Some days, my head feels like it's going to spin right off :-) Thank goodness I love my job! I'm personally working on some of the last-minute demos - there's some really cool stuff that's under embargo until Wednesday - but suffice it it will be cool!
My colleague Nick Triantos from NetApp did a good post on what Netapp will be doing, here: http://blogs.netapp.com/storage_nuts_n_bolts/2008/09/netapp-vmworld.html?cid=130026414#comment-130026414
I have to confess, it got my blood boiling a little bit - he accuses EMC of being "All Marketing" and that they will be the largest vendor there. Please, look at my record, I've been kind, even handed, even complimentary to NetApp, but come on Nick, is that condescending tone necessary? Tar ME with the marketing brush?!?
Did you know that while we're mud slinging (well, at least I'm getting mud slung at me) that the Large Hadron Collider fired up today? Man, it's inspiring, and a reminder that this competitive stuff is SO petty. I'm also pretty inspired by the SVVP "other shoe dropping" with formal ESX 3.5u2 qual getting done.
Ok, so we have a marketing gimmick (the car!!!), sure but heck, it's Vegas :-) I like to think of us as "All technical, and some fun too"
You'd think that with all this back and forth - it's all we do (well for me - it's 8:51pm, and I've been working all day - so this is a diversion :-)
I will tell you this, it's going to be technical, we're demoing like mad, and there are some MIND BLOWING things there.
We're in booth 500, and I look forward to seeing you there. What you can expect to see:
- Demonstrating Oracle 11g and SAP with instant/backup recovery and Site Recovery Manager all in action together (BTW - thank you all who have been so interested in the Oracle piece that it got oversubscribed and we've been asked by VMware to schedule a second session on EA1961)
- Demonstrating Exchange 2007 Joint VMware/EMC reference architecture including VSS backup/restore, CCR and LCR use cases
- How all our management tools (Storage, Network, Application Dependency and VMware Best Practice compliance analysis) integrate with the VI 2.5 SDK and ESX CIM APIs - TODAY. Our view is that customer need to start virtualizing tier 1 apps - and we want to help - with the joint best practices and with tools to ensure you get applicaiton-level SLAs.
- Replication Manager for VMware - instant VM or datastore backup/restore - integrated with the VI and ESX APIs for nice simple point in time consistency. As a company that's not as good at marketing as others, we quietly actually shipped this BEFORE ANYONE ELSE. It wasn't pre-launched, it shipped in June. Here's a quick look if you want to see what it does. BTW - this is a single tool that does this for application integration Exchange 2003 and 2007/SQL Server/Oracle and now VMware, and across all EMC's platforms. Here's a demo....
- VDI - great to hear that NetApp hit 5K clients. We just broke 10K :-) UPDATE: I regret phrasing this sentence this way - it comes across as snide and as condescending. I let frustration get the better of me. NetApp has no intrinsic scaling limit that I know of, I only know what we can do. BTW - that's what this standing lab in Santa Clara is there for - for EMC and VMware to jointly prove these out at scales (target of 40K clients). BTW, we're also doing this at 500, and 1000 client cases. It's not a chest-beating exercise - customers come in all shapes and sizes, and we're trying to help prove out how this works for them all, it was triggered by the World Bank which asked for us to show how this would work for 20K clients. We have a similar (but different - each with advantages and disadvantages) approach as NetApp - mass scale with consumption of one, both how we do this today, and also how we do it with VMware tomorrow. We will be sharing all our performance scaling data, and experiences. THIS IS BLEEDING EDGE. Anyone who tries to tell you that this is all figured out is not giving you the whole truth. Anyone who just shows you the array side of the equation is flat-out dangerous. When you push this far, and all boot simultaneously, sometimes VC gets into a weird state on some of the VMs. Its fun, and continues to be fun. BTW - here's a cool screenshot (count up the VMs - there's actually 10,994)
UPDATE: Folks, the NetApp side has made some comments that in their view we're not being clear here: http://blogs.netapp.com/virtualstorageguy/ Vaughn is a good guy, so I'm going to take the personal slag (ouch - used car salesman) in stride. We are replicating the LUN objects in this case, and they are the unit of replication. If you will have more than roughly 200 VDI VMs per cluster, you need to have several VMs per LUN. The PowerVDI tool automates this. These ratios mean it's more accuate to say "you will invariably achieve 100:1 space savings, and may achieve more depending on the scaling goal". (the ratio of source VMs per source LUN needs to be higher at higher scales, and therefore 100:1 is the worst case model). There is NOTHING intrinsically wrong with NetApp's approach, there is NOTHING intrinsically wrong with EMC's approach. Each have advantages and disadvantages, and are a function of each vendor trying to solve the customer problem. The ratio of LUNs to VMs is not 1:1. We don't do this because we love block - while we can take 96 filesystem snapshots, only 16 of those are writeable, so this approach is better for EMC customers. Just setting the technical record straight.
- Here are some datapoints from the VDI testing to date:
- there are limits to how fast ESX and VC can register vms (hostd dies) and how many you can spawn simultaneously - discover the what we've done jointly with VMware on this!
