Exhausted from Post-VMworld? Not sure what the status of your Private Cloud has been? Wondering where the Cloud meets the road up in Canada?   Come on down to EMC Forum hitting Toronto on September 9th, 2010!   Register now!

I thought you might find the actual agenda useful of what tracks happen to be available, so here is the breakdown removing all of the other details like breaks and keynotes:

Now.. you know how I love free stuff.. so here is some additional incentive! :)

· EMC Forum Facebook Page: http://www.facebook.com/EMCForum

· Onsite Facebook “Best Pic” photo contest. Attendees are asked to submit a picture from the event to our Facebook account. The best picture wins an iPad at the end of the event. Check out the best pic submissions on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/EMCForum?v=photos

So, I definitely encourage you to check this out and be sure to Register now! before it is too late!

Yea, seriously, this IS a Rap Video! Albeit sure you’re saying “Wow, isn’t that Circa Chicago Bears in the mid 1980’s with the superbowl shuffle?!” And I would go so far as to say.. The bears were rockstars at that time were they not?    This is simply a further reference to just how far these guys go the extra mile, both in their ability to get things actually done (as they say so in there) but a testament what each of these individuals do.   When they’re not busy doing their actual jobs, or studying or taking exams, or writing blog posts, or writing chapters for the next greatest Virtualization book you’ll be buying… or traveling all over the place, OR building out LABS and testing out things in every possible configuration and publishing the results..

Well… when all of that is said… and all of that is done.    They make rap videos! :)

I hope you enjoy it! The Production quality of this is absolutely AMAZING! I saw it on a big screen and I was floored at how well it was done (I always judge for production quality before I even look at content.. and the content is crazy good times ;))

As some of the other prevailing events have gotten finalized from a time perspective I’m adjusting the time ever so slightly for this in order to respect the times of registration / etc.

Now, the event will kick off around Noon on Sunday, starting from the W Hotel to head over there (you can meet us at (Lucky Foot Massage) or walk/public transit over with us. 

This will give more than enough time to allow for people to get back to Moscone for Shirt pickup for the VMworld Fun Run (Shirt Pickup runs from 3PM to 3:30PM) This also leaves time open to catch the Busses to the Fun Run at Moscone starting at 3:30PM

Not to mention this provides more than enough time for the MNTweetup and WuPaaS hosted at the Thirsty Bear.

So, hopefully this doesn’t disrupt anyone’s schedule or plans they had around joining vAcupressure! In any event, I’ll likely be there until ~3PM or so anyway (Getting my feet and hand rubbed!)

Don’t hesitate to contact me via txt/call at 630.362.1320 or try to reach me on Twitter! @cxi

See you all tomorrow! (We may do a follow-up on Friday after the con is over because our feet will likely hurt! ;))

I was thinking we’d be looking at around 2:00PM or so, at say.. the W Hotel [Which is RIGHT next to Moscone] (Or a better chosen location) and head our way over to Chinatown!

The location I have in mind is Lucky Foot Massage! – They quoted me on the phone 1HR Foot Massage $25 (We’ll confirm when we’re really there of course ;))

If you’ve never had Acupressure done before, it’s been described as acupuncture without the needles or a nice soothing foot rub (which will hit EVERY button you didn’t realize you even had!)

I’ll be pursuing in the Acupressure hand-rub because I am skilled in acupressure and can rub my own feet (but I lack the two hands to work on my own hands!) – Great for that carpal tunnel!

This is especially beneficial (the timing was chosen because of this….) for those of you also attending the VMworld 2010 Fun Run at 5PM!

So if you are going to join us, come on down! We can have some hardcore Virtual conversations while our feet and hands are PHYSICALLY rubbed! :)

Next week is VMworld 2010 in San Francisco! (oh my!)   Yes that is indeed correct! And as part of a community service (and because I want to do it, damnit!)

I’m going to go around and find as many vExperts (and other experts as applicable) and ask them questions! Your Questions! (My questions) so on and so forth!

I’m not looking to go into a single half hour diatribe response from each person on each question.. but I know there are some hard hitting good questions you have for the vExperts out there, as well as some ridiculous questions you may have … And I’m going to get it all on Video (and sum up all of the responses in txt form as well as applicable when I ask recurring/repeating questions to multiple vExperts)

The vExpert community is filled with some absolute champions of industry – I typically reference this VMware vExpert 2010 Directory as it seems to be the most complete compared to the other instances I can find out there.  

So, please provide the types of questions you’d like to get answered! And if there are specific questions you want asked of specific vExperts (or VMware folks who are not vExperts) or perhaps even if you want me to convince them to sing a song or do some karaoke.. You just say the word… and as a champion vExpert myself I shall tackle this!

Special.. if you want me to ask the SPOUSES of vExperts questions as well (which may help your own spouselife know what the life of vExpert Wives is like… that too ;))

See you at VMworld!

Next week is VMworld 2010 in San Francisco! (oh my!)   Yes that is indeed correct! And as part of a community service (and because I want to do it, damnit!)

I’m going to go around and find as many vExperts (and other experts as applicable) and ask them questions! Your Questions! (My questions) so on and so forth!

I’m not looking to go into a single half hour diatribe response from each person on each question.. but I know there are some hard hitting good questions you have for the vExperts out there, as well as some ridiculous questions you may have … And I’m going to get it all on Video (and sum up all of the responses in txt form as well as applicable when I ask recurring/repeating questions to multiple vExperts)

The vExpert community is filled with some absolute champions of industry – I typically reference this VMware vExpert 2010 Directory as it seems to be the most complete compared to the other instances I can find out there.  

So, please provide the types of questions you’d like to get answered! And if there are specific questions you want asked of specific vExperts (or VMware folks who are not vExperts) or perhaps even if you want me to convince them to sing a song or do some karaoke.. You just say the word… and as a champion vExpert myself I shall tackle this!

Special.. if you want me to ask the SPOUSES of vExperts questions as well (which may help your own spouselife know what the life of vExpert Wives is like… that too ;))

See you at VMworld!

Next week is VMworld 2010 in San Francisco! (oh my!)   Yes that is indeed correct! And as part of a community service (and because I want to do it, damnit!)

I’m going to go around and find as many vExperts (and other experts as applicable) and ask them questions! Your Questions! (My questions) so on and so forth!

I’m not looking to go into a single half hour diatribe response from each person on each question.. but I know there are some hard hitting good questions you have for the vExperts out there, as well as some ridiculous questions you may have … And I’m going to get it all on Video (and sum up all of the responses in txt form as well as applicable when I ask recurring/repeating questions to multiple vExperts)

The vExpert community is filled with some absolute champions of industry – I typically reference this VMware vExpert 2010 Directory as it seems to be the most complete compared to the other instances I can find out there.  

So, please provide the types of questions you’d like to get answered! And if there are specific questions you want asked of specific vExperts (or VMware folks who are not vExperts) or perhaps even if you want me to convince them to sing a song or do some karaoke.. You just say the word… and as a champion vExpert myself I shall tackle this!

Special.. if you want me to ask the SPOUSES of vExperts questions as well (which may help your own spouselife know what the life of vExpert Wives is like… that too ;))

See you at VMworld!

Thanks to Donors like Scott Lowe, David Davis and Eric Siebert – vDestination.com is enabling you to win THIS!

* A signed copy of Mastering VMware vSphere 4 from Scott Lowe
* A signed copy of VMware vSphere 4 Administration Instant Reference from Scott Lowe
* A signed copy of Maximum vSphere from Eric Siebert
* A copy of VMware vSphere Pro Series Training vol. 2: Site Recovery Manager (SRM), Veeam Management Suite, VMware Data Recovery,
Power CLI and vSphere Advanced Features from David Davis
* A vDestination.com t-shirt (XL only), bumper sticker and mouse pad
UPDATE! UPDATE! UPDATE! 8/19
* Just added to the list of prizes, a generous donation from Mike Laverick*
**A signed copy of Administering VMware Site Recovery Manager 4.0
**A signed copy of VMware vSphere 4 Implementation

I’m fortunate to call most of those items inclusive in my own library – and if you enter the contest which ENDS this Thursday August 26th.. So can you! :)

Rules are pretty simple… be alive to start.. and then..

Contest Rules:
Beginning today August 8th, 2010 (coincidentally, my birthday!), registration is open. Here’s how:

1. You must log on to twitter and follow me. Easy enough.
2. You must post only one (1) comment/reply to this blog post below. The comment must include the following:

a. Your first and last name
b. A valid email address
c. A short bio about yourself and how you use VMware
d How you plan on putting these prizes to use
e. What you are looking forward to learning from these prizes

So what are you waiting for?!? Time is running out! Get out there and join this contest!!!

You could win what very well may fulfill your destination!

And you guys tell me.. if you want I can throw in a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate into the mix as well? That’s entirely up to you (Yea, it’s not virtual.. but whatever! ;))

How to mass unfollow or follow people on Twitter .. and more …

How to mass follow and unfollow on twitter: over 10k club!

But then it all went away.. until NOW! (Again ;))

Featuring Twitter Mutuality!

I decided to give this a try today – Why not (I had hit an odd condition where I had a bunch of people I was not following but should have been!) so I decided to give it a try.

First I used three of my test accounts in order to ensure that it would actually function/work, and if it didn’t or my account was compromised I’d be able to simply change the password and move on.    It seemed to function and operate as expected… so I took it to the next level.

Lo and behold, BAM!  It worked! It not only worked though.. it worked VERY well, VERY fast and extremely efficient.  All for the major price of $0 (Wow!)

Is my account compromised? Will they use my credentials for evil? (This does not use oAuth for verification, so it’s VERY possible they’re storing your credentials in some database for major exploitation.   My advise there – Use the tool if you want and then change your creds… Until I get confirmation one way or the other of how safe and legit this may be (I seem fine for now) you can take advantage of the tool and move on.

In the past I’ve discussed tools which had limits for having over 10K followers/following.  This tool does not seem to be even phased by my 16k followers, so take that to heart and take advantage of this! If this works for you and you like it, be sure to let me know in the comments or on twitter @cxi :)

How did this all start you might say?!? Well, contrary to popular belief, I am a STAUNCH NetApp FUD dispeller.  What that means is, if I hear something said about NetApp by a competitor, peer, partner or customer which I feel is incorrect or just sounds interesting; I task it upon myself to prove/disprove it because well frankly… People still hit me up with NetApp questions all the time :) (And I’d like to make sure I’m supplying them with the most accurate and reflective data! – yea that’s it, and it has nothing to do with how much of a geek I am.. :))

Well, in the defense of the video it didn’t go EXACTLY like that.   Here is a little background on how we got to where that video is today :)   I recently overheard someone say the following:

What I hear over and over is that dedupe rates when using VMware deteriorate over time

And my first response was “nuh uh!”, Well, maybe not my FIRST response.. but quickly followed by; “Let me try and get some foundational data”  because you know me… I like to blog about things and as a result collect way too much data to try to validate and understand and effectively say whatever I say accurately :)

The first thing I did was engage several former NetApp folks who are as agnostic and objective as I am to get their thoughts on the matter (we were on the same page!) – Data collection time!  

For Data Collection… I talked to some good friends of mine regarding how their Dedupe savings have been over time because they were so excited when we first enabled it in the first place (And I was excited for them!)   This is where I learned some… frankly disturbing things (I did talk to numerous guys named Mike interestingly enough, and on the whole all of those who I talked with and their data they shared with me reflected similar findings)

Disturbing things learned!

Yea I’ve heard all the jibber jabber before usually touted as FUD that NetApp systems will deteriorate over time in general (whether it be Performance, whether it be Space Savings) etc etc. 

