Storagezilla

It's going to be a long year for some.

Customer asks a question in an EMC Community Forum. NetApp show up in that EMC Community Forum and try and flog him a V-Series. He tests the V-Series, rejects it and then posts the reasons why in the same Community Forum.

Where I will ensure it is viewable until the stars go dark and the universe collapses.

This has to be like waking up in the morning. Everything is good. You're doing well. And then the idea you're some "leader" in Flash evaporates because what you and your co-workers agree must be so (3PBs) at the company All Hands meeting in Sunnyvale is in no way connected with reality. (10PBs sold by EMC in 2010)

Oh, and here's the post.

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All,

                I thought this thread should have my results posted to it. We have done some extensive testing and had equipment from both vendors onsite. We read through many blogs, articles, white papers and manuals during testing. We used the same data sets and same VMware data stores for these tests.

Let’s start off with the technical specs:

1.)    We found the EMC had faster CPU and more Memory per host and cluster

2.)    Redundancy – The NetApp isn’t a true redundant system since the controllers are separate. As we saw NetApp was 4 9’s availability versus 5 9’s from EMC

3.)    PAM/CACHE – The NetApp cache is read only versus EMC cache as read/write

4.)    PAM/CACHE – When either controller reboots the CACHE is cleared versus moved to the other controller on EMC

Let’s discuss capacity now:

1.)    We used 1.3TB of RAW disk capacity

a.)    EMC had 81% of the RAW capacity as useable

b.)    NetApp was 48% of the RAW capacity as useable

2.)    Dedupe rates

            a.) EMC was a 46% dedupe rate plus we saw gain from compression

            b.) NetApp a was 90% dedupe rate

Results:

                Manageability was one of the major concerns in our organization as well.  NetApp is simple to manage while allowing a robust CLI and a great V-sphere plug-in. However filer view is a very old interface and needs some updating as well.  With EMC's current platform, we found that Unisphere is a simple to manage platform and the new vSphere plug-in is robust and works great.

One thing we did note was that response time on EMC fiber channel LUN’s was better than the NetApp LUN’s.  Now in our environment I’m not sure that would matter a whole lot but it was worth noting. Reading various blogs also indicated the same results on FC & iscsi; noting that EMC had better performance than NetApp.

I think there is no doubt that the WAFL file system is a great file system and block level dedupe beats out file/byte level dedupe. NetApp appears to have better response from a NFS mount perspective however we had some permission issues getting mounts to work on VMware which was seamless with the EMC.

All in all so far we couldn’t find a compelling reason to choose NetApp for our environment.  I think in the end the dedupe differences seem to even out in regards to useable capacity. Well that’s it from our testing and research, I hope this ends up being helpful to someone else out there.

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Greenplum: The Untold Story.

 

The guy playing Larry Ellison is great. I burst out laughing at his pipeline and when I saw the other video where he has a sailboat.

Leadership

Yes, last year EMC shipped 10 PBs of Flash to customers. I know this because in the weeks just after introducing FAST Cache and FAST VP we sold 1PB alone.

That’s Flash leadership in technology and sales.

Putting it together with Pat Gelsinger

Somewhere between carving the Christmas turkey and toasting the New Year I spoke with Pat Gelsinger, President and Chief Operating Office of EMC Information Infrastructure Products about the year ahead in general and what EMC will deliver in specific.

As per usual I don’t cut him a break on the first question

Concepts like the Journey to the Private Cloud and Big Data. Those strike me as being very strategic messages for upper management. How do these equate to what the team on the ground does, be that team inside a customers organization or inside EMC?

Well lets break that down. In any strategic vision, the top level messages need to be simple and generally consistent over time. They are like a north star to help guide the myriad of activities which occur inside any large and diverse organisation.

It becomes the responsibility of each organization to incrementally align its activities to better fit with and be refined against that top level message. They’re a way of thinking about how what you’re working on today fits into the larger overall picture. For instance in Information Infrastructure Products for some product groups, it might mean to do a better job supporting virtualized environments. For others, it might mean delivering fully automated management environments for cloud (private or public) operators. For other product teams they are all about Big Data so its already central to what they do. For our sales teams, this message may be an opportunity to up level ourselves to the CIO or business leaders in our accounts to tell a more strategic and visionary message with the result being, EMC becoming a more strategic and trusted partner.

EMC has storage platforms running different operating systems and Microcode. VNX is a move towards convergence but how converged do you expect EMC storage products to get? What’s going to happen or more importantly what should we expect not to happen?