- XP Booting causes 4000 IOs spread over 20 seconds. That is 200 IOPS per Client Sustained during the boot…. Multiply that times 100 for a server…… 20,000 IOPS. Or multiply it out to a moderate environment of 1000 desktops. 200,000 IOPS all directed at the Array. How much hits the backend vs cache effect? What is the client experience? Come and find out! (BTW this will be a big topic in session PO3824 - "Storage Solutions for Enterprise Consolidation with VMware")
- BTW - Congratulations Dan for coming in 3rd in VMware's PowerShell contest for the PowerVDI tool we created for this. The quote was great: "Here's what Lee Holmes, author of the Windows PowerShell Cookbook had to say about it: "Automates a very complex scale-out task, and combines a lot of technology (VMWare, Putty, AD, etc) into a single PowerShell task. Offers interactive use, unattended scripting. For high-scale clusters, this would be an enormous time-saver. This script really demonstrates the super-glue nature of PowerShell." Dan, you'll laugh man, but a large NetApp customer asked me for the script... wait until we unveil what's coming next! For those of you wanting this script, note that we've posted it openly for all.
- Deduplication, and simple file-level recovery for Windows/Linux VMs
- NFS and iSCSI deployment best practices
- Joint EMC/VMware Remote/Branch Office solution
- Several of our Partners (Agilsys, Fusionstorm, ICI and others) will be present in the booth to show their integrated solutions.
- We will be demonstrating several things I can't even allude to as they are under an embargo until the event.
We will have 70 people at the event, including myself, but also our engineering teams directly - including Bala Ganeshan and Sheetal Kochavara who are the engineering folks who maintain our DMX and CX best practices, along with our Field VMware Specialists (all VCPs from around the world.
I don't know what any other vendors are sending equipment wise, but I've sent 13 CX3s, 4 CX4s, 3 NS20s and 2 DMX4-950s. Those will be in lots of places where you can use them, including the hands-on labs, and in various booths.
I can wait to talk to YOU, and of course with our competitive brothers and sisters!
Oh, and our keynote (where all are welcome!) is KN EMC on Wednesday at 11:00-12:00. It is a joint VMware/Cisco/EMC session discussing best practices for designing the next generation datacenter with Scott Davis from VMware and Ed Bugnion from Cisco. It's three nerds on stage - a recipe for trouble! I asked to do a show release to show what we're doing at the event, but our PR folks told me that unless a senior exec is doing the Keynote (like Dave Hitz is for NetApp - and they did a press release), we don't do those. I'm just a technical guy, so I don't qualify :-)
Just to show the ridiculousness of it all, NetApp's press event got scheduled at the same time as our keynote. We intentionally moved ours to avoid conflicting with theirs because we know some people will want to go to both. I'm going to keep pushing the kind agenda, because I don't think pettiness helps any of us.
Nick says:
"For NetApp this will be the largest event of the year and like everybody else we've been preparing for it for some time now. This year, by far, we'll have the largest presence in the show and we'll be ready to showcase various technologies that solve some very real and hard to solve business problems."
UPDATE: Nick has made a fair clarification of his intent of the statement, and I trust him in his clarification.
Nick - looking forward to meeting you there and getting to know you. This is our biggest event of the year also, a bit bigger than EMC World which had 10K customers. I don't know if we'll have the largest presence at the show, but I can tell you that you are not in a position to make that statement that you will be until after the show ends, right? Statements that are not true? I call that Marketing.
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OK, I can't help being a bit petty.
Remember the whole brouhaha about the IDC data back here?
So, on Sept 8th, Goldman Sachs released their annual survey analyzing IT spending - the "Independent Insight" here's how THEY describe it.
"This is the 42nd issue in our IT Spending Survey series. Our survey panel is made up of 100 managers with strategic decision-making authority at multinational Fortune 1000 companies."
Ok - so note (I don't want to misrepresent!) note that this is FT1000 (we're doing excellent in all segments - but I don't want to imply anything about other segments, take it what it is, no more, no less)
First, for my VMware brothers and sisters - congrats:
"VMware’s incumbent position at the top of the rankings demonstrates that server virtualization momentum remains alive and well." (Microsoft - watch out for the wrath of Nick, showing Live Migration when Hyper-V R2 is scheduled for a 2011 release is called Marketing)
Nice to see EMC Software (which excludes VMware) also in the gainer column - our management tools are flying off the shelves, in some part due to their integration with the VI SDK and ESX CIM APIs.
I liked this, of course:
Does that look like it agrees with the IDC data from earlier to you? Look also at who went up and who went down.
Oh, and then here's this hot off the presses too: http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS21411908 The NAS numbers and growth numbers are stunning.
LET ME BE CLEAR: I THINK NO CUSTOMER SHOULD PICK A SOLUTION PURELY BECAUSE OTHERS DO. Every customer should pick solutions that work for them. What I am saying is you can't produce those results and outgrowing those that are smaller, and do it across categories if you're not doing something right for your customers. To believe otherwise is to shrug off reality, and to become one of those "extremeophiles".
Look, I want us to focus on helping the customer. Nick - I'm good with that if you are - sincerely......
I will be in some NetApp sessions (and in VMware labs, and in other sessions I'm interested in). I will not heckle - though of course you guys are welcome to in my session (leave my colleagues alone). I'm respectful and want to learn from you and with you. But I won't take mudslinging at EMC lying down - in the same way that you guys shouldn't (and don't) when we do it.
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