Virtual Geek

EMC - Journey to the Private Cloud – Award Nomination

Each and every day, our customers and partners are heroically driving innovation and success through the use of virtualization as the foundational step to achieving the benefits of cloud computing.

This is a chance for us to THANK and showcase EMC customers and partners as leaders at VMworld 2010.

EMC Journey to the Private Cloud Awards winners will receive an honorary award from EMC and be recognized among their peers during an EMC Customer Appreciation event at VMworld 2010 in San Francisco, August 30 – September 2, 2010. Additionally, winners will receive complimentary passes to VMworld 2011.

NOMINATIONS ARE DUE NO LATER than August 16, 2010. Please visit the EMC Journey to the Private Cloud Awards 2010 Nomination Form to recognize EMC customers and EMC partners.

CRITERIA

A panel of EMC, VMware and third-party experts will judge each of the nominations and select an EMC “Journey” Award winner for each of the five categories based on the following criteria:

• Innovation – Do the results reflect new capabilities or significant improvements in the realm of virtualization and cloud computing for your business?
• Value – Does the product represent a cost-effective solution? Can the ROI and business value be easily justified?
• Performance – Does the product perform to the degree that the solution improves overall data center operations?

Results must have been generated through the use of EMC and VMware technologies during the period of September 1, 2009 – August 1, 2010.

CATEGORIES FOR ENTRY

The “Journey” Awards 2010 were created to honor customers and partners that have deployed EMC and VMware technologies to ease their journey from physical to virtual and, in time, private cloud infrastructures. Customers are leveraging these technologies to further innovation, value and data center performance. We are accepting customer and partner nominations in five categories of EMC Journey Awards including:

Technology Excellence – Achieving Savings, Efficiencies and Agility in the Cloud

• Recognizes customers that have successfully driven results in operational efficiency, business agility, and energy efficiency/space savings through virtualization and the adoption of unique solutions aimed at effectively managing their physical, virtual and private cloud infrastructures.

Technology Excellence – Paving the Way to the Cloud

• Recognizes those organizations that have successfully accelerated the adoption of cloud computing through IT operations and staff education.

Partner Innovation– Groundbreaking Cloud Computing Solution

• Recognizes EMC partners that have raised the bar in delivering innovative solutions, product integrations and applications to help customers adopt and navigate their virtualized architectures.

Best Cloud Computing Collaboration Partner

• Recognizes those partners that have worked alongside EMC to build solutions to improve overall data center performance and operations.

Cloud Computing Visionary Award

• Recognizes an IT leader who has demonstrated extraordinary thought-leadership and vision, paving the way for private cloud adoption for their organization.

So – what’s EMC doing at VMworld 2010?

I’m going to keep updating this this post as things get closer and closer – but there’s already a ton our customers and partners can start planning for…

You can get the summary at the video below…

  

For those of you who can’t make VMworld Americas, but will be at VMworld Copenhagen – no worries – we’ll be mirroring the bulk of this there as well!

You can register using the EMC link and get the EMC discounted rate!

If you want detail on sessions, hands-on-labs, those face-melting demos and more – read on!

How good is YOUR VDI kung-fu?

A really great EMC partner, Nexus IS, has built a really cool VDI centric lab where customers can really see and learn.

As a partner of many technology leaders – you’ll get a chance to see this across many vendors, and compare VMware View and Citrix.

They run these on an ongoing basis, and if you’re in the central US, and thinking about client virtualization – you should check it out.  If you’re near Minneapolis/St. Paul and Wed, August 18th, 2010 – 10-4pm works for you…  Register at the link below… it will be worth your while!

Upcoming August EMC/VMware Webcasts…

Customer feedback on these keep getting better and better, so we need to continue to dial it up!   August is dominated by vSpecialists, including our very own Scott Baker, the inimitable Scott Lowe, and Tee Glasgow.   Brian Henderson is too cool to be a vSpecialist (he really is very, very good :-) and will be covering Exchange 2010 on Private Cloud models.

I’ve asked these to always be technical, and focused.   Give me feedback on the content, the sessions, and what you want to see next….

As always – same bat time, same bat channel – every thursday at 8am pacific, 11am eastern.

You can register for any any all – in one convenient place – right HERE.

Building Blocks for a 100% Virtualized and Protected Data Center

Thursday, August 5, 2010 - 8 am PT / 11 am ET / 16:00 BST

Hosts: Scott Baker, Technical Marketing Manager, EMC and Jim LaFollette, Sr. Systems Engineer, VMware
Hear a discussion on the integrated technologies from EMC and VMware that can be used to create a 100% virtualized and protected data center.

Disaster Avoidance with VMware vSphere and EMC VPLEX

Thursday, August 12, 2010 - 8 am PT / 11 am ET / 16:00 BST

Host: Scott Lowe, VMware-Cisco Solutions Principal, EMC
Find out how: EMC VPLEX differs from other storage platforms; active-active storage in multiple data centers enables new operational models; and vSphere and VPLEX together can allow you to live-migrate workloads between data centers.

vCenter Plug-ins from EMC

Thursday, August 19, 2010 - 8 am PT / 11 am ET / 16:00 BST

Host: Tee Glasgow, Senior vSpecialist, VCE Strategic Alliance, EMC
Discover how EMC plug-ins for VMware vCenter deliver the visibility, provisioning, and management of EMC storage from the vCenter interface - giving you more integration and capabilities than any other storage vendor.