Well some of the disturbing things learned actually coming from the field on real systems protecting real production data was:

• Space Savings are GREAT, and will be absolutely amazing in the beginning! 70-90% is common… in the beginning. (Call this the POC and the burn-in period)
• As that data starts to ‘change’ ever so slightly as you would expect your data to change (not sit static and RO) you’ll see your savings start to decrease, as much as 45% over a year
• This figure is not NetApp’s fault.  Virtual machines (mainly what we’re discussing here) are not designed to stay uniformly the same no matter what in accordance to 4k blocks, so the very fact that they change is absolutely normal so this loss isn’t a catastrophe, it’s a fact of the longevity of data.
• Virtual Machine data which is optimal for deduplication typically amounts to 1-5% of the total storage in the datacenter.   In fact if we want to lie to ourselves or we have a specific use-case, we can pretend that it’s upwards of 10%, but not much more than that.  And this basically accounts for Operating System, Disk Image, blah blah blah – the normal type of data that you would dedupe in the first place.
• I found that particularly disturbing because after reviewing the data from these numerous environments… I had the impression VMware data would account for much more!   I saw a 50TB SAN only have ~2TB of data residing in Data stores and of that only 23% of it was deduplicating (I was shocked!)
• I was further shocked that when reviewing the data that over the course of a year on a 60TB SAN, this customer only found 12TB of data they could justify running the dedupe process against and of that they were seeing less than 3TB of ‘duplicate data’ coming in around 18% space savings over that 12TB.    The interesting bit is that the other 48TB of data just continued on un-affected by dedupe.   (Yes, I asked why don’t they try to dedupe it… and they did in the lab and, well it never made it into production)

At this point, I was even more so concerned.   Concerned whether there was some truth to this whole NetApp starts really high in the beginning (Performance/IO way up there, certain datasets will have amazing dedupe ratios to start) etc. and then starts to drop off considerably over time, while the EMC equivalent system performs consistently the entire time.

Warning! Warning Will Robinson!

This is usually where klaxons and red lights would normally go off in my head.    If what my good friends (and customers) are telling me is accurate, it is that not only will my performance degrade just by merely using the system, but my space efficiency will deteriorate over time as well.    Sure we’ll get some deduplication, no doubt about that!  But the long term benefit isn’t any better than compression (as a friend of mine had commented on this whole ordeal)    With the many ways of trying to look at this and understand I discussed it with my friend Scott who had the following analogy and example to cite with this:

The issue that I’ve seen is this:

Since a VMDK is a container file, the nature of the data is a little different than a standard file like a word doc for example.

Normally, if you take a standard windows C: – like on your laptop, every file is stored as 4K blocks.  However, unless the file is exactly divisible by 4K (which is rare), the last block has just a little bit of waste in it.  Doesn’t matter if this is a word doc, a PowerPoint, or a .dll in the \windows\system32 directory, they all have a little bit of waste at the end of that last block.

When converted to a VMDK file, the files are all smashed together because inside the container file, we don’t have to keep that 4K boundary.  Kind of like sliding a bunch of books together on a book shelf eliminating the wasted space.  Now this is one of the cool things about VMware that makes the virtual disk more space efficient than a physical disk – so this is a good thing.

So, when you have a VMDK and you clone it – let’s say create 100 copies and then do a block based dedupe – you’ll get a 99% dedupe rate across those virtual disks.  That’s great – initially.  Netapp tends to calculate this “savings” into their proposals and tell customers that require 10TB of storage, that they can just buy 5TB and dedupe and then they’ll have plenty of space.

What happens is, that after buying ½ the storage they really needed the dedupe rate starts to break down. Here’s why:

When you start running the VMs and adding things like service packs or patches for example – well that process doesn’t always add files to the end of the vmdk.  It often deletes files from the middle, beginning, end and then  replaces them with other files etc.  What happens then is that the bits shift a little to the left and the right – breaking the block boundaries. Imagine adding and removing books of different sizes from the shelf and making sure there’s no wasted space between them.

If you did a file per file scan on the virtual disk (Say a windows C: drive), you might have exactly the same data within the vmdk, however since the blocks don’t line up, the block based dedupe which is fixed at 4K sees different data and therefore the dedupe rate breaks down.

A sliding window technology (like what Avamar does ) would solve this problem, but today ASIS is fixed at 4K. 

Thoughts?

If you have particular thoughts about what Scott shared there, feel free to comment and I’ll make sure he reads this as well; but this raises some interesting questions.   

We’ve covered numerous things in here, and I’ve done everything I can to avoid discussing the guarantees I feel like I’ve talked about to death (linked below) so addressing what we’ve discussed:

• I’m seeing on average 20% of a customers data which merits deduping and of that I’m seeing anywhere from 10-20% space saved across that 20%
• Translation: 100TB of data, 20TB is worth deduping reclaiming about 4TB of space in total; thus on this conservative estimate you’d get about 4-5% space saved!
• Translation: When you have a 20TB data warehouse and you go to dedupe it (You won’t) you’ll see no space gained, with a 100% cost across it.
• With the EMC Unified Storage Guarantee, that same 20TB data warehouse will be covered by the 20% more efficient guarantee (Well, EVERY data type is covered without caveat)   [It’s almost like it’s a shill, but it really bears repeating because frankly this is earth shattering and worth discussing with your TC or whoever]

For more great information on EMC’s 20% Unified Storage Guarantee – check out these links (and other articles I’ve written on the subject as well!)

• EMC didn’t invent Unified Storage; They Perfected it
• EMC 20% Unified Storage Guarantee: Final Reprise
• EMC Unified Storage Capacity Calculator – The Tutorial!
• EMC 20% Unified Storage Guarantee !EXPOSED!
• EMC Unified Storage is 20% more efficient Guaranteed!

I won’t subject you to it, especially because it is over 7 minutes long, but here is a semi funny (my family does NOT find it funny!) video about EMCs Unified Storage Guarantee and making a comparison to NetApp’s Guarantee.   Various comments included in the description of the video – Don’t worry if you never watch it… I won’t hold it against you ;)

Be safe out there, the data jungle is a vicious one!   If you need any help driving truth out of your EMC or NetApp folks feel free to reach out and I’ll do what I can :)

SPOILERS!!!

You didn’t think I’d leave it that easily!   I definitely encourage conversation and engagement and absolutely want you to; some of you are you going to read what I said (or completely disregard or gloss over it) and say “I GET AMAZING DEDUPE RESULTS TODAY LOOK AT WHAT I HAVE!” or “MY ENVIRONMENT IS DEDUPING X Y AND Z AT J PERCENT” etc.  No, I get it, I do.   You had BETTER be seeing massive deduplication space savings in your VMware environment.  In fact, I hope you are seeing 10-20% savings in your SQL environments which you’re not compressing by default (Why are you deduping SQL? Yea I know we’re crazy, lets get past that!) and your file data, you’ll be seeing what.. 35-45% deduped there per volume you have allocated or broken down into your CIFS or NFS structures?   I know for the most part exactly what type of space savings you SHOULD see out the gate, and at a fairly decent level what you would typically be seeing over the span of x months, years (etc rate of change period, etc).  Not to mention that I personally love the algorithm which is employed, I think it’s really cool functionally and understand it far more than most people should.   Though this is not the panacea of all things.   And with that in mind I want you to be combative if you are defensive about the savings you’ve gained; ESPECIALLY if you are questioning where that may bode for the future.   I hate nothing more than making a promise “Look! You’ve saved 80% today, so it can only stay at 80% or above for the future right?” only to find them shattered because there honestly wasn’t enough historical data let alone usage patterns to dictate what the future would look like.    

As I always have, I encourage you to question, confirm, validate and question again.   I drive a Prius and NetApp is a little like a Prius in a number of ways.   In optimal conditions you can get an expected MPG, and pretty much assume you’ll get it.   Unless you go up hill, or down hill, or it’s too hot out or it’s too cold out; though otherwise you can pretty much expect to get this same MPG! (Even if my MPG deviates by as much as 30% given any number of conditions)     EMC has always been conservative.  If they say you’ll get ‘x’ you have the expectation, nay a guarantee that you will be obtaining ‘x’, that’s something they’ve always been very good at which is why EMC is where information lives. :) (bad tagline reference… ;))

“Ooh! What’s that playing on the radio! Wow, let me see… (Pulls out iPhone4, loads up search and types in shaz – Select Shazam and select “Tag”) [listening… listening… listening…]

?!?!?WTF?!?!? I’m limited to 5 per tags per month?!? Okay fine.. sure that was a complete surprise, but I’ll download the pay version and finish tagging my song there. 

HI IM SHAZAM AND EVEN IF YOU PAY YOU STILL GET ADS – JUST LIKE CLASSMATES.COM  Seriously?!   Yea, #fail multiplied by #fail equals me going to look for another solution.   And it was then (that I complained about this on Twitter) that @jeffcoffee suggested I check out SoundHound!  

Okay, let me first off set the disclaimer:

There is a ‘5 per month’ limit on the Free version of SoundHound as well, but I was already in the market for a new product which clearly was NOT Shazam.

So, I load up the app and I get splashed with this screen

First of all, let me just say.   Whoa!  I decide to click “Tap Here” and I proceed to sing the Beatles “The Yellow Submarine” (I did consider filming me doing that… for your sake, I didn’t ;))

Lo and behold shortly into the song, BAM! It recognized it from my very own (at this point out of tune voice)  Wow! I should share this feat with someone shouldn’t I!? Ooh! Twitter and FB integration!  Yea, that’s the cost of doing business though.    But what if I don’t know the name of the song… all I can really remember is an artist…

With the ease of knowing ‘words’ I simply say a song name or an artist name by clicking on the “Title or Artist” section and bam! I’m presented with Michael Jackson!

And while it is very nice that they have the settings easy enough to configure inside of the Settings section… the following is something I tested (both from my iPhone and my iPad) Something I had wished Shazam could do.. but never did, and frankly I don’t care if they ever support it at this point!

Suppose the following situation exists:   You’re listening to a song out of iTunes/iPod on your device, or even listening to something on Pandora! And you’re saying “Man, I wish I had the lyrics to that song, or knew what album it was off of, or other details” etc etc..  So you go and launch Shazam and immediately all sound CEASES to operate.  WTF?!? That’s kind of dismissing!

I welcome you to this feature in SoundHound called “Now Playing!”   Yes, this screen shot is from my iPad because it looks soooooo much cooler in that sense ;) But it works JUST as well on the iPhone (I guarantee :))

And the last thing I’d like to share from my playing with this, is the “What’s Hot” “UnderPlayed” and “Just found by Users” options.  As you can see the iPad version looks a lot sweeter than the iPhone version… :)

And last but not least, I’d like to share some of the ‘highlights’ mentioned from their actual website which incase I missed any of this, you have it here! :)

	Free Version of SoundHound Now Available for iOS and Android Highlights Blazing fast music identification Sing & Hum recognition Voice-directed music search In-app lyrics Special on iPad: Big, beautiful lyrics and music videos The SoundHound Ticker
Version 3.3.1 for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad Version 2.0.1 for Android - SoundHound (free): 5 IDs per month Available on the App Store - SoundHound ?: unlimited Available on the App Store

Oh, and let’s not ignore the one feature (which seemed to be overlooked in too many ways in the features…)

Instantly launch a Pandora Station!!!

Okay..  I think that is enough… I’ll let you tell me your favorite functions, features and otherwise.   If you found this useful at all, and if you kick the ‘”Shazam” habit, let me know.  If you’re from Shazam I’d love to hear your feedback as well. :) 

So, in the effort of full disclosure and thanks to my good friend Stuart Miniman, I’m publishing this post here, containing everything you actually care about!

