the storage anarchist

5.004: the cloud gets big. rreeaallyy big!

Brian Gallagher, President of EMC’s Enterprise Storage Division, gave his keynote address today at EMC World 2012. (If you were unable to make it to Las Vegas, you can watch the video here.)

In his keynote, Brian spoke about how enterprises of all sizes are increasingly seeking to leverage cloud technology to meet their constantly expanding IT demands. But, he noted, the cloud demands of enterprise computing aren’t adequately addressed by most of the current public cloud service providers.

No, enterprise IT requires that their clouds to deliver the same continuous availability, predictable performance, assured data integrity, and security that they currently enjoy from their own internal data centers. And in fact, the lack of such “High QoS clouds” has slowed cloud adoption by enterprises globally.

That’s all changing – transforming, if you will – thanks in no small part to EMC’s relentless focus on cloud computing. In his keynote, Brian talked about how customers are building out their next-generation data centers around hybrid clouds, and (more importantly) how the new products announcements made by ESD on Monday are laser-focused on delivering enterprise-class service levels to the hybrid cloud.

From the incredible scalability of the new (Powerful. Trusted. Smart. and Efficient.) VMAX Family and radically improved simplicity and automation of VMAX administration, to the revolutionary high-availability active/active distributed data infrastructure uniquely delivered by VPLEX, to the glimpse into technologies that will help to dissolve distance to reduce the effect of latency on remote data centers, the biggest takeaway from Gallagher’s talk is that big enterprises no longer have any excuses. It is time to transform to the hybrid cloud.

And we just might have a few things to help accelerate your transformation…
 

5.002: emc world 2012 preview

Wow - EMC World 2012 is only a few days away! Are you ready? (I’m not.) 

The slogan for this year’s EMC World- Transform: IT+Business+Yourself could not be more accurate for what can be expected at the show. Just about everything at EMC World this year is about how Cloud and Big Data are driving revolutionary change in information technology, business and the people behind the scenes who drive value out of information assets.

As you might imagine, things have been hectic around the Enterprise Storage Division (ESD) offices during the run-up to World. For the past 4 months our global team have been designing, scripting and rehearsing the more than 40-odd presentations and a dozen or so hands-on lab sessions that ESD engineering will be presenting at World.

On top of all that, the cross-functional teams of development, manufacturing, training, services and go-to market have been working feverishly to put the finishing touches on the more than 14 new VMAX, VPLEX and RecoverPoint products plus literally hundreds of enhancements that are being announced and discussed at EMC World next week. The scope of these announcements is even larger than our “megalaunch” back at the beginning of 2011, and that was the largest announcement in EMC’s history.

Among all the announcement are a few gems that are sure to cause some heartburn for the competition.

But then, that’s always a fun part of such announcements!
 

5.001: vspex, vblock and enterprise clouds

Last week’s VSPEX announcement let the world know how serious EMC is about being a channel friendly partner.  Compared to competitive announcements made by various companies last week, EMC demonstrated far more commitment to the channel community.  In essence, the VSPEX announcement was about EMC’s partners, whereas the Netapp, IBM and HP announcements were about… well, Netapp, IBM and HP.

Last week's announcements are being vigorously debated in the blogosphere, so for my part I'll try to explore some ground that may not be covered elsewhere.

First, my observations on the VSPEX announcement and why EMC's event was different than what was announced by the other folks last week.

EMC announced:

• Proven reference architectures built on a collective 9000+ staff years of experience and upon technology widely deployed throughout the world;
• Market expansion through enabling partners to capture more revenue at better margins, aided by EMC GTM incentives and programs;
• An actual VSPEX lab, leveraging EMC's $3 Billion in eLab investments and 100+ interoperability qualification engineers;
• The ability for partners to leverage EMC branding for the first time, enabling them to piggyback their own brand in the solutions they deliver to customers;
• And last (but not least),flexible customer procurement options thought EMC financing

In all, far more comprehensive than simply another reference architecture.

Now, what I'd really like to talk about was what was not discussed as much over the past week…

 

4.003: a big thing in a small package

Imagine:

• Start with the world's most Powerful, Trusted and Smart enterprise storage array, hardened by almost 23 years of protecting the world's most critical information assets.
• Scale down its Intel-based infrastructure and dial-back its innovative scale-out architecture to optimize for less-demanding enterprise environments.
• Remove the layers of complexity associated with supporting legacy hosts such as mainframes and iSeries to simplify configuration and operations.
• Eliminate physical drive and RAID configuration altogether and pre-configure the array at the factory for pool-based Virtual Provisioning to radically simplify resource allocation and management while maximizing utilization efficiency.
• Allow customers to add factory-configured Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST VP) to further drive down the acquisition AND operational costs of both capacity AND performance.
• For local and remote data protection, include the world's most widely adopted heterogeneous Continuous Data Protection and Remote Replication capability, EMC RecoverPoint.
• Simplify the product installation to no more than a 4 hours to power-up, and 4 minutes to first I/O after the keys are handed over to the customer.
• Package that all in standard 19" racks configured to optimize floor tile utilization, requiring only single-phase power as evidence of reduced power requirements and deployment simplicity.
• Oh, and don't forget the trademark blue LED bar and one of those fancy little "e" thingies that the VNX guys introduced earlier this year.

What do you get?
 

3.017: vmax 2011 edition - powerful. trusted. smartest.

In the 20 months since its launch back in April of 2009, VMAX has literally redefined the storage landscape. Back then, EMC focused the messaging around how VMAX was purpose-built for the virtual data center, leveraging multi-core Intel technology to deliver a highly efficient and scalable modular and tiered enterprise storage platform. We introduced the new Virtual Matrix architecture, the first array built upon that architecture, and the first wave of automation that has simplified the whole deployment model of Symmetrix storage.

EMC also did a bit of a Babe Ruth at that launch – pointing to the bleachers where we intended to deliver, in two phases, the innovation of Fully Automated Storage Tiering. FAST v1 for VMAX began shipping just about a year ago.

On December 15th, 2010 the second phase of FAST began shipping, along with more than 50 other significant features and new products in what we now call Enginuity 5875. Included also were some new hardware updates to VMAX – a new native 10Gb Ethernet director for SRDF and iSCSI, plus a new VMAX engine that sports an encrypting back-end to support Data at Rest Encryption.

Today (January 18th, 2010), EMC publicly announces what is inarguably the largest set of new storage products ever to be simultaneously introduced on one day. With over 40 new products and scores of new features, today's launch truly lives up to its Record Breaker theme. (If by chance you've missed all the hype, there's still time to learn about it at the #EMCBreaksRecords web site.)

So, what's all the hype about? Well, for the full effect, you'll have to go see for yourself. But within the context of VMAX, there's lots of new things in this latest release of Enginuity 5875, and I thought I'd lead off my contribution to the launch day communications with a quick run through of the major ones…

 

3.013: of public and private clouds - in 98 seconds

Forbes has posted an interview with EMC's Pat Gelsinger where he is asked to explain the relationship of Public and Private clouds. It's short and simple, and you can see it here.

If you can, please try not to notice all the non-EMC advertising and product placements that have gotten wrapped around (and inside) the interview.

Perhaps just a bit more "balanced reporting" than necessary, if you ask me.

 

technorati tags: EMC,VMware,Journey to the Private Cloud,private cloud,public cloud,Pat Gelsinger,Forbes