Getting Microsoft Exchange 2010 into the Private Cloud

Thursday, August 26, 2010 - 8 am PT / 11 am ET / 16:00 BST

Host: Brian Henderson, Technical Marketing Manager, EMC
Learn best practices and hear alternative scenarios for cloud rollouts that will help you make the right storage, virtualization, and replication decisions for your organization.

Now THIS is going to be a party :-)

Sure, VMworld is about learning.   It’s also about networking with people – friends, colleagues, customers, and even respected competitors.   Heck – I’m in full on cram mode now.   We are prepping content, kit to support the hands-on-labs, finalizing face-melting demos, giveaways (1 iPad per hour), and much, much more.   Hey, I’m getting daily “where is your content” nag emails (well deserved!) from the VMworld crew.

but – it’s also about having a little fun while saying THANK YOU to the customers :-)

Since I started being “Mr. VMware at EMC” – one thing I said to Joe was “I want EMC to not only win in the VMware context on our own merits, but have fun while doing it!”

So… here are details on the VMworld 2010 EMC/VMware customer appreciation party…

Read on (including how to get an invite)…

 

vSphere 4.1, SIOC, and Array Auto-Tiering

So – do these ideas work together?  Do they complement each other or compete?   What’s the source of these questions Chad – and why are you asking them?  :-)

(BTW – this topic is one I’m covering at VMworld, along with some of the testing data)

If you’re interested, read on…

Oh – if ONLY there was a way to…

The lament of many cloud compute providers as we engage with them…   “I wish someone would offer a storage subsystem:”

• Was transactional (which VMware needs today to host VMDK storage) – but scaled, so I could manage at scale with less:
• scaled out linearly to large clusters (lets say 16 nodes – for a total of 128 intel cores for dealing with the IO load), using commodity x86 servers, but commodity components built for a service provider.
• where any resource in that cluster – brains, ports, caches could all service any IO – meaning it’s one big pool.  A datastore literally is everywhere, but also dependent on no one element.
• that could scale up to huge capacity (let’s say petabytes) without increasing my FTE cost because it’s designed for management at scale (hey, just like Cisco UCS!)
• where everything could be wide-striped across the entire backend of the array – so it acts as one big aggregate pool of ports, IO, brains, IOps and GBs.
• that was deeply integrated with VMware:
• offering vCenter plugins for end-to-end visibility
• complete automation of all path management – period.
• delegated storage provisioning in vCenter – where storage could be allocated to datacenter objects and cluster objects, and the VMware admins could self-service provision their own storage as needed?
• vStorage API for Array Integration support and much more…
• that was uber-efficient:
• enabling use of massive 2TB SATA disks (lowest $/GB), as well as solid state (lowest $/IOp)
• had massive scale-out cache models to absorb common workloads
• Supported pool expansion and rebalancing, as well as simple and easy zero reclamation.
• could auto-tier – which coupled with VMware SIOC = DRS for storage
• Could be coupled by that same vendor with cloud object storage at huge scale for non-transactional use cases and next-generation application use so they could compete with Amazon S3.
• Could be purchased and supported by someone with global reach and scale so as they grow, and need new stuff in places like Brazil, they could be counted on as a partner.
• Was built like a tank – an outage for a service provider is very bad.

And perhaps most of all:

• could support their business model – meaning that they could acquire it for:
• low dollars/GB if they like a capex-oriented model
• low cents/GB/month if they like an opex economic model
• Ultimately able to support services in the $0.10/GB/month band as end-user pricing with good business margin, and simultaneously also power higher-value services in the $0.25/GB/month and higher range.

If only EMC made something like that – well, the service providers would buy it by the truckload…

Well… WE DO.   And, they ARE.

Read on….

vSphere 4.1 – Cross-EMC support – what’s the good/bad/ugly?

UPDATE Sept 23th, 2010 – vSphere 4.1 (ESX and ESXi) is now universal across all of the major EMC capabilities.

UPDATE July 18th, 2010: a bit more info on Site Recovery Manager & Avamar…

Whenever there is a major VMware release, a common question from EMCers, EMC customers, and EMC partners is: “what is supported day one, and what will break if I upgrade?”

Any vendor who tells you “nothing will break” is either:

1. lying (lying maliciously)
2. delusional (lying, but unintentionally) – if you’re a competitor that piles on to this post, remember I have most competitor’s products myself, and I’ll call you on it :-)
3. a one-product company

As soon as you have a broad portfolio – getting everything to line up is impossible.  As we near major VMware releases, as the “face for VMware inside EMC”, I rally across the product teams to make sure we’re aligning.   We all work hard, and push as much as possible – but inevitably there are little time gaps.    They are all on eLab and the VMware HCL – but I’ve found it’s useful to have it integrated in one place. 

So – I’m taking the high road here and being as explicit as possible – even with gaps.  

