chorus, your Data Warehouse and any other sources you so choose, and analysts can rapidly provision sandboxes where they can mash up different kinds of analysis then present those results upwards at different levels of granularity.

The power analysts get the view from every point in space or whatever points they specify, the Executives get something that looks like it’s a post on their Facebook wall with just the facts they need to make a decision.

And all is right with the world.

Grab the free single node edition here.

All you need to know about Atmos...

..in less than seven minutes.

 

Happy Customers. Happy Partners. Happy to talk about Atmos.