the storage anarchist

2.024: stuck in the middle with hu

You've got to admit that the lyrics of the Stealer's Wheel hit have an uncanny resonance with the FCoE misinformation being promoted by
you-know-Hu.

I hereby refer my readership to
Storagezilla's latest post on FCoE. 

technorati tags: FCoE,FUD

2.023: the future of flash is fast

I had the honor yesterday of hosting an EMC Investor Relations "Tech Talk" webcast on the subject of Flash Drives and EMC FAST (Fully Automated Storage Tiering).

Although Chris Mellor scooped me with his second-hand coverage of the event (Chris leveraged a report put out by Aaron Rakers to customers of Stifel Nicolaus Equity Research for his story), I thought I'd share the session with my readers first-hand.

So, if you have an hour or so, pop over to the IR landing page on EMC.com and click the banner link to the recorded webcast (or go directly to the webcast hosting site). But take notice – this webcast will be available on-line only through October 21, 2009.

I also included the net result of the FAST demo that Chad Sakac presented at VMworld 2009 in yesterday's presentation. If you'd like to see the complete demonstration, it's available on YouTube here:

I have also received a few follow-up questions from the event; I'll answer several of them after the break…
 

2.022: free migrations

As the beginning of Fall approaches in North America, much of our wildlife prepares for their annual migratory trip south to warmer climes.

What better time to announce the No-Charge Symmetrix Migrator Package?

Effective this month, this new package provides both current and new V-Max and DMX customers with free licenses to three powerful storage migration utilities:

1. Open Migrator, for host-based migrations. Runs on most popular operating systems and server cluster software. OM can mount the new target LUN(s), copy data (on another array or from within the platform itself) in the background, and it will mirror writes to both old and new storage during the migration;
2. SRDF/DM (Data Mobility), Symmetrix-based replication frequently used to make a mirror of current Symmetrix volumes onto a new array before swapping the hosts over to the new storage. Used by customers for more than a decade to effect both Open Systems and Mainframe data migrations;
3. Open Replicator/LM (Live Migration), array-based "hot pull" migration for Open Systems hosts. Simply insert the new Symmetrix into the SAN in between the hosts and their current storage array(s). LUNs are copied off of the old storage in the background, while any host reads or writes are moved to the head of the queue for maximum efficiency. Works to migrate data into a Symmetrix from virtually any SAN-based storage platform, and it can even move a small existing LUN into a larger one in the process.

As with the recently announced FREE status for Symmetrix Virtual Provisioning, this new package comes with only one string: you have to own or purchase a Symmetrix DMX or V-Max. Other than that it is truly no-additional-charge. Customers can take advantage of these new tools immediately upon arrival of their system (or license keys), without concern for the amount of capacity they want to move (or Virtually Provision).

Yet another way that EMC is helping to reduce the TCO and expand the use cases of Symmetrix, the enterprise storage market share leader for nearly 20 years.

Enjoy!

 

technorati tags: EMC,Symmetrix,V-Max,DMX,Virtual Provisioning,Symmetrix Migrator Package,FREE,No-Charge,Open Replicator/LM,Open Migrator,SRDF/DM,data migration,tech refresh