And now – something just AWESOME for small VMware shops….

So – with all the back and forth in the blog-o-sphere recently, and with VMworld next week - it’s made me take stock of the last year….

• We launched our updated Enterprise platform – for very large scale internal and external clouds at customers and service providers building private cloud structures for cloud compute models on top of VMware – EMC Symmetrix V-Max.   Delivered.   100’s of units have shipped and are in production.
• We launched and shipped our Cloud Optimized Storage for customers and and service providers – EMC Atmos.  A new architecture for a new set of needs:  
• Data Presentation models using REST/SOAP.
• Something that natively does object storage and multi-tenancy.
• Price point needs to be a FRACTION of traditional enterprise storage architectures.  There is a place for traditional scale-out block and scale-out NAS in this new storage use case – but if anyone thinks those can compete with Amazon S3 (on function or price), personally, I think they are missing something.  
• Policy (like and object distribution) occurs at an OBJECT level – not at a LUN or filesystem level
• BTW – Atmos is proving quite successful (these “do something different” things always entail risk).   Hundreds of PB have shipped, and it is in use around the world at customers.   People are building Atmos support into their applications, which is the ultimate example of success.
• EMC Ionix has started to integrate our management portfolio – which we’ve been constructing focusing on the transition from “classic physical application infrastructure stacks” to “100% virtual environments” to “build and operate like a cloud” to (eventually) “federate between internal and external clouds).   Some big stuff to see next week on this topic.
• We expanded our deduplication strategy – with the addition of our first production storage dedupe (Celerra NAS – with lots to do, and more coming on that front), the leading source-based deduplication (EMC Avamar) – and now also the clear market leader in target based deduplication (Data Domain).   When it comes to doing more with less – we’ve been doing it for a while, and you can see we’re doubling down there.
• Most recently, we’ve updated our mid-range – in that space, ease of use, flexibility, efficiency and delivering VMware integration are the things we’ve heard are really important, and we’ve delivered end to end 10GbE iSCSI and NAS support, and VM-Awareness by integrating EMC CLARiiON Navisphere, Replication Manager and Recoverpoint directly with the vCenter APIs – adding to the extensive list of vCenter plugins we’ve made available for VMware admins.   

As always here at Virtualgeek – there’s never an implication that we have it “uniquely” figured out.   We have strengths and weaknesses at EMC – galore.   More broadly, my experience is that in EMC is that we recognize that we’re never “there” – always working to head in the right direction.   We can, should and WILL be making continued investments to make our products more integrated, and simpler to use.

You’ll see lots more on all those fronts (some of it next week @ VMworld :-)

So… Stopping my ramble, who’s left for this quarter’s update? 

Well – the SMB and consumer, of course :-)

Today – the first “fully designed from the ground up as part of the EMC family” iomega device is available.   This unit has some nice industrial design finally (the older ix2 and ix4’s had a look only an engineer could like).

 

Want the high notes?

1. 4 drive desktop unit – 2, 4, and 8TB configurations – starting at under $650.
2. Super-simple and easy to use – with all the EMC Lifeline goodness including drive and fan spin-down, RAID 1/10/5
3. Formal CIFS, NFS and iSCSI support – and on the VMware HCL day 1 for both iSCSI and NFS on vSphere 4 (see that here).  BTW – it also is on the Microsoft HCL for W2K3 and W2K8 iSCSI initiator.
4. Dual GbE interfaces – crazy at this price point, but this means link aggregation and network HA.
5. Remote Replication capability.  Wow.   Yes, this begs the obvious question, and we’re working on it.   SRM needs remote replication and snapshots/clones to work – we’re getting the key pre-requisites – and are indeed working on it – but not yet…).
6. Other things that matter to small businesses (strong Active Directory support, SMTP, email alerts, remote management, print server and USB storage expansion)
7. Other things that matter to consumers (“One Click” remote or local backup, nice mgmt LCD, Retrospect included, Mozy support, Apple iTunes and Time Machine support, uPnP, native BitTorrent support, for the paranoid – can connect 5 external video cameras directly, and more…)

For those of you who have latched on to the VMware support, I also want to highlight two whitepapers:

This is for the desktop units: Iomega StorCenter Pro NAS ix4 and ix2 with VMware ESX Server 3.5

This is for the rack-mount units: USING IOMEGA STORCENTER PRO ix4-200r NAS SERVER WITH VMWARE ESX

I’m pretty sure that these are the only “VMware storage best practices” for storage devices in the <$1000 price band :-)

It’s AWESOME :-)   BTW – I dropped a hint on our giveaway at VMworld – so here you have it.   We will have 3 Segways for the big “once a day” draw, but we also have 3 of the 4TB units each day for people who register at the booth.

There will also be a one-time 25% discount coupon at the booth for people who want one but don’t win.   I’ll also be giving one away in SS5140 – if you’re there, you might get it!

I think this will likely be my last “pre VMworld post” – looking forward to seeing you there!

Comments

[Carlo Costanzo]

I gotta get me one of these for the Basement!

[Duncan]

SRM Support would be amazing! :-) But even having manual failover capabilities is fantastic. Does it have an API so it's possible to fully script a failover?

[Chad Sakac]

We're working on the SRM support. To do it, lifeline needs to add a snapshot/clone function first - but Duncan, we are serious about trying to get that done over time.

Will let you know about the API/scriptability - I believe the answer is yes, but will be able to tell you soon.

(plus, I'm sure I can get you one :-)

[JBrokaw]

What kind of performance have you seen out of these? I've seen the older model around, but was never able to find anyone that had tested/deployed them.

[Chris]

Kinda shitty that the rack unit only has a single ethernet.

[Stephen Foskett]

I'd just like to highlight one statement from the above post:

"if anyone thinks [traditional scale-out block and scale-out NAS] can compete with Amazon S3 (on function or price), personally, I think they are missing something."

Amen, Chad! Amen!

[Jay Weinshenker]

Oh great, just great. At work, we run EMC products on most of our data center. I come home and talk about how cool the stuff is to my wife, who is into high end photography... and who has been needing a good solution involving remote replication for her pictures....

Well, on the bright side, I'm saving $$ on buying these with the coupon codes given out at the show :D

[MarkA]

Looks like the VMworld $$ special offer ended...too bad...I was too slow.