To me, simplification and convergence will be a somewhat never ending assignment for us. Clearly when we began this thrust in January of 2010 I knew we had to take major steps in replication, mid-range systems management and other things. With RecoverPoint Unified Storage Replication, Unisphere and the launch of VNX, the first phase of this plan is coming to fruition.

However, just as we start to make progress on simplification we make things more complex by adding Data Domain Archiver and Isilon to the product mix! Net, I expect we’ll make more big steps in 2011 with VNX but our need to keep simplifying and pruning will be never ending as we continue to respond to new trends in the market, as we continue to innovate and continue to acquire.

Any hints on the acquire part?

No.

Moving on..

Good idea.

The VNXe puts EMC into a more generalist practitioner segment. Do you see that product taking those design concepts upwards into the midmarket?

Yes. You can expect many of the design concepts of VNXe migrate upward into VNX over time as we work to simplify the product interfaces, further unify block and file, provide deeper application integration and make the totality of VNX and VNXe a more seamless product line going forward.

EMC has placed a big bet on Big Data by paying $2.25B for Isilon Systems and merging the Atmos team into that organisation.With a tagline like “Smart is Simple” isn’t big relative? It could be 3 Isilon nodes or 30 of them. Where’s the boundary with VNX in NAS deployments for customers who wouldn’t class themselves as having Big Data needs?

Actually the bet is bigger than simply the acquisition price of Isilon, we also have the acquisition of Greenplum and the formation of the Data Computing Division. Further, we need to carefully manage the alignment between Atmos and Isilon and Isilon and VNX.

Taken together, we have a tremendous set of assets but now, a huge set of challenges as well. We have a very aggressive ramp up for DCD and Isilon respectively; we need to execute like crazy on each of these to both realize the full value they afford, but also the competitive elements in the market place demand that we perform extremely well.

Of course, if that were not enough, the fine line between the Atmos and Isilon in scale out environments and VNX and Isilon in mid-range makes the potential for leverage high but also the risk of message and sales conflict high as well. As EMC Vice-Chairman Bill Teuber says, 2011 is a high degree of difficulty plan!

Both the opportunity and the challenges are getting lots of attention and I’ve thought about them a lot, but we couldn’t be happier with the early progress. Teams are in place, processes underway, cooperation very high and enthusiasm off the charts!

However, diligence is required.

Moving away from the tech stuff, have you read any good books over the holidays?

The two I’ve been dipping into most frequently are “The Heart of a Leader” by Ken Blanchard and since I’m training for my first marathon the aptly named “Essential Guide To Training For Your First Marathon” by Joe Donovan.

You’re running your first marathon? Which one?

Well this year I’m running the Boston Marathon in April and then the Great Wall Marathon in China in May. So not only will it be my first marathon but it’ll be my first marathon on two continents.

I’m starting to see where these high degree of difficulty plans come from.

I'll race you.

VNXe: Cherry Bomb!

It’s managed by Unisphere.

It has no X-Blades or Control Station.

It’s uses Active-Active Disk Processor Units.

It’s an all Ethernet storage system.

It’s designed with tool free Customer Replaceable Modules.

It comes with Thin Provisioning, Compression and Snapshots.

It supports Flex I/O expansion, Remote Replication and Application Awareness.

It runs the VNX Operating Environment on a dual core Intel processor in less than 4GB of RAM.

It’s a new family of product.

It’s the VNX^e

Yes the superscript matters as that’s the name. VNXe isn’t the name but it’s easier to write, so while incorrect it’s allowable. What does the superscript ^e stand for?

Nothing.

But I like to think I stands for everything I want it to stand for.

Of all the products being launched today VNXe and the Data Domain Archiver are the products I love the most. I love them because they bring me into new market segments with new customers to whom I previously didn’t have anything to offer.

Price wise it sits nicely just above Iomega’s rack mount systems but just below the low end of the VNX range.

The VNXe family is storage for the IT generalist because guess what? Generalists don’t care about carving up storage and don’t want to spend time on the mathematics required to figure out how they should lay things out to support a workload of a few dozen or a few hundred Exchange users.

So we decided we weren’t going to ask them to do that.

Instead it takes less than ten clicks of a mouse as we’ve placed the EMC best practices directly into the product. Exchange, Hyper-V, VMware, iSCSI, NFS & CIFS shares there are best practices in there for all of them and more will be rolled out as they’re required.

It takes your application requirement inputs and the system does the maths and the layout for you.

When we get right down to it Generalists don’t care about storage. They care about Applications. Which is why VNXe is designed to be application centric. Storage management concepts have little to no place in the day to day thinking of an IT Generalist so expecting them to digest those concepts is ridiculous and a recipe for disaster.

Who cares about replication relationships? IT Generalists don’t. Ditch that storage management terminology and all that comes with it. It really is a case of copy my Application/my data from here to there.

