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Posts Tagged ‘EMC’

EMC’s Recoverpoint has always fascinated me. The technology that manages to split writes out and use those to journal these writes and replicate them is awesome technology. Unfortunately as with many cool technology features, it was complex and prone to error if not doen exactly right. Today EMC announced something that makes very cool technology WAY MORE cool: Recoverpoint will sit inside the hypervisor. What you can do then is mind blowing!

A very quick intro into EMC recoverpoint

Recoverpoint is basically a snapshot and replication technology that is independent of the used storage architecture. And much more. And with limitations. Basically Read the rest of this entry »

A very exciting announcement was made at VMworld today: EVO:Rail. I’ve known for a while about this under the codename “Marvin” (and EMC’s appliance related to this codenamed “Mystic”), now it is out there with it’s official naming. But what is it? Disclaimer: I work for EMC, but what I write here are my own opinions.

First things first: A quick intro to hyper-converged

First we had converged infrastructure. Converged infrastructure operates by grouping multiple components together into a single, optimized computing package. Components of a converged infrastructure may include servers, data-storage devices, networking equipment and software for IT infrastructure management, automation and orchestration. VCE’s Vblock is a prime example of converged infrastructure. Below that we have reference architectures like EMC’s VSPEX and NetApp’s Flexpod.

So on to even higher integration and automation: “hyper-converged”. Hyper-converged architectures consolidate and manage compute, Read the rest of this entry »

People who have been using VMware Data Recovery quickly discovered that this product had issues. VMware’s take on Data Recovery was that they wanted to have a backup product for the smaller shops with a short time-to-market. Too bad it was this product that drove a lot of users to Veeam or PHDvirtual because of its many problems. In secrecy VMware started working together with EMC’s BRS division to build a brand new backup product leveraging EMC’s Avamar technology under the codename “Project Toystory”. This product has seen the light of day as “vSphere Data Protection 5.1” or vDP for short. In this post I will be looking into vDP version 5.1, which is actually the initial release.

Introduction to vSphere Data Protection 5.1

This is the first release of vDP, so actually a 1.0 version. I will not be expecting a fully feature-rich product, but one that actually WORKS would be nice. After all, it is a “free” product Read the rest of this entry »

I have seen different implementations of read caching in arrays and even inside hosts, just to be able to cope with boot storms of VDI workloads. When using linked clones caching really helps; all the VDIs being booted perform massive reads from a very small portion of the infrastructure: the replica(s). VMware came up with a nice software solution to this: Why not sacrifice some memory inside the vSphere nodes to accommodate read caching there? This is what CBRC (vSphere 5) or Host Caching (View 5.1) is all about. And… It really works!

What happens during a boot storm

First of all, we need to figure out what happens during a boot storm. Even wondered just how much data Read the rest of this entry »

The cloud vision of both VMware and EMC are very much aligned. Nothing new here. What is new, is that both VMware and EMC have now joined forces by delivering the “Cloud Readiness flight check”, a quick but effective way of giving businesses a quick view into their own cloud readiness.

The history of Cloud Readiness

Started some time ago, EMC introduced the “Cloud Readiness Accelerator” program. This program consists of a 2 day workshop Read the rest of this entry »

Tomorrow there will be an EMC Live Webcast around EMC’s VSI plugin called “How to simplify Management with EMC VSI plugin for VMware vSphere”. This webcast will be delivered by my colleague and friend Simon Seagrave (@Kiwi_Si at http://www.techhead.co.uk for those who know people by their twitter names!). I will be assisting in answering in the chat window, together with Josh Hutt, one of the VSI plugin developers!

The VSI plugin is a cool little plugin that allows for EMC storage to be integrated into vCenter. With separate menus and right-click integration using EMC storage straight from vCenter is a breeze. Provision storage, monitor storage, deploy fast clones or change path failover modes… The VSI plugin has it all.

Come join me, Simon and Josh in this webinar! You can subscribe for this webinar here.

It will run from 6/7/12 9:00 AM MDT to 10:00 AM MDT (America/Denver)

That is 15:30 through 17:00 GMT (Greenwich Mean Time).

UPDATE: Read more info on the Webcast at Simon’s blog here.

Even though this blog mainly focusses on technical geeky things, it cannot be denied that as infrastructures grow, the deep-down technical details get covered up more and more by the sheer size of things. As customers need to grow their environments more and faster, they have a need to make things decide for themselves, automate more and more. Yesterday you bought boxes and cables. Tomorrow you buy a converged infrastructure like VCE’s Vblock. But what about today? EMC is about to fill that gap…

The Cake Story

To explain the difference between a build-your-own and a Vblock, there is this great story where the parallel is drawn to birthday cakes: Read the rest of this entry »

I do not often write to specific implementations of a vendor. This time however I focus on EMC’s FAST-cache technology, and we will be playing a little “follow the I/O” to see what it actually does, where it helps and where it might not.

Read the rest of this entry »

EMC and VMware have published a joined Reference Architecture where an EMC VNX5300 using a minimum configuration of disks squeezes out the required IOPS for a thousand VDI users. That is awesome stuff, but how to go about using and remodeling this RA for your own needs? In this blog post I’ll try to put some numbers to it, both validating and enabling you to resize for your needs.

A very cool use case: VMware View and 1000 vDesktops running off an EMC VNX5300

This is a very VERY cool one. You can find the Reference Architecture Read the rest of this entry »

VAAI has been around for quite some time, but I still get a lot of questions on the subject. Most people seem to think VAAI is solely for speeding up processes, where in reality there should not be significant speeding up if your infrastructure has enough reserves. VAAI is meant to offload storage-related things so they are executed where they should: Inside the storage array.

EDIT: My title was stolen borrowed from my dear collegue Bas Raayman in a post like this one, but focussing on file-side in My VAAI is Better Than Yours – The File-side of Things. Nice addition Bas!

My VAAI is better than yours

I recently had an interesting conversation Read the rest of this entry »