Published in this lovely slide share; Converged Networks: FCoE, iSCSI and the Future of Storage Networking is a beautiful slide like this, but the real core and important bit is.

Orange Fiber Cable DOES 10g, but only up to 82m

Blue (Aqua) Fiber Cable is ALSO 10g, at lengths of up to 300m

By the looks of things though, when it comes to the days of 40g or 100g, Orange cable will not exactly be your best friend in those scenarios; a good problem to have at that point.

So, when you’re going through your datacenter and doing short-haul in a cabinet and saying “doh! we need to rip out all of this orange so we can to 10g”.. Don’t.   If you’re running long haul or to a cabinet pretty far away, sure make sure it’s blue all day long but you will be fine in the short term if you’re doing short runs.

Hopefully you found this useful (let me know if so) because I’m sick and tired of trying to remember what this is and end up at a million pages telling me EVERY detail but this! :)

This is actually a particularly funny video – Any time a celebrity shows up in a video, it’s pretty funny. :)

First thing I did in this video was deeply analyze it with loads of commentary! (You may notice I didn’t do that in my previous post, EMC Unified Storage Guarantee improves your Golf Game by 20% – Which is accurate because… Golf isn’t my thang so much, so improving my game by 20% isn’t saying much ;) that and it’s good to take a break from discussions)

But this video in particular… it drew up a few questions to the top of my mind:

• Is that really someone’s car with a CIO license plate in california?! (I considered calling it in to determine who owns that plate… but I didn’t.. ;))
• Is Sarah Phillips intended to represent someone internally/externally? (Not sure, I couldn’t find anything which jumped out…)
• Why is it she only handed pieces of paper?! Is that the new greener California License?! made of paper?! :)
• Why isn’t Sarah wearing a seatbelt? (Yes, I realize this is staged… :))
• If I got pulled over for 78 in a 65… well, let’s just say, I’m glad I work for EMC… ;)

All in all though, it’s a fairly funny video which quite frankly… if I could get a 20% guarantee on my speed limit, I’d be ALL over that – Though with that being the case, I’d hope that everyone else on the road equally had a similar 20% guarantee or at least introduce some vehicles for us to get to FAST (Oh my god that was a terrible tie-in/joke! :))

If you haven’t seen this yet, it’s pretty funny and covers things at a much higher level than all of the previous discussions I’ve had on this subject :)

….What happened?!?? I was just using ATMOS Yesterday and all of a sudden every competitor of EMC is telling me that ATMOS is DEAD and it’s time to close up shop?!? Whoa, hold on there pardner, that’s not what we’re saying at all! (Yes, that is exactly how *I* read it from the NUMEROUS competitive coverage of this event occurring and happening :))

As far as you and I should be concerned, ATMOS hasn’t changed at all; except perhaps getting a little simpler in your choices of where to store ATMOS.

Prior to this June 29th event, you would have the choice of ATMOS Hosted internally as part of your Private Cloud.   ATMOS Hosted externally at EMC’s ATMOS Online, or ATMOS Hosted externally at one of the three Service Providers listed below.

Now… as far as Production Grade ATMOS Online goes; You can choose between Internally, and Externally with the Cloud Service Providers where you can act and operate against their existing SLA structure you may likely be familiar with.

Looks pretty straight-forward if you ask me!   I sat down, read all of the data which was available to me, and I saw a strategic decision being taken in order to remove the competitive pressures between EMC’s own sales force, and that of the partners and service providers offering up the ATMOS Cloud Service to the general purpose community.   Or in the words of Dave Simpson who so eloquently said:

The winners, of course, are EMC’s Atmos cloud storage partners, which no longer have to compete with EMC. Likewise, EMC no longer has to compete with those partners. It’s a win-win on that front. In fact, on its Atmos web site, EMC is “strongly encouraging” its existing Atmos customers to migrate to one of its partners.

…..

The shuttering of Atmos Online should be seen not as a failure on the part of EMC but, rather, as another prescient and tactical move by the company.

And quite frankly Dave said it well; which I feel takes the whole debate about “where” should I host my Cloud Storage off the table; Discussion point over.   But what now?

With the service providers discussion off the table, I think it is important to take the time to focus on customers and the community

The EMC ATMOS Online Community is still strong and hearty.     Your vehicle for open discussion on this matter is still available and at your disposal.

The ATMOS Online service can continued to be used for Development Purposes.

Keeping your Cloud Private and doing your own internal testing has never been stronger with the release of the ATMOS Online Virtual Server Appliance (VSA)

And last but not least – Customers DO continue to use this, and STILL will continue to use this.   This is best of breed Cloud Storage in a growing world which needs more versatile solutions at your disposal.    There will continue to be businesses like eBay who selected ATMOS to create a reliable, scalable cloud infrastructure.

So in the end here; the real winners are YOU! EMC Customers, EMC Partners, EMC Service Providers.

There’s never been a better time to play with ATMOS, and with the public release of the VSA, I’ve been seeing internal and external adoption grow at exponential rates; which means you’ll likely see a lot more perspectives and use-cases of EMC ATMOS which will far trump that of what has been seen up until this point.   More fun, more play, more winners! :)

References also discussing this:

• EMC pulls the plug on Atmos Online (InfoStor)
• EMC cans Atmos Online service (The Register)
• All you need to know about Atmos… (StorageZilla)
• Understanding what we’re doing with Atmos (Virtual Geek)
• My Friday Rant – Transparency (Chuck Hollis)
• Important Service Notice (ATMOS Blog)

Where to get your Cloud On:

• EMC Atmos Virtual Appliance – Downloadable VSA’s
• AT&T Synaptic Storage as a Service (AT&T Hosting)
• CloudOne Storage (Peer1 Hosting)
• Stratus Cloud Storage (Hosted Solutions)
• EMC ATMOS Online Community (Forums)

• EMC 20% Unified Storage Guarantee !EXPOSED!
• EMC Unified Storage Capacity Calculator – The Tutorial!
• EMC 20% Unified Storage Guarantee: Final Reprise

In case any of you forgot some of those "target" posts, here they are for your reference! but I’m not here to start a fight! I’m here to educate and to direct my focus on not what this previously OVERLY discussed Unified Storage Guarantee was or is, but instead to drive down in to what Unified Storage will really bring to bear.   So, without further adieu!

What is Unified Storage?

I’ve seen a lot of definitions of what it is, quite frankly a lot of stupid definitions too. (My GOD I hate stupid definitions!)  But what does it mean when you Unify to you and me?   I could go on and on about the various ‘definitions’ of what it really is (and I even started WRITING that portion of it!) but instead I’m going to scrap all of that so I do not end up on my own list of ‘stupid definitions’ and instead will define Unified Storage at it’s simplest terms.

A unified storage system merges NAS and SAN. Optimized for performance and interoperability, the system simultaneously stores both file data and blocks of application data in virtually any operating environment

You can put your own take and spin on it, but at it’s guts that is seemingly what the basics of a "Unified Storage" system are; nothing special about it, NAS and SAN (hey, lots of people do that right?!)  You bet they do!   And this is by no way the definitive definition on what “Unified Storage” is, and frankly that is not my concern either.   So taking things to the next level; now that we have a baseline of what it takes to ‘get the job done’, now it’s time to evaluate the Cost of Living in a Unified Storage environment.

Unified Storage Architecture Cost of Living

I get it.  No really I do.   And I’m sure by now you’re tired of the conversation of ‘uniqueness’ focused on the following core areas:

• Support for Mixed Clients
• Support for multiple types (tiers) of disk
• Simplified Provisioning
• Thin Provisioning
• Improving Utilization

All of these items are simply a FACT and an expectation when it comes to a Unified Platform.  (Forget unified, a platform in general)   Lack of support of multiple tiers, locking down to a single client, complicated provisioning which can only be done fat which makes you lose out on utilization and likely is a waste of time – That my friend is the cost of living.    You’re not going to introduce a wasteful fat obsolete system and frankly, I’m not sure of any (many) vendors who are actually delivering services which don’t meet on multiple of these criteria; So the question I’m asking is… Why do we continue to discuss these points?   I do not go to a car dealership and say “You know, I’m expecting a transmission in this car, you have a transmission right?”  And feel free to replace transmission with tires and other things you just flat out EXPECT.    It’s time to take the conversation to the next level though; because if you’ve ever talked to me you know how I feel about storage. “There is no inherent value of storage in and of itself without context or application.”   Thus… You don’t want spinning rust just for the sake to have it spin, no you want it to store something for you, and it is with that you need to invest in Perfection.

Unified Storage Perfection

What exactly is the idea of Unified Storage Perfection?   It is an epic nirvana whereby we shift from traditional thinking and takes NAS and SAN out of the business of merely rusty spindles and enable and engage the business to earn its keep.

Enterprise Flash Disks

Still storage, yet sexy in it’s own right.  Why?  First of all, it’s FAST OMFG FLASH IS SO FAST! And second of all, it’s not spinning, so it’s not annoying like the latest and greatest SAS, ATA or FC disk!    But what makes this particular implementation of EFD far sexier than simple consumer grade SSD’s is the fact that these things will guarantee you a consistent speed and latency through and through.   I mean, sure it’s nice that these things can take the sheer number of FC disks you’d need to run an aggressive SQL server configuration and optimize the system to perform, but it goes beyond that.   

Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST)

Think back to that high performance SQL workload you had a moment ago, there might come a time in the life of the business where your performance needs change; Nirvana comes a knocking and with the power of FAST enables you to dynamically, non-disruptively move from one tier of Storage (EFD, FC, SATA) to another, so you are guaranteed not only investment protection but scalability which grows and shrinks as your business does.    Gone are the days of ‘buy for what we might use one day’ and welcome are the days of Dynamic and Scalable business.

FAST Cache

Wow, is this the triple whammy or what?  Building upon the previous two points, this realm of Perfection is able to take the performance and speed of Enterprise Flash Disks and the concept of tiering your disks to let you use those same existing EFD disks to extend your READ and WRITE cache on your array!    FAST Cache accelerates performance to address unexpected workload spikes. FAST and FAST Cache are a powerful combination, unmatched in the industry, that provides optimal performance at the lowest possible cost.  (Yes I copied that from a marketing thingie, but it’s true and is soooooo cool!) 

FAST + FAST Cache = Unified Storage Performance Nirvana

So, let’s put some common sense on this then, because this is no joke, nor is it marketing BS.    You assign EFD’s to a specific workload you want to guarantee a certain speed and a certain response time (Win).    You have unpredictable workloads who may need to be fast some times, but may be slow other times on quarterly of yearly basis’s, so you leverage FAST to move that data around, but that’s your friend when you can PREDICT what is going to happen.    What about when it is slow most of the time, but then on June 29th you make a major announcement that you were not expecting to hit as hard as it did, and BAM! Your system goes in the tank because data sitting on FC or SATA couldn’t handle the load.   Hello FAST Cache, how I love you so.     Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely LOVE EFD’s and I wish all of my data could sit on them (At home a lot of it does ;)) and I have massive desire for FAST because I CAN move my workload around based upon predictable or planned patterns (Marry me!)  But FAST Cache is my superman, because he is there to save the day when I least expected it, he caches my reads when BOOM I didn’t know it was coming, but more importantly he holds my massive load of WRITES which come in JUST as unexpectedly.   So for you naysayers or just confused ones who wonder why you’d have one vs the other (vs) the other; Hopefully this example use-case is valuable.   Think about it in terms of your business, you could get away with one or the other, or all three… Either way, you’re a winner.

