I did a Webcast last Thursday covering these 3 topics. Triggered in part by requests, in part based on internal dialog amongst the vSpecialists, and in part by the popularity of the session Netapp’s Vaughn Stewart and I did at VMworld 2010 in San Francisco (and will be repeating next week in Copenhagen).
It’s rooted in three observations:
- Storage is really important in VMware environments – it can make you sink (due to cost, bad performance, bad availability, rigidity) or swim (due to efficiency, great performance, great availability, great integration and flexibility). Getting this right is more about KNOW HOW than it is any PRODUCT.
- People tend to be unable to keep up with all the things as they change – a lot of people still follow best practices from 5 years ago.
- We tend to make things too complicated – things should be able to be summarized down more. Furthermore, we make things to complex by focusing on “get it right out of the gate”, rather than “get good out of the gate, then know how to measure and non-disruptively adapt”. Flexibility is more important (and more possible) than prescience.
Click on the below to watch the recorded webcast:
I’m also posting the powerpoint in raw PPT format – finding this helps people get more reuse from the content (and all the links).
Psst… Let me be a little more explicit about a breadcrumb trail I left in the webcast. listen to this paragraph, and read:
#2 on the “amazing technologies we’re working on” list: “Bolt-on” vs. “Built for Purpose” using Virtual Appliance constructs
- EMC has 3 shipping virtual storage appliances (Atmos/VE, Avamar/VE, Networker/VE)
- Every EMC array is really a cluster of commodity servers with disks
- What more could we do to make “bolt on value” easier this way?
- “follow the breadcrumb trail”: http://stevetodd.typepad.com/my_weblog/2010/09/csx-technology.html
I agree with Todd – this innovation is a huge one, and is fueling the next round of coolness. The thing that’s really cool is it helps power not only “ingest new stuff” (important as we continue to acquire – we cannot be limited by the pace of our own innovation), but as importantly “integrate internal/external innovation in a way that is invisible to the user”.
Like the other items in the list, this isn’t just hypothetical.
Like the others – you can point to shipping products/capabilities now (we have shipping autotiering/QoS, shipping pNFS target, shipping Federated storage, shipping cloud object storage), and it’s a case of “much more to come” as we leverage/integrate these more and more in the context VMware is driving.
What are key best practices I missed?
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