Read on for details, but in a nutshell – core storage support is a rock on day one, and almost everything else lands within Q3, with some Q4 stragglers.

BTW – also getting the inevitable “can I get a Vblock with vSphere 4.1?”.  The answer now is YES.   That one is a firm NO right now.   Remember – the core idea of a Vblock is that it’s all integrated and tested so you don’t need to.   That means that by definition it will always lag any given component a little bit – and that’s a GOOD thing.   Of course, expect an update soon :-)

Remember everyone – always test before putting anything into production!!!!

Read on for details…

vSphere 4.1 - What do the “vStorage APIs for Array Integration” mean to you?

Well – in a nutshell – more, for less.

The vStorage APIs for Array integration (or VAAI) have been something that we previewed back at VMworld 2009.

Now that vSphere 4.1 is officially out, we can now talk about it without tapdancing around a lot of stuff.

I did a webcast on this topic the week before last.  I needed to step carefully around not saying “vSphere 4.1” or committed dates/functions, but now you know…   All the info on the webcast was technically accurate, and now officially decoded :-)

The topic is very interesting and the effect of these hardware acceleration offloads can be very pronounced.  

Just one example (of many)… using the Full Copy API:

1. We reduced the time for many VMware storage-related tasks by 25% or more (in some cases up to 10x)
2. We reduced the amount of CPU load on the ESX host and the array by 50% or more (in some cases up to 10x) (by reducing the impact during the operation and reducing the duration) for many tasks.
3. We reduced the traffic on the network by 99% for those tasks.  Yes you read that right, 99%.   During these activities (storage vmotion is what we used in the example), so much storage network traffic can be so heavy (in the example 240MBps worth of traffic), it impacts all the other VMs using the storage network and storage arrays.

And like Intel VT with vSphere 4, these improvements just “appear” for customers using vSphere 4.1 and storage arrays that support these new hardware acceleration offloads.

As cool as the Full Copy API is, I think hardware accelerated locking will have as much of an impact.  Locking is thrown out by protocol passionistas as a “why NFS is intrinsically better than VMFS” - which I don’t agree with.  There are differences which mean for some use cases, NFS is a fit, and for others the VMFS is a fit – the only thing that is always true is it’s handy to have both as options.   I’ve talked about this at length, and if you want to understand more, read here and here.  

In my experience, for most customers – they never experience any issues with VMFS locking.   In fact, it’s “invisibility” is a good thing – VMFS remains in my experience one of the simplest distributed filesystem implementations.  BUT, it can be an issue in certain use cases (and stuck locks suck).  Ideally you wouldn’t have to have any considerations for a datastore other than “is it big enough, and does it deliver the performance the VMs need, and does it do it as efficiently as possible”.   That is what the hardware accelerated locking does in vSphere 4.1.   Literally metadata updates have no impact on other things using the datastore (VMs or ESX hosts).  Mucho cool.

To understand more, and see resources to help visualize (and also a demonstration) – read on!

A bit of insider perspective – part I: my take on the Greenplum deal

Normally, I try to keep the discussions on the blog technology focused, but getting questions on this one, so wanted to put my 2 cents out there, just like I shared with the vSpecialist team internally. 

What is going on here?   Well, here are my cliff-notes on it.

The database market is being disrupted in both major areas:

1. OLTP/Web App – here, customers at the very high end are hitting core RDBMS scaling limits forcing them into exotic hardware away from x86.  Disruption and innovation is occurring to fill the vacuum.
2. BI/DW – here, bulk load and query throughput are forcing customers to abandon their desire for mass-commoditization and leverage of x86 and virtualization trend (“horizontal virtualization”) towards BI/DW appliances that don't match their general infrastructure plans (“verticalization”).  Disruption and innovation is occurring to fill the vacuum.

EMC and VMware (and others) are arming for battle on multiple separate, but related fronts.

• Gemstone (recently acquired by VMware) coupled with Redis (open source, with key contributors joining VMware – here also) are disruptors for OLTP use cases.   The disruption is occuring via in memory, NoSQL scale out models (Redis is an example of one of the pieces here – in-memory key value store), coupled with in-memory distributed data management  (Gemstone has key technologies here).   These ideas forgo locking and other traditional semantics in RDBMS-land, so aren’t for everyone, and aren’t for every use case. These require new apps to be written expecting that model, so it makes more sense as part of SpringSource.
• GreenPlum  (recently acquired by EMC) is a disruptor for BI/DW oriented use cases. These use cases CAN be done at the infrastructure part of the stack (ergo don’t demand application level-change), and can have a ton of infrastructure-layer optimization, can be implemented via appliance approaches (but in Greenplum’s case – appliances that match where customers are looking to go – with scale-out with commodity hardware and pervasive virtualization.   That’s all possible because transformation is part of the BI/DW process. All these reasons mean that there is a strong EMC fit.

BOTH Gemstone and Greenplum leverage and are amplified by the trends of virtualization, scale out, commodity hardware and cloud operational models - all aligned with EMC and VMware's technologies, and Private Cloud vision.

Simple, beautiful moves, IMO (though I’m sure I’m biased) - now can we pull it off?