Block Data Compression

EMC is further advancing its storage efficiency innovation as the first storage provider to introduce block data compression, by allowing customers to compress inactive data and reclaiming valuable storage capacity— data footprints can be reduced by up to 50 percent. A common use case would be compressing inactive data once EMC FAST software has moved that data to the most cost-effective storage tier. Block data compression joins EMC’s existing capabilities, including thin provisioning and data deduplication, to automatically and transparently maximize storage utilization.

Yea, I DID copy that verbatim from a Press Release – And do you know why? Because it’s right! Even addresses a pretty compelling use-case too!   So think about it a moment.  Does this apply to you?  I’d never compress ALL of my data (reminisces back to the days of DoubleSpace where let’s just say, for any of us who lived it… those were interesting times ;)) But think about the volume of data which you have sitting on Primary Storage which is inactive and otherwise wasting space when it continues sitting un-accessed and consuming maximum capacity!  But this is more than just about that data type, unlike some solutions this it not an all or nothing.

Think if you could choose to compress on demand! Compress say… your virtual machine right out of vCenter! But wait there’s more!   And there’s so much more to say on this, let alone the things which are coming.. I don’t want to reveal what is coming, so I’ll let Mark Twomey do it where he did it here:  Storage Services for Clariion Storage Pool LUNs

What does all of this mean for me and Unified Storage?!

Whoa, hey now! What do you mean what does all of this mean?! Are you cutting me short?  Yes.  Yes I am. :)   There are some cool things coming, which I cannot talk about yet… and not to mention some of all of the new stuff coming in Q3 – But things I was talking about… that’s stuff I can talk about –TODAY- there’s only even better things and cake coming tomorrow :)

I can fill this with videos, decks, resources, references, Unisphere and every thing under the sun (You let me know if you really want that.. I’ve done that in the past as well)  But ideally, I want you to make your own decision, come to your own conclusions..  What does this mean for you?   Stop asking “What is Unified Storage” and start asking “What value can my business derive from technologies in order to save money, save time, save waste!”    I’ll try to avoid writing yet another article on this subject unless you so demand it! I look forward to all of your comments and feedback! :)

Oh no you didn’t! You didn’t just compare my business application to a common STD often called “the great imitator” because it’s many features and functions are often indistinguishable from other products!    I have to say, this is by far the PERFECT anecdote! (I’ve referenced SharePoint in this way in the past in my talks.. but never before did I have this VERBATIM and slightly modified caption from the CDC Website on STD Facts)  So, let’s take a journey, slightly modifying and replacing a few words in this description of What is the Treatment

SharePoint is easy to cure in its early stages. A single injection of planning and training will cure a business who has had SharePoint for less than a year. Additional doses are needed to treat someone who has had SharePoint for longer than a year. For people who are allergic to planning, other forms of project management are available to treat SharePoint. There are no home remedies or over-the-counter solutions that will cure SharePoint. Treatment will kill the SharePoint sprawl and prevent further damage, but it will not repair damage already done.

Because effective treatment is available, it is important that persons be screened for SharePoint on an on-going basis if their legacy behaviors put them at risk for STD’s (SharePoint Team Deployments)

Persons who receive SharePoint treatment must abstain from sprawl with new partners until the SharePoint sores are completely healed. Persons with SharePoint must notify their partners so that they also can be tested and receive treatment if necessary.

As you can tell if you read the original sourced location, NOT A WHOLE LOT CHANGED! But this says SO MUCH for this STD and the SharePoint community as a whole!

If you’ve ever suffered through sprawl, be it SharePoint, Exchange, Notes, or Wiki-sprawl you know exactly what I’m talking about.    I cannot emphasize enough how beneficial planning is, but this is not for naught!   Just because you built a legacy infrastructure whereby your sprawl has left you almost crippled does not mean you have no recourse or option to turn this around.    These lessons learned and best practices from Microsoft’s own Internal IT on what they did to get from where they ‘were’ to where they are today on 2010 is an eye-opener and a must check out!

Some of the best lessons I took away from these sessions (and more which I’m not referring to here) is I get it that you have a war-torn SharePoint environment which was created potentially years ago with bad patterns, practices and little strategy, direction or vision.   Guess what?  I don’t care!  I don’t care about yester-year, I care about the future; and the strategy for the future is… Build for tomorrow, and migrate yesterday; Don’t try to migrate yesterday in ORDER to build for tomorrow.   Is it possible? Yes.  Is it enjoyable? NO!   SharePoint easily migrates and data can shift and move far easier than other platforms.   You DO HAVE OPTIONS! Take advantage of them, but don’t try and cripple yourself attempting to fix your SharePoint 2003 environment so you can TRY to migrate to 2010.    Deploy 2010, get it the way you want, establish governance, proper practices, avoid the sprawl and migrate IN to it; don’t try to do this backwards – You don’t have to!

Oh, and get regular check-ups, you never know what your Partner has been getting in to. :)

Resources in this article from:

• Microsoft IT: How MSIT Upgraded Microsoft to SharePoint 2010

• Information Governance for Microsoft SharePoint 2010

Disclaimer: The following is a breakdown of entirely non-sarcastic statements with core sound, business and technical justifications of just why SharePoint is the flaming pile of destructive pleasure that it is and will continue to be part of your organizations ecosystem from this point forward.    If you disagree, agree or are a contrarian this is the post for you!

Follow-up Disclaimer: I’ve decided to release this as a series instead of one really long blog post you likely won’t even read in the first place, so feel free to follow the entire series of why I hate sharepoint and why you should use it! :)

• SharePoint is where you put your data if you never want anyone to find it

• SharePoint is Viral in Nature, just implement it and it’ll spread! (like Syphilis)

Have you ever heard this statement before? I know I have, in fact I have lived it countless times in my life going back to the earliest versions of WSS and SharePoint Services ever since Microsoft made this available.    And is that story true today even? Sure; out of context definitely.     If you continue to do exactly what you are doing today, change nothing and start to leverage SharePoint the same way you are using File Services you will experience the same benefit and value of a pool of data to lose things in.   However, SharePoint changes things ever so slightly and for the better by introducing the concept of ‘metadata’ to your otherwise unstructured datasets.    Yea we’ve all heard of metadata, it’s where two bits go to get a byte (Wow, I can’t believe I just made that terrible joke!)   But it is so much more than that.    Unstructured content combined with Metadata, toss a little search services in there and all of a sudden you have the ability to not simply ‘find your data’ when looking for it, but you can go to the extents of searching across an enterprise and making the data available and extensible to an audience far greater than your own.

So rather than simply managing lots of silo’s – Be it SharePoint Servers, File Shares, EMC Documentum, MORE Websites, Notes Servers, Exchange data, external sources, and an infinite number of other resources you’d otherwise be managing individually and be unable to find things – SharePoint changes your game a bit by making them all consumable in one “Pane of Glass” instead of lots of individual “Pains of glAss” :)  

So, if you want to ensure no-one ever finds your data, I highly encourage you to put it into a file share, into SharePoint, into a random Wiki you manage and maintain internally; but regardless of where you put it, you can use this tool to ensure that your data is not only indexed, referenced and accessible, but you can continue what you’re doing today in a more efficient and accessible manner so as to flatten the enterprise down to a level at which even localization can come to grips with and understand.

Resources in this article from:

• Customizing Microsoft FAST …Customizing Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint

• Getting to know FAST Search …Getting to know FAST Search Server for SharePoint 2010

So, what’s the big deal about the TechNet Wiki? I mean, we have other Wiki’s out there right? so obviously it must be the same! (it is not!)

Cool Features in the TechNet Wiki Beta!

• The ability to create content that you feel really need to exist when it doesn’t
• The ability to SEARCH for CONTENT (indexed in your favorite search engine without login… so no need to login/etc) and thus determine whether you need to create new content
• Integration with your LiveID so there’s no need to manage and maintain yet ANOTHER acct in order to do things – That’s something you can write home about!
• Forums! Forums! Forums! (Yea, that feature has existed… but it’s EASY to get to using this vehicle!)

And I’m sure there are other reasons to use it, but if there is one thing I can encourage you to do now, instead of waiting for it… Just go Check it out!

Do it! (Do It! :))   It may be something helpful which will change your life, and if not.. at least you can feel well knowing that Microsoft has adopted a Wiki architecture to enable you (the community) to express and move forward with doing things! :)

So, get out there and wiki-wiki your wiki on!

I’m not sure I could have made the TITLE any more detailed and specific! But just incase that wasn’t straight forward enough.. here is a semi-hijack of Jason’s blog post, including the important details.. most especially HOW to WIN

Do NOT comment on my blog to win! Go to Jason’s and enter to WINWINWIN!!!

Win A Free VMworld Pass From boche.net

Contest Rules:

1. Post one comment/reply and only one comment/reply to this blog article below.
2. Include your first and last name.
3. Provide a valid email address when completing the comment form.
4. Include a short bio about yourself and how you use VMware currently or how you would like to leverage VMware products.
5. Include three (3) things you are looking to gain from attending VMworld 2010 (ie. Why do you want to go?)
6. Contest entry must be recieved by noon CST Thursday June 17th, 2010.
7. One (1) random winner will be chosen Thursday evening June 17th, 2010. 
8. Contest results will posted Friday June 18th, 2010.
9. The winner will be contacted via email address provided in #3 above.
10. The winner will recieve a VMworld 2010 San Francisco conference pass only.
11. The conference pass is non-transferrable and non-refundable.
12. Transportation, hotel, and other expenses are not covered by boche.net.
13. No purchase necessary.

Good Luck!

Win A Free VMworld Pass From boche.net

Welcome to the Houston Audobon Society!    It took us a bit to find the place as our ‘address’ and ‘map’ as it were, took us a little further away than this place which is located off the beaten path, so to speak.    This location is truly a sanctuary within a sanctuary.

The Houston Audobon Society is a close-knit group which does an amazing job of addressing a lot of the challenges which small businesses typically go through.   They had just gotten through a BPOS migration, moving Email and Sharepoint up in to the cloud; this gave them the opportunity to spread their load around outside of having to host everything internally at the mothership so to speak (which is valuable with Hurricane season starting)

However, the real value of this BPOS migration was even more so important in that the physical server they had been running DIED days prior to us showing up! (Wow, if there was ever a need for a series of IT Pro’s, this was definitely it! :))

What became the ultimate value of the event was the sheer fact that, no matter what kind of challenge or problem as an organization they had (above and beyond our ‘defined challenges’) they had the right audience to pursue and answer any and all questions, and get things rolling to not only get a ‘path’ but also get hard actionable items on board at that moment.  There were problems solved, which every one of us was glad to be a part of, and sincerely glad to be able to help! :)

I’m tired and didn’t get as many photos as I would hope – else I would have contributed some of the other content here :)

We all gathered down in the main lobby bright and early at 8:15AM (For someone who historically is on Chicago time.. that’s 7:15, WTF right?! :))

There we stood, on Camera to find out the official results of Day 1’s competitions, the battle so to speak as we competed at KIPP DC as our Red team Vs the Blue Team (redvsblue) and the Gold and Green teams duked it out at a training facility ByteBack teaching the folks as part of “Back on my Feet”.    So David Elfassy, standing before us delivers the final word.. Red Team Wins! Green Team Wins! Wow! We won! (I was a little shocked, because I –loved- the Powerpoint template which the blue team used!)  However, now.. what do we do? We need to have a Tie-Breaker! Oh my!

Tie-Breaker Challenge

“Find someone running Windows 7 and ask them what their favorite feature is.”

So, we began our hunt to find someone who met this criteria!   Thinking on our feet.. we thought “Let’s head to the closest starbucks!”  As there was one in the hotel there, but no one seemed to have a Laptop!  Add to that… we had 36 minutes to complete this challenge – The first one to complete it, get a photo and get it uploaded would become the winner!