Storage Pools and Storage Pool Services? They neither want or need to know about any of that. Specialists might be interested in block sizes for Thin LUNS, Generalists aren’t and as it’s VNX OE from top to bottom current and future Storage Pool services can be enabled to meet demand in that segment.

Need support? Want to watch How to videos? Or have a question for other VNXe users? Click the relevant button in Unisphere.

The VNXe represents everything we know about how people use storage in a system for people who know nothing about how storage is used.

And we’re going to sell a ton of them.

VNX: Notes on a launch

So VNX is here. There will be post after post discussing the new platform but as is the case a lot of the software engineering effort has gone into supporting the new hardware and making some foundational changes to facilitate future functionality.

There are a couple of aspects to the launch which I found interesting and are worth highlighting.

Previously the Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST) Solution for NAS on the Celerra was the EMC File Migration Appliance with file data being migrated to a destination tier of storage while stubs were dropped at the source, thereby making the migration transparent to the user.

While doing it this way allowed not only for tiering inside a system but tiering across systems, it showed that Pool based services were not being leveraged for File data. It also required an external appliance, physical or virtual, to orchestrate the data movement.

With VNX, File data moves between tiers inside the system at the sub-LUN level. Exactly the same way I described the process for Block data in a previous post leveraging the exact same Pool based services and with the exact same views and controls shown in Unisphere.

In VNX, FAST VP (Virtual Pools) is now a system wide service. Just like FAST Cache.

Looking towards replication, to date replication of file data has not been supported by RecoverPoint, but with VNX and the latest release of RecoverPoint this has changed. Replication of SAN LUNs and NAS File Systems are supported for system level disaster recovery with RecoverPoint Continuous Remote Replication. Users choose which VNX X-Blades they wish to replicate and RecoverPoint replicates the storage owned by that X-Blade while managing the required locking operations.

This Unified system level replication is VNX specific and not available on previous generations of EMC Unified Storage.

Also in this release of RecoverPoint, Block Level Data Deduplication For Data In Flight. This is for WAN transmission only, when data lands on storage at the destination location it won’t be deduplicated. In flight however the bandwidth savings can be dramatic with the system performing block level data deduplication first and then applying RecoverPoint compression to the unique data being transmitted to the destination to deliver more of a data transmission reduction.

I’d expect additional functionality in the direction going forward.

To focus on the sales process previously EMC Unified had an enabler code for everything. I can’t count the number of times I took a meeting and came across a solution to a problem only to find they hadn’t licensed that feature.

Well feature licensing is out and software suites are in. You license a suite or a Pack made up of suites and get all the functionality in that suite or suites. You might use that functionality now, you might use it later but you’re licensed for it right away.

The Suites break down across the usual lines of performance and protection.

-The FAST Suite

Does exactly what it says in the title. FAST, FAST Cache, Unisphere Analyzer and Unisphere Quality of Service Manager licensed to allow you to deploy a FLASH 1st storage architecture starting with a small number of Flash drives.

I expect The FAST Suite to be probably the most popular Suite for VNX.

-The Local Protection Suite

Snaps, Clones, Point In Time Recovery. Licenses for SnapView, SnapSure and RecoverPoint CDP. Anything you need for in system protection.

-The Remote Protection Suite

Licenses for Replicator, MirrorView and RecoverPoint CRR. Anything you need for remote replication.

-The Application Protection Suite

Licenses for Replication Manager and Data Protection Advisor for Replication Analysis. If you’re replicating data I cannot underline the importance of the gap analysis functionality of DPA. It finds those small configuration things which can kill you should the proverbial hit the fan.

-The Security And Compliance Suite

Licenses for Event Enabler (Anti-Virus, quota management and auditing), File Level Retention and Host Data Encryption.

To conclude, I found the most interesting parts of the VNX to be in what you can see are clearly the structural changes visible when you look deeply at VNX Block and VNX File.

As Pat Gelsinger stated in the Putting It All Together post VNX, VNXe, RecoverPoint Unified Replication and Unisphere management is the first phase.

If you read between the lines with what I’ve written above, the shape of things to come is Phase 2.

VNX: It’s Showtime!

Yes, it’s finally Showtime.

Time to see what we’ve been working on since last January. Or Phase 1 as it’s known on Mount Olympus.

While the VNX posts are cueing up to form a cacophonous roar and Barry counts up how many points of share VMAX has gained from it’s competitors over the past year while introducing the biggest Enginuity release since it was named Enginuity I want to point you to a few places.

Some of these links might be online when you click through, some might not depending on when the author has chosen to post their content.