We walked a few blocks away (as I pulled my laptop out and started staging a blog post… :)) To the next nearest Starbucks only to be presented with the following challenge.

• “I’m sorry I’m running Windows XP”
• “No.  I have a mac.”
• Daniel: “You know you can run Windows 7 on a mac!”
• MacUser: *scorn* *disgust* :)
• “I’m sorry, no” which was more or less the “I don’t know what you’re selling, but I’m not buying!”

So, this was our first set of challenges… at which point… I did a refresh on the IT Grand Prix site only to find that… they had already posted their Photo! – We were done for! (and we headed back)

Focusing on the fact that the post in a ‘technicality’ only had a photo and not any expression of their ‘favorite’ feature, we were still game and looking for that next Windows 7 User – When qualifying this fact, we were happily informed that they not only got that.. They got it on film! (Go Scott the Videographer! :))

• Do you run Windows 7 on your laptop? New Yorkers Do!
• I’m a PC and Windows 7 is My Idea
• Code Monkey Say: Green Team Wins Washington, DC Ground Challenge

So, taking our lumps so to speak, we offered to castrate ourselves at their feet in respect of their utter domination of the circumstances :)

At this point, we began our Challenge for the day, which involved another puzzle to sort out.  We were given a contact we needed to find, and an obscure formulae to figure out, simple enough!   Well, after careful calculation and rigorous battle (and using the power of LinkedIn instead of solving an actual puzzle…) we were able to find our next destination to go to!

Welcome to NPower NY! They had this program called TSC or Technology Service Corps!

TSC offers a free, 18-week intensive IT training program to low-income youth and young adults (ages 18-25), and then places graduates in full-time employment throughout New York City’s nonprofit, business and public sectors. Participants practice their new skills and give back to their communities by performing service internships and volunteer work for area nonprofits.

The program has experienced steady growth since it began, and consistent high (80%) graduation and placement rates. Because of its success, TSC has grown to serve as many as 111 students/year, in a dedicated Brooklyn-based training facility. As part of this evolution, TSC introduced a Microsoft professional certification component for each student. Finally, NPower will soon launch a new three-year plan to begin TSC chapters at other NPower affiliates.

We were fortunate to meet 30 individuals who were graduates of this program, who went on to serve in Internships, and careers in technology.    The enthusiasm and passion these folks brought brought a great smile to all of our faces as we’ve been in the seat they’re sitting in, and it’s nice to help share our experiences as to how we got to where we are today!

We started off our time here with introducing ourselves and then lead into an “Ask the Experts” panel so they could ask any questions as well as so we could share our stories and history with everyone.     The range of our technical and business history ranged with a number of us having started back as far as 1992, and even some epic success stories of excelling to stardom in as few as 5 years!   We ended up learning a lot about each other and ourselves in this little time together, which was one of the most honest and infinitely valuable moments on the trip thus far.

(Because frankly, I’m writing this blog… I’ll share one of my stories :)  I didn’t get the chance to share this full story to the group, bits and pieces sure.. and I also shared some one-on-one or in a one-to-many session with the graduates, so here goes! )

<begin story>

Every one of us on this trip are MCT’s, many of which have been MCT’s for years (a lot of them have been an MCT 11+ years) which is similar to my own experience on the matter.    Back in the 90’s Microsoft had this ‘offer’, whereby if you got your MCSE you would receive the benefit of a TechNet subscription and a number of support incidents FREE for one year!   Okay… I was younger back then… but I wasn’t any less geeky.   The prospect of a TechNet subscription to me was HUGE! MASSIVE! OMFG AMAZING!   So I did it.  In 11 days, I passed 7 Exams from Microsoft and earned myself the MCSE NT 4.0.   Sure, I knew it might do something for my career in the long-term, but in the short term.. I’d be getting me some software+support! (Booyah! :))

Certainly… this isn’t the type of story you hear from other MCSE’s, MCT’s and otherwise.   Although like almost everything in my life… my situation is drastically different.   I had been investing in myself and my knowledge of Microsoft Technologies going back 10 years prior to that point.   This was huge to me, and meant a lot to me; did I know that my initiative, drive and passion would turn around quickly into a rocketing career (which is STILL ROCKETING UPWARD) from doing that? No..   It was all about giving me access to more tools to play with. :)

What happened next though, was my pursuit of the MCT! It was 1998, I thought, wow I would –love- to teach, share and endow those I worked with and consulted in order to help train them and bring them forward, and wanted to become an MCT.    However, I am very literal to the point of fault sometimes (and especially then).  The guidelines for the MCT at the time required a Premium Certification (MCSE/etc) which I HAD! But it also required me to work for a Trainer/training company, something I was not exactly in the capacity to take on board at that time; thus my plan to become an MCT was put on hold.    —————–> FAST FORWARD to 2009!   While spending my time on the Get On The Bus Tour – First tour of Americas… I got to know the entire MSLearning team, and when I raised this legacy 10+ year old concern around becoming an MCT (something I wanted so to do) I was informed… “Yea, we got rid of that requirement ‘x’ years ago”.

There it was… Becoming an MCT was in my grasp!  In fact, more than just being in my grasp, I actually reached out and took hold and subsequently I’ve been an MCT Officially since 2009!

Now, for those of you who know me… you know that personally certification doesn’t mean a whole lot to myself, because I collect certifications like some people collect fine art.    And that analogy is king here, as they are indeed fine art in a manner of speaking; So much effort goes into their creation, and once you acquire them and hold them in your repository you have the experience and knowledge and are able to keep them forever!    However, not all certifications are created equal; and this distinction is important because frankly I don’t have room for EVERY one of my certifications on my business card or signature line.     If you do see my signature or business card you will see two certifications standing Prominent.  MCT and CISSP.

CISSP

Hey, I’m a security guy, I invested a lot of myself in this… both in the test and the years of required experience to sit this exam, so this means a lot to me.

As a caveat to this, 3-6 months after completing my CISSP which I studied for 6-9 months and read 57 books to prepare for, I finally sat my GED getting the 99th percentile and thus successfully having documentation stating ‘I have a equivalent to a high school diploma’   Yea… That’s right, right after I completed something which people dedicate decades to :)

MCT

I think I pretty much explained that here.   Holding the MCT means a real lot to me, it means decades of dedication, education and pursuit; and I am proud to hold it today as I will to hold it for years to come.    It may not be for every one, but for me, it means a real lot, and I hope you are able to make a story for yourself like my very own above. :)

</end story>

So, while my story ended there… the stories of these individuals at NPower in the TSC Program is just going to continue going forward.    It was a great honor to have these fine people take time out of their day in order to come talk with us, listen to us speak, but more importantly to engage our minds and theirs in unison discussing things which we have such a passionate discourse for.    If you’re curious to what extent this was so passionately driven? :) The Red Team was assigned “Virtualization” as the topic of discussion to cover with them.   Just think about it.. Daniel Nerenberg, MVP of Application Virtualization, and me… the poster child for Virtualization ;)   Talk about the Perfecta!

While there were four teams that day, Red, Blue, Gold and Green all “competing” to win the challenge, we all ended up winners that day.   The opportunity to share with the students, and their attention and passion to join us and enable us to talk with them; All of these challenges are in their own right challenging because any single one of us would give our time to help these folks in an instant.   So, thank you so much NPower and Graduates of the TSC Program.   You made our time in NYC not only a productive one, but an amazing one we’re so happy to have been able to share with you!

Welcome to KIPP DC!

KIPP DC is a network of high-performing, college-preparatory charter schools in Washington D.C., which serve the city’s under-resourced communities. At KIPP DC, there are no shortcuts: outstanding educators, more time in school, a rigorous college-preparatory curriculum, and a strong culture of achievement and support help our students make significant academic gains and continue to excel in high school and college.

But what does that mean to you and me?  They’re a business just like yours and anyone else’s who suffer many of the same challenges we all do.  And one of those challenges is how to manage the demanding needs of students, faculty and staff, while being able to stay strategic, forward thinking and be proactive instead of merely reacting to the future of computing.    The challenge with Daniel Nerenberg and I on the Red Team were helping them work with, was addressing Application Virtualization.  Our esteemed coopetition fellows Gordon Ryan, Andrew Bettany of the Blue Team are helping with a Windows 7 Deployment strategy and plan.

What do you get when you combine IT Pro’s, Non-Profits, Coffee and @cxi?

Innovative solutions the likes of which can only be explained with stirrer sticks and sugar packets!    If you know anything about me, you know that I love tactile reference of physical infrastructure, solely for the logic that we have the ability to MOVE objects around (unlike a whiteboard where we end up getting messy… and it’s not nearly as cool and impactful)   I felt it might be useful for a layman’s explanation of what I just said, so in simple terms…  I like to play with stuff you can find around you :)

The above picture is an architectural breakdown of application virtualization presented to a user use-case environment.   Basically look at it as the sticks are ‘boundaries’ in the first square picture, that physically shows a single ‘machine’ with applications living inside of it, with all of the constraints and conflicts which also happen to live within that environment.    However, in the second picture, you have a breakdown of applications virtualized into separate packages, yet there’s also a model of shared package layers and abstraction… Lots of abstraction! This video helps explain it a little further!

After our sit down talk and interview with Director of Operations, Edward Han and IT Manager, Adam Roberts we got to work on a plan of how Application Virtualization would help out Kipp DC with their organizational challenges.  

As you can see here, the Blue Team is hard at work.  I’m not sure if they were working on their slides, or checking out some new Chuck Norris statistic, but nonetheless… We all got down to business creating collateral, producing and providing information which would help out those folks and how it would apply (in our case) to what Application Virtualization with App-V could do for them!

I would be remiss in my duty to not share with you what I shared with them.  Use it in the context of your organization of course (as I will not be sharing the incidentals of their organization here! :))

Microsoft’s Application Virtualization collateral!

• App-V Case Studies
• University Reduces Application Packaging Time, Enhances Access, with Virtualization
• Independent App-V Blog
• Accelerate your Windows 7 deployment with App-V
• Application virtualization candidates
• Microsoft Office 2010, more integration in App-V 4.6

And here are a few videos produced by the folks on Sequencing and actually deploying using App-V (or Softgrid for you legacy folks like me :))

Though I’m sure some of you are saying “Hey, what about VMware ThinApp – Why didn’t you talk about that?!”  It’s true.   Our mission was to discuss App-V, fortunately I had Daniel with me who is an MVP in App-V too!  However, so you don’t feel left out, here are a few videos of Deploying VMware ThinApp from start to finish in 20 minutes! – Enjoy! :)

Following this, we wrapped up for the day, grabbed our (heavy) bags, and headed out to where the Bus would take us to our next destination: Marriott Brooklyn Bridge in New York City!

However, like the geeks we are… All the way at the back of the bus is… a Power Outlet! … Ooh! Two outlets actually! So the guys had their ‘friendmaker’ power strip multipliers, and we plugged them in, with enough arsenal to run a small business (or even a mid-sized enterprise with the kind of gear we’re sporting! :))   And just so you get a good feel for what we’re looking at here… I’m sitting in the literal hot seat!   See all the cables? Oh wait, what’s that you see? It’s 109.5 DEGREES DOWN THERE?!?!? Yea, it’s pretty hot at my feet :)

I hope you enjoyed Day 1 – This was only the beginning on this whirlwind adventure tour of madness, insanity, education, and Technology! We’re Technology Focused! :)

After eventually getting from the airport to the shuttle to the hotel, I took a walk over to meet my fellow Red Team member Daniel Nerenberg and Gold Team member Susan Ibach who waited for me on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.    On the way to meet them, I did pass by the White House where I took this photo of apparently Biden taking advantage of the fact that Obama was back in my native Chicago and moving some things out! err… I mean something else entirely! Though tweeting my ‘joke’ about that resulted in a rather awkward snafu of ‘auto-correct’ gone wild :)

In all, it was a good start off to what is already a fairly confusing (intentionally) adventure of working with non-profits, charities and others as we travel our way over the next several days before finally descending upon New Orleans.      For those who had not seen our ‘agenda’ so to speak, here is the breakdown of where our travels will take us:

• Tuesday, June 1st – Washington DC
• Wednesday, June 2nd – New York City, NY
• Thursday, June 3rd – Houston, TX
• Friday, June 4th – New Orleans, LA

After which point, we take a brief moment to relax before each of our respective responsibilities take charge at TechEd, whether it is running labs, working a booth, interfacing with customers, or in my case – Covering the event for the Media, Press and general community so you can get a unique perspective on stuffs, so to speak :)

And if that doesn’t wrap up the day.. Enjoy this little story my good friend Jorge sent me… Notice: my little picture/name are there on the left/middle.   I guess that’d translate into.. I made it onto the Front Page of the Chicago Tribune! :)    In the meantime, if you have not already joined the Red Team! Please do so :)  It’s for our charity NetHope that we are trying to win $10,000 for!

Enjoy, and look forward to sharing the festivities and events of Days 1 and beyond for you!   Take care and talk to you soon!   – Christopher :)

Disclaimer: I am in no way saying I am the voice of EMC, nor am I assuming that Mike Richardson is infact the voice of NetApp, but I know we’re both loud, so our voices are heard regardless :)

So on to the meat of the ‘argument’ so to speak (That’d be some kind of vegan meat substitute being that I’m vegan!)

EMC Unified Storage Guarantee

I find it’d be useful if I quote the text of the EMC Guarantee, and then as appropriate drill down into each selected section in our comparable review on this subject.

It’s easy to be efficient with EMC.

EMC® unified storage brings efficiency to a whole new level. We’ve even created a capacity calculator so you can configure efficiency results for yourself. You’ll discover that EMC requires 20% less raw capacity to achieve your unified storage needs. This translates to superior storage efficiency when compared to other unified storage arrays—even those utilizing their own documented best practices.

If we’re not more efficient, we’ll match the shortfall

If for some unlikely reason the capacity calculator does not demonstrate that EMC is 20% more efficient, we’ll match the shortfall with additional storage. That’s how confident we are.

The guarantee to end all guarantees

Storage efficiency is one of EMC’s fundamental strengths. Even though our competitors try to match it by altering their systems, turning off options, changing defaults or tweaking configurations—no amount of adjustments can counter the EMC unified storage advantage.

Here’s the nitty-gritty, for you nitty-gritty types

• The 20% guarantee is for EMC unified storage (file and block—at least 20% of each)
• It’s based on out-of-the-box best practices
• There’s no need to compromise availability to achieve efficiency
• There are no caveats on types of data you must use
• There’s no need to auto-delete snapshots to get results

This guarantee is based on standard out-of-the-box configurations. Let us show you how to configure your unified storage to get even more efficiency. Try our capacity calculator today.

Okay, now that we have THAT part out of the way.. What does this mean? Why am I stating the obvious (so to speak)  Let’s drill this down to the discussions at hand.

The 20% guarantee is for EMC unified storage (file and block—at least 20% of each)

This is relatively straight-forward.  It simply says “Build a Unified Configuration – which is Unified” SAN is SAN, NAS is NAS, but when you combine them together you get a Unified Configuration! – Not much to read in to that.  Just that you’re likely to see the benefit of 20% or greater in a Unified scenario, than you are in a comparable SAN or NAS only scenario.

It’s based on out-of-the-box best practices

I cannot stress this enough.   Out-Of-Box Best practices.   What does that mean?    Universally, I can build a configuration which will say to this “20% efficiency guarantee” Muhahah! Look what I did! I made this configuration which CLEARLY is less than 20%! Even going into the negative percentile! I AM CHAMPION GIVE ME DISK NOW!".   Absolutely.  I’ve seen it, and heard it touted (Hey, even humor me as I discuss a specific use-case which me and Mike Richardson have recently discussed.)    But building a one-off configuration which makes your numbers appear ‘more right’ v using your company subscribed best practices (and out of box configurations) is what is being proposed here.   If it weren’t for best practices we’d have R0 configurations spread across every workload, with every feature and function under the sun disabled to say ‘look what I can doo!”

So, I feel it is important to put this matter to bed (because so many people have been losing their time and sleep over this debate and consideration)  I will take this liberty to quote from a recent blog post by Mike Richardson – Playing to Lose, Hoping to Win: EMC’s Latest Guarantee (Part 2)    In this article written by Mike he did some –great- analysis.  We’re talking champion.  He went through and used the calculator, built out use-cases and raid groups, really gave it a good and solid run through (which I appreciate!)   He was extremely honest, forthright and open and communicative about his experience, configuration and building this out with the customer in mind.   To tell you the truth, Mike truly inspired me to follow-up with this final reprise.

Reading through Mike’s article I would like to quote (in context) the following from it:

The configuration I recommend is to the left.  With 450GB FC drives, the maximum drive count you can have in a 32bit aggr is 44.  This divides evenly into 2 raidgroups of 20+2.  I am usually comfortable recommending between 16 and 22 RG size, although NetApp supports FC raidgroup sizes up to 28 disks.  Starting with the same amount of total disks (168 – 3 un-needed spares), the remaining disks are split into 8 RAID DP raidgroups. After subtracting an additional 138GB for the root volumes, the total usable capacity for either NAS or SAN is just under 52TB.

I love that Mike was able to share this image from the Internal NetApp calculator tool (It’s really useful to build out RG configurations) and it gives a great breakdown of disk usage.

For the sake of argument for those who cannot make it out from the picture, what Mike has presented here is a 22 disk RAID-DP RG (20+2 disks – Made up of 168 FC450 disks with 7 spares) I’d also like to note that snapshot reserve has been changed from the default of 20% to 0% in the case of this example.

Being I do not have access to the calculator tool which Mike used, I used my own spreadsheet run calculator which more or less confirms what Mike’s tool is saying to be absolutely true!   But this got me thinking!    (Oh no! Don’t start thinking on me now!)    And I was curious.   Hey, sure this deviates from best practices a bit, right? But BP’s change at times, right?

So being that I rarely like to have opinions of my own, and instead like to base it on historical evidence founded factually and referenced in others… I sent the following txt message to various people I know (Some Former Netappians’s, some close friends who manage large scale enterprise NetApp accounts, etc (etc is for the protection of those I asked ;))

The TXT Message was: “Would you ever create a 20+2 FC RG with netapp?”

That seems pretty straight forward.   Right? Here is a verbatim summation of the responses I received.

• Sorry, I forgot about this email.  To be brief, NO.
• “It depends, I know (customer removed) did 28, 16 is the biggest I would do”
• I would never think to do that… unless it came as a suggestion from NetApp for some perfemance reasons… (I blame txting for typo’s ;))
• Nope we never use more then 16
• Well rebuild times would be huge.

So, sure this is a small sampling (of the responses I received) but I notice a resonating pattern there.   The resounding response is a NO.   But wait, what does that have to do with a hole in the wall?   Like Mike said, NetApp can do RG sizes of up to 28 disks.   Also absolutely 100% accurate, and in a small number of use-cases I have found situations in which people have exceeded 16 disk RG’s.   So, I decided to do a little research and see what the community has said on this matter of RG sizes. (This happened out of trying to find a Raid6 RG Rebuild Guide – I failed)

I found a few articles I’d like to reference here:

• Raid Group size 8, 16, 28?

  • According to the resiliency guide Page 11:

    NetApp recommends using the default RAID group sizes when using RAID-DP.

  • Eugene makes some good points here –

    • All disks in an aggregate are supposed to participate in IO operations.  There is a performance penalty during reconstruction as well as risks; "smaller" RG sizes are meant to minimize both.

    • There is a maximum number of data disks that can contribute space to an aggregate for a 16TB aggregate composed entirely of a give disk size, so I’ve seen RG sizes deviate from the recommended based on that factor (You don’t want/need a RG of 2 data+2parity just to add 2 more data disks to an aggr….). Minimizing losses to parity is not a great solution to any capacity issue.

    • my $0.02.

  • An enterprise account I’m familiar has been using NetApp storage since F300 days and they have tested all types of configurations and have found performance starts to flatline after 16 disks.  I think the most convincing proof that 16 is the sweet spot is the results on spec.org.  NetApp tests using 16 disk RAID groups.

    • Particularly compelling especially coming from NetApp PSE – mcope

• Raid group size recommendation

  • Okay, maybe not the best reference considering I was fairly active in the response on the subject in July and August of 2008 in this particular thread.  Though read through it if you like, I guess the best take away I can get from it (which I happened to have said…)
    • I was looking at this from two aspects: Performance, and long-term capacity.
    • My sources for this were a calculator and capacity documents.
    • Hopefully this helped bring some insight into the operation  and my decisions around it.
      • (Just goes to show… I don’t have opinions… only citeable evidence Well, and real world customer experiences as well;))
  • Raid group size with FAS3140 and DS4243
    • I found this in the DS4243 Disk Shelf Technical FAQ document
    • WHAT ARE THE BEST PRACTICES FOR CONFIGURING RAID GROUPS IN FULLY LOADED CONFIGURATIONS?
    • For one shelf: two RAID groups with maximum size 12. (It is possible in this case that customers will configure one big RAID group of size 23–21 data and 2 parity; however, NetApp recommends two RAID groups).
  • Managing performance degradation over time
  • Aggregate size and "overhead" and % free rules of thumb.
  • Why should we not reserve Snap space for SAN volumes?
    • All around good information, conversation and discussion around filling up Aggr’s – No need to drill down to a specific point.

So, what does all of this mean other than the fact that I appear to have too much time on my hands? :)

Well, to sum up what I’m seeing and considering we are in the section titled ‘out of box best practices’

1. Best Practices and recommendations (as well as expert guidance and general use) seem to dictate a 14+2, 16 disk RG
   1. Can that number be higher.  Yes, but that would serve to be counter to out-of-box best practices, not to mention it seems your performance will not benefit as seen in the comments mentioned above (and the fact that spec.org tests are run in that model)
2. By default the system will have a reserve, and not set to 0% – so if I were to strip out all of the reserve which is there for a reason – my usable capacity will go up in spades, but I’m not discussing a modified configuration; I’m comparing against a default, out-of-box best practices configuration, which by default calls for a 5% aggr snap reserve, 20% vol snap reserve for NAS and a SAN Fractional Reserve of 100%
   1. Default Snapshot reserve, and TR-3483 helps provide backing information and discussion around this subject. (Friendly modifications from Aaron Delp’s NetApp Setup Cheat Sheet)
3. In order to maintain these ‘out of box best practices’ and enable for a true model of thin provisioning (albeit, not what I am challenging here, especially being that Mike completely whacked the reserve space for snapshots – Nonetheless… in our guarantee side of the house we have the ‘caveat’ of “There’s no need to auto-delete snapshots to get results” – Which is simply saying, Even if you were to have your default system out of box, in order to achieve, strive and take things to the next level you would need to enable “Volume Auto-Grow” on NetApp, or it’s sister function “Snap Auto Delete” the first of which is nice as it’s not disruptive to your backups, but you can’t grow when you’ve hit your peak! So your snapshots would then be at risk.   Don’t put your snapshots at risk!
4. Blog posts are not evidence for updating of Best Practices, nor does it change your defaults out of box.   What am I talking about here?  (Hi Dimitris!)   Dimitri wrote this –great- blog post NetApp usable space – beyond the FUD whereby he goes into the depth and discussion of what we’ve been talking about these past weeks, he makes a lot of good points, and even goes so far as to validate a lot of what I’ve said, which I greatly appreciate.    But taking things a little too far, he ‘recommends’ snap reserve 0, fractional reserve 0, snap autodelete on, etc.    As a former NetApp engineer I would strongly recommend a lot of ‘changes’ to the defaults and the best practices as the use-case fit, however I did not set a holistic “Let’s win this capacity battle at the sake of compromising my customers data”   And by blindly doing exactly what he suggested here, you are indeed putting your data integrity and recovery at risk.   

I’ve noticed that.. I actually covered all of the other bullet points in this article without needing to actually drill into them separately.  :) So, allow me to do some summing up on this coverage.

If we compare an EMC RAID6 Configuration to a NetApp RAID-DP Configuration, with file and block (at least 20% of each) using out of box default best practices, you will be able to achieve no compromise availability, no compromise efficiency regardless of data type, with no need to auto-delete your snapshots to gain results.   So that’s a guarantee you can write home about, 20% guaranteed in ‘caveats’ you can fit into a single paragraph (and not a 96 page document ;))

Now, I’m sure, no.. Let me give a 100% guarantee… that someone is going to call ‘foul’ on this whole thing, and this will be the hot-bed post of the week, I completely get it.   But what you the reader really are wondering “Yea, 20% Guarantee.. Guarantee of what? How am I supposed to learn about Unified?”

Welcome to the EMC Unified Storage – Next Generation Efficiency message!

Welcome to the EMC Unisphere – Next Generation Storage Management Simplicity

I mean, obviously once you’re over the whole debate of ‘storage, capacity, performance’ you want to actually be able to pay to play (or, $0 PO to play, right? ;))

But I say.. Why wait?  We’re all intelligent and savvy individuals.  What if I said you could in the comfort of your own home (or lab) start playing with this technology today with little effort on your behalf.     I say, don’t wait.   Go download now and start playing.

For those of you who are familiar with the infamous Celerra VSA as published in Chad’s blog numerous times New Celerra VSA (5.6.48.701) and Updated “SRM4 in a box” guide things have recently gone to a whole new level with the introduction of Nicholas Weaver’s UBER VSA!  Besser UBER : Celerra VSA UBER v2 – Which takes the ‘work’ out of set up.  In fact, all set up requires is an ESX Server, VMware Workstation, VMware Fusion (or in my particular case, I do testing on VMware Viewer to prove you can do it) and BAM! You’re ready to go and you have a Unified array at your disposal!

Celerra VSA UBER Version 2 – Workstation
Celerra VSA UBER Version 2 – OVA (ESX)

Though I wouldn’t stop there, if you’re already talking Unified and playing with File data at all, run don’t walk to download (and play with) the latest FMA Virtual Appliance! Get yer EMC FMA Virtual Appliance here!

But don’t let sillie little Powerpoint slides tell you anything about it, listen to talking heads on youtube instead :)

I won’t include all of the videos here, but I adore the way the presenter in this video says ‘series’ :) – But, deep dive and walk through in FMA in Minutes!

• FMA/VE HOWTO 101 – Setting up the EMC FMA Virtual Edition
• FMA/VE HOWTO 201 – Setting up the Celerra to integrate with EMC FMA/VE
• FMA/VE HOWTO 301 – Configuring EMC FMA/VE
• FMA/VE HOWTO 401 – Implementing EMC FMA/VE
• FMA/VE HOWTO 501 – Use Case Walkthrough
  • You can download the VMware vSphere ESX OVA (644MB) here.
  • You can download the VMware Workstation version (655MB) here.
  • You can download the documentation here…

Okay! Fine! I’ve downloaded the Unified VSA, I’ve checked out FMA and seen how it might help.. but how does this help my storage efficiency message? What are you trying to tell me?  If I leave you with anything at this point, let’s break it down into a few key points.

• Following best practices will garner you a 20% greater efficiency before you even start to get efficient with technologies like Thin Provisioning, FAST, Fast Cache, FMA, etc
• With the power of a little bandwidth, you’re able to download fully functional Virtual Appliances to allow you to play with and learn the Unified Storage line today.
• The power of managing your File Tiering architecture and Archiving policy is at your finger tips with the FMA Virtual Appliance.
• I apparently have too much time on my hands.  (I actually don’t… but it can certainly look that way :))
• Talk to your TC, Rep, Partner (whoever) about Unified.   Feel free to reference this blog post if you want, if there is nothing else to learn from this, I want you – the end user to be educated :)
• I appreciate all of your comments, feedback, positive and negative commentary on the subject.  I encourage you to question everything, me, the competition, the FUD and even the facts.   I research first, ask questions, ask questions later and THEN shoot.    The proof is in the pudding.  Or in my case, a unique form of Vegan pudding.

Good luck out there, I await the maelstrom, the fun, the joy.   Go download some VSA’s, watch some videos, and calculate, calculate, calculate!   Take care! – Christopher :)

After all of the brouhaha and discussion from a recent post EMC 20% Unified Storage Guarantee !EXPOSED! I thought it valuable to dive a little deeper into our own calculator.

I’m sure like me, some of you may have tried to use the calculator and found it to be really cool, but you also may have experienced a few bouts of frustration.   It’s okay, I completely get it.  I get it so much that I’m writing this article to help reveal some of the challenges and how to overcome them.

For starters, one of the coolest bits about the EMC Unified Storage Capacity Calculator… is the fact it has a –help- option right there on screen.  I totally get it if you didn’t notice it, or feel you’re above ‘help’, I’m with you wholly! But I decided ‘Why not.. what does the “?” unveil? Wait for it… it unveils secrets to your success! And a breakdown of the ‘sauce’ so to speak!

When you first launch the Capacity Calculator for the first time, you should see a screen which looks like this – It defaults to a NX4 with nothing configured or set up.

Configuration and Templates

Regardless of which System Model you choose, NX4, NS-120, NS-480 or NS-960, the “?” help text for the NAS/SAN/Breakdown will be the same across the board.  Exceptions being that the help file will specifically declare whether you’re looking at a specific/respective model.   

As you start to fill the system with disks you may at some point come across an error such as ‘not enough space’, this will usually come up when you’re playing around with SAN configurations, or NAS (Custom) configs.    There is no need to be worried or alarmed when this happens.   All this is saying is that based upon the configuration you have ‘defaulted’ in the column/tab you’re working in, there is not enough “space” in that particular tray to add the disks.  

There are two ways to resolve this.    Either change to a disk format you can work with (Such as HS (Hot Spare)) as seen above, or using the arrows in the System Model diagram, you can move to another tray entirely!

System Models

What I find to be particularly useful and cool is the fact that when you select a particular system, hover over the “?” in the System Model section is that it will give you a breakdown of details about the system. (No more needing to go search the internet or call your TC asking “How many drives will my system take!?”  Not only that, but it also provides you with details of how you’d go about building this configuration – both in this simulator so to speak, and respectively when you go live with this as a real configuration.   Sweet if you ask me!

Total Usable Capacity

One particularly useful and cool bit about this is it not only tells you specifically what kinds of disks are required of the system, one particular complaint I’ve heard from some folks was about not knowing how many Spares were recommended in their configuration.  Well, check out the ‘caution’ symbol!

I built the following un-realistic configuration so we could drill down in to the system to see what it will report for ‘spares’ required.  Based upon this example, it looks like I need spares of every type, EFC, FC and ATA!    (I populated a tray of each type of disk to make this as unrealistic as possible :))  Pretty cool if you ask me!

But for the most part, this accounts for all of the ‘errors’, common or otherwise which I am noticing are encountered using this calculator.

Feel free to give it a good run through, but I’m so glad to see that a majority (read:all) of our concerns of how it operates and functions are actually solved right here in the help file! And in the case of SAN Custom Configuration (read:lack of templates) the little workaround for ‘lack of space’ above seems to address that in whole!

I hope you find the EMC Unified Storage Capacity Calculator to be as cool as I do, and that you get the best out of it!

Thanks and for those of you who haven’t played with the Celerra Virtual Appliance yet – Go download the Uber version here! Besser UBER : Celerra VSA UBER v2 (That’ll give you the ability to play around with the Celerra today without having to buy the hardware… nothing spells getting familiar than actually playing with a fully functioning system!)

Thanks, and good luck!

The latest update to this is included here in the Final Reprise! EMC 20% Unified Storage Guarantee: Final Reprise

Hello! I’m Christopher Kusek! – You may know me in the twitter world as @cxi (Why yes, I do have people come up to me and call me cxi… it’s okay, I don’t find it too weird!)

But there are some lessons to be learned here, both from this blog post, and from the whole of this event.

1. The first lesson is… Try not to run yourself too thin when you’re at a company conference the week of an event kick off, it will definitely show in your team’s presence :)
2. The second lesson is, don’t be on an opposing team when you have someone get behind their cause, like ours of NetHope!
3. And the last lesson is.  Have fun :)

So, what am I saying here? It is definitely time to have a GREAT Time!    For those of you who have first met me through my various blog posts around education, learning, certification, technology centric things… or various Zynga Facebook games – Welcome :)

And for those who do not know me, let me tell you a little about myself :)

I am in few if any ways orthodox, it is not exactly part of my DNA, though it is part of the foundation of my success!    A success I like to transfer and convey on to others.

In my professional life (re: the part that pays the bills so I can enjoy the rest of my life) I’m a Technology Evangelist for the semi-large technology company EMC.     I love my job, and I equally love bringing people over to our company (If you are a rock star, LET ME KNOW and I can get you in front of the right people to bring you on board, I’m ALWAYS looking for professional, passionate, OMG AMAZING people! and frankly, it’s getting hard to find those from within my network (the last few I know just started 2 weeks ago… but we still have thousands of positions open world wide!)… Whoa this is starting to look like a commercial, but in reality… for those of you on the fence, I’d like to help improve and change your life and your future… which brings on to the second point of who I am..

I absolutely LOVE helping people! I dedicate a large portion of my life around that; whether it be directly through career counseling and doing deeply technical and strategic things, or indirectly by contributing to a charity and helping out in my (tech) community.   The end result (I hope) is that these others who have grown as a result will be able to continue to go out and help others, allowing this chain of benefit to continue through and through!   I’m not saying that will always be the case, but I’m fortunate to have thousands of stories of others who have gone on and done just that and I am proud of every one of them!

So, why am I doing this? Why am I participating in this event to raise not only money for charity, but at the same time raise the bar for the community as a whole?  Because I get a 20% cut of everything we raise! err.. wait, no that’s not it! (no, it isn’t :))

It’s because I more than care about doing something to help improve the lives of others.. I am actually DOING something about it! And you can do something about it to!

There has been no better time than the present to join the RED Team! Seriously, think about it, the red team has Chief, and Simmons… sure.. we don’t have Church, but cmon.. he’s an AI… (if this doesn’t make sense, please visit redvsblue.com)

But seriously.   The time is here, the time is now, and the time to join our team, well, we can very clearly make it worth it to you!

I DO want to hear from you, as a part of this contest, and outside of this contest as well – Please do stay in touch and if you are looking for a job anywhere in industry.. well, I talk to hundreds of recruiters on a regular basis (industry wide) also, if you play Facebook games.. you can join my Mafia of 3000 people! ;)

Here is how to contact me, and please do sign up and be a champion!

Twitter: @cxi

Facebook: Christopher Kusek

LinkedIn: Christopher Kusek

Blog: PKGuild

FriendFeed: CXI

Email Personal: christopher.kusek@pkguild.com

Email Professional: christopher.kusek@emc.com

Youtube: christopherkusek

And for further social media context (Who doesn’t do this?! ) And so you can follow along the journey..

Foursquare: CXI

GoWalla: CXI

But above all, I implore you to go here to sign up for the red team! Register and join us! - Please comment on this post if you do as well! :)

And if there is something I can do to help you in particular in some various area.. let me know, and be SURE to let me know if you’re (also) attending TechEd!

I hope to hear from and see you all soon!

Christopher Kusek, CISSP, MCT

Technology Evangelist, Ninja [or] Pirate?!

I hope you can help us out I am a virtual pit crew member of the Red Team in the IT Grand Prix.  This is a competition being put on to raise awareness of Microsoft Learning, training, and Certification. Starting on May 31^st a ground team will be racing throughout the US to help local Charities solve their IT problems. The winning team gets to donate 10 000$ US to the charity of their choice.

Our team is racing for the charity NetHope. They work all over the world to help aid groups leverage technology on the ground better. This could include bringing in technical people to build network infrastructure, or providing training to locals so that they can continue to build and support technology that solves all sorts of problems.

This race has 2 components. We will be racing on the ground in each city. There are also online challenges. That’s where you come in. If you could register as a member of the Red Team’s virtual Pit crew on the website www.itgrandprix.com and help us out with some of the online challenges our team would really appreciate it!

You can help him by joining the “Team Red” pit crew at www.itgrandprix.com and selecting “Join The Race” to sign in and associate your Live ID with the team. It’s simple to do, fun to follow the exploits of the team and also do something good for yourself (flex some of that certified learning / exams / helping others muscle) as well as others. Make sure you associate the live id that is also associated with your Microsoft Certification!

Once you’re registered here’s how you can help right away!

Let your followers know all about the IT Grand Prix, ask them to sign up for the RED team! Next, complete online challenges!! You can start right now:

Challenge: Take a certification exam

Criteria: The team with the most MCP exams taken by their pit crew between May 1 and June 4, 2010 wins the challenge.

Action: Register with Prometric and take your exam by June 4, 2010. No other action required.

Challenge: Recruit friends and colleagues to join your pit crew

Criteria: Each certification held by each new pit crew member (though May 21, 2010) is worth points to your team.

Action: Recruit your friends and colleagues to join your pit crew by May 21, 2010

Challenge: Participate in Born to Learn Discussion Forums

Criteria: In the IT Grand Prix forum, your ground team will moderate discussion threads. Participate in those discussions and the team with the most relevant posts wins the challenge.

Action: Visit the ITGP forum, find your team’s threads ( your team color will be in the title), and participate in the discussion.

Challenge: Did you know you can track the number of times your VBC is viewed? Create and promote your Virtual Business Card to win this challenge.

Criteria: The team with the most cumulative views of their pit crew’s Virtual Business Cards wins.

Action: Create your VBC and share it. Make sure you have the VBC linked from our servers (image versions do not count)!

Challenge: Take the Are You Certifiable Challenge

Criteria: Play the Windows 7 track and the team with the highest cumulative score will win.

Action: Play Are You Certifiable, (make sure you login with the same Live ID you used to register for IT Grand Prix), and select the Windows 7 track.

Challenge: Update your newsletter subscription preferences

Criteria: We recently added the ability for you to choose how you want to receive your MCP or MCT newsletter: monthly, weekly, or even daily. The team with the most people who have updated or confirmed their subscription preferences wins. That’s it!

Action: Update or confirm your subscription preferences.

Update your MCP Flash newsletter preferences

Update your MCT Flash newsletter preferences

We also have a Facebook fan page where we will update you as we move throughout the challenge you can find here:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/IT-Grand-Prix-Red-Team/118301818209916

If you want to find out more about NetHope check out www.nethope.org

Thanks so much for helping out! If you have any questions about this don’t hesitate to reach out!

For those of you who know me (and those who don’t, hi! Pleased to meet you!) I spent a lot of time at NetApp battling the storage efficiency game, always trying to justify where all of the storage space went in a capacity bound situation.   However since joining EMC, all I would ever hear from the competition is how ‘space inefficient’ we were and frankly, I’m glad to see the release of the EMC Capacity Calculator to let you decide for yourself where your efficiency goes.   Recently we announced this whole "Unified Storage Guarantee" and to be honest with you, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. So I decided to take the marketing hype, set it on fire and start drilling down into the details, because that’s the way I roll. :)

I decided to generate two workload sets side by side to compare what you get when you use the Calculators

I have a set of requirements – ~131TB of File/Services data, and 4TB of Highly performing random IO SAN storage

There is an ‘advisory’ on the EMC guarantee that you have at least 20% SAN and 20% NAS in order to guarantee a 20% space efficiency over others – So I modified my configuration to include at least 20% of both SAN and NAS (But let me tell you, when I had it as just NAS.. It was just as pretty :))

Using NetApp’s Storage Efficiency Calculator I assigned the following data:

That seems pretty normal, nothing too out of the ordinary – I left all of the defaults otherwise as we all know that ‘cost per TB’ is relative depending upon any number of circumstances!

So, I click ‘Calculate’ and it generates this (beautiful) web page, check it out! – There is other data at the bottom which is ‘cut off’ due to my resolution, but I guarantee it was nothing more than marketing jibber jabber and contained no technical details.

So, taking a look at that – this is pretty sweet, it gives me a cool little tubular breakdown, tells me that to meet my requirements of 135TB I’ll require 197TB in my NetApp Configuration – that’s really cool, it’s very forthright and forth coming.

What’s even cooler is there are checkboxes I can uncheck in order to ‘equalize’ things so to speak. And considering that the EMC Guarantee is based upon Useable up front without enabling any features! Let me take this moment to establish some equality for a second.

All I’ve done is uncheck Thin Provisioning (EMC can do that too, but doesn’t require you to do that as part of the Guarantee, because we all know… some times… customers WON’T thin provision certain workloads, so I get it!)   Also turning off deduplication, just so I get a good feel for how many spindles I’ll be eating up from a performance perspective – And turning off dev/test clone (which didn’t really make much difference since I had little DB in this configuration)

Now, through no effort of my own, the chart updated a little bit to report that NetApp now requires 387TB to manage the same workload a second ago required 197TB. That’s a little odd, but hey, what do I know.. This is just a calculator taking data and presenting it to me!

Now… with the very same details thrown into the EMC Capacity Calculator, lets take a look at how it looks.

According to this, I start with a Raw Capacity of ~207TB and through all of the ways as defined on screen, I end up with 135TB Total usable, with at least 20% SAN and about twice that in NAS – Looks fairly interesting, right?

But lets take things one step further. Let’s scrap Snapshots on both sides of the fence. Throw caution in to the wind.. No snapshots.. What does that do to my capacity requirements for the same ~135TB Usable I was looking for in the original configurations.

On the NetApp side I reclaim 27TB of Useable space (to make it 360TB Raw)- while on the EMC side I reclaim 15TB of useable space [150TB Useable now] while Still 207TB Raw.

But we both know the value of having snapshots in these file-type data scenarios, so we’ll leave the snapshots enabled – and now it’s time to do some math – Help me as I go through this, and pardon any errors.

However, just because I care (and I wanted to see what happened) I decided to say "Screw the EMC Guarantee" and threw all caution to the wind and decided to compare a pure-play SAN v SAN scenario, just to see how it’d look.

I swapped out the numbers to be Database Data, Email/Collaboration Data – The results don’t change (Eng Data seems to have a minor 7TB Difference.. Not sure why that is, – feel free to manipulate the numbers yourself though, it’s negligible)

And I got this rocking result! (Yay, right?!) 202TB seems to be my requirement with all the checkboxes checked! But this is Exchange and Sharepoint data (or notes.. I’m not judging what email/collab means ;))… I’m being honest and realistic with myself, so I’m not going to thin provision or Dedup it any way, so how does that change the picture?

It looks EXACTLY the same [as before]. Well, that’s cool, at least it is consistent, right?

However, doing the same thing on the EMC side of the house.

I want to note a few differences in this configuration – I upgraded to a 480 because I used exclusively 600GB FC drives as I’m not even going to lie to myself that I’m humoring my high IO workloads on 2TB SATA Disks – If you disagree you let me know, but I’m trying to keep it real :)

RAID5 is good enough with FC disks (If this was SATA I’d be doing best practice and assigning RAID6 as well, so keeping it true and honest) And it looks like this:

(Side Note: It looks like this SAN Calculation has only 1 hot spare declared instead of the 6 used above in the other configuration – I’m not sure why that is, but I’m not going to consider 5 disks as room for concern so far as my calculations go – it is not reflected in my % charts below - FYI!  I fixed the issue and introduced 6 Spare disks.  I also changed the system from 14+1 R5 sets to 4+1 and 8+1 R5 sets which seems to accurately reflect more production like workloads :))

Whoa, 200TB Raw Capacity to get me 135TB Usable? Whoa, now wait a second. (says the naysayers) You’re comparing RAID5 to RAID6 – that’s not a fair configuration because there is definitely going to be a discrepancy! And you have snapshots enabled too for this workload. (Side note: I do welcome you to compare RAID6 in this configuration, you’ll be surprised :))

I absolutely agree – so in the effort of equalization – I’m going to uncheck the Double Disk Failure Protection from the NetApp side (Against best practices, but effectively turning the NetApp configuration into a RAID4 config) and I’ll turn off Snapshot copies to be a fair sport.

There, it’s been done. The difference is.. That EMC RAW Capacity has stayed the same(200TB) while NetApp raw capacity has dropped considerably by 30TB from 387TB to 357TB. (I do like how it reports "Total Storage Savings – 0%" :))

So, what does all of this mean? Why do you keep taking screen caps, ahh!!

This gives you the opportunity to sit down, configure what it is YOU want, get a good feel for what configuration feels right to you and be open and honest with yourself and said configuration.

No matter how I try to swizzle it, I end up with EMC coming front and center on capacity utilization from RAW to Usable – Which down right devastates anything in comparison. I do want to qualify this though.

The ‘guarantee’ is that you’ll get 20% savings with both SAN and NAS. Apparently if I LIE to my configuration and say ‘Eh, I don’t care about that’ I still get OMG devastatingly positive results of capacity utilization. – So taking the two scenarios I tested in here and reviewing the math..

When we’re discussing apples for apples – We seem to be meeting the guarantee whether NAS, SAN or Unified.

If we were to take things to another boundary, out the gate I get the capacity I require – If I slap Virtual Provisioning, Compression, FAST Cache, Auto-Tiering, Snapshots and a host of other benefits that the EMC Unified line brings to solve your business challenges… well, to be honest it looks like you’re coming out on top no matter what way you look at it!

I welcome you to ‘prove me wrong’ based upon my calculations here (I’m not sure how that’s possible because I simply entered data which you can clearly see, and pressed little calculate buttons… so if I’m doing some voodoo, I’d really love to know)

I also like to try to keep this as realistic as possible and we all know some people like their NAS only or SAN only configurations. The fact that the numbers in the calculations are hitting it out of the ballpark so to speak is absolutely astonishing to me! (Considering where I worked before I joined EMC… well, I’m as surprised as you are!) But I do know the results to be true.

If you want to discuss these details further, reach out to me directly (christopher.kusek@emc.com) – or talk to your local TC (Or your TC, TC Manager and me in a nicely threaded email ;)) – They understand this rather implicitly.. I