Data Domain Archiver over at Scott’s

This is the battering ram product when it comes to the last bastion of tape. The long term multi-year retention of backups.

With Bus-Tech Mainframe connectivity in one hand and Data Domain Archiver in the other, this year EMC are going to bust open tapes last two strongholds and make off with the tape vendors treasure. Treasure which they’ve been lazily mining out of tape accounts for years if not decades.

This isn’t something that’s going to happen, it’s been happening in the early adopter accounts.

Don’t weep for tape, it brought this upon itself and will be ground down in the gears of progress. Gears which in this case are High Speed Inline Data Deduplication, Continuous Data Integrity Checking and built in Replication for an incredibly short Time To DR Readiness.

The new DD890 and Global Deduplication Array over at Scott’s

The big get bigger. And faster. And deeper. And pretty much leave the competition in a wreck on the side of the road to greatness.

Inside VNXe over at Steve’s.

Steve has the advantage over the rest of us in discussing this since he was on the team that built it. It being the VNX Operating Environment deployed in an integrated package delivered at a tiny price point. A rather busy Steve rips some paragraphs from his notes and turns them into a blog entry.

Since I’ve been a big supporter for this project I expect it to be hyper competitive with offerings from other vendors in the same space I’ve ripped some paragraphs from my own notes and you can read those here.

VNX. Well this is the big ticket tin that’s been in the industry news every day for the past two weeks. I think we’ll get another few days out of it if we all work for it.

Here are my Notes On A Launch.

And last but by no means least, Putting It Together With Pat Gelsinger.

Running your own EMC Celerra ‘Uber’ Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA) in your vSphere Lab – Part 1 | TechHead.co.uk

In this series of blog posts I am going to take you through how to successfully install, configure, run and manage the EMC Celerra VSA in your own VMware vSphere lab using management tools and utilities such as Unisphere, vCenter Server and the EMC vCenter Server plug-ins.  We will also take a look at some of the real value add features such as compression, de-dupe and of course replication between two Celerra VSA instances. Fun times ahead!  For my hardware I am going to take my new HP MicroServer for a spin, I have added 8GB of memory to it along with an extra hard disk. Everything EMC Celerra storage related, even with replication, is going to run from this single lab server.

The series is going to be broken up into the following posts:

• Part 1 – The Basics: A High Level Introduction to the EMC Celerra Physical Storage Appliance
• Part 2 – Installing the EMC Celerra VSA (coming soon)
• Part 3 – Managing your EMC Celerra VSA with Unisphere (integrated & also free) (coming soon)
• Part 4 – Configuring the EMC Celerra VSA for NFS (coming soon)
• Part 5 – Configuring the EMC Celerra VSA for iSCSI (coming soon)
• Part 6 – EMC vCenter Plugs & Other Cool Stuff (coming soon)
• Part 7 – Configuring replication between two EMC Celerra VSAs (coming soon)

via www.techhead.co.uk

Good stuff Simon, everyone should go read the rest of it.

Iomega TV with Boxee, SuperHero Backup & Charger And Your Personal Cloud.

It’s CES week which means it’s time for EMC to release the first batch of this years Iomega crop.

I’ll start with what I’m most interested in but can’t have as it isn’t available in Europe yet.

Iomega TV with Boxee

As someone who consumes countless hours of media a week I wrote an email to the powers that be saying that we should drive our consumer TV efforts forward by doing something with Boxee. At the time I didn’t receive a response which is always a sign to me that there’s something going on even if I don’t know exactly what that something is. And here we are.

An Intel Atom powered Boxee system with up to 2TB of internal storage or available as a bring your own storage device. It’s the media player I’ve asked for and it’s the one I can’t have yet, probably because none of the TV streaming functionality will work when those services see a non-US IP address.

But I may need to drop by a BestBuy the next time I’m in the US. You know, for research.

Iomega SuperHero Backup and Charger

One for iPhone owners. The SuperHero Dock acts not only as a charger but also as an automatic backup device for your data on your iPhone to an SD Card. Data only. Your contacts, photos and so on. iOS currently doesn’t allow for the third party back up of apps without some jiggery pokery which would annoy Cupertino.

What’s the win here? Well when you’ve docked your phone seconds later you’ll have a backup which can easily be restored back to the same or a different iPhone.

Yes I’ve asked if there will be a version for Android, no I haven’t gotten an answer so take from that what you will.

Iomega Personal Cloud

Encryption, replication, access control and heterogeneous access device support all in an Iomega StorCenter. Host your own infrastructure in five clicks or less, browse and edit your files on your computer, phone or tablet.

There’s a lot going on there, I’ll have more thoughts when I get my hands on them.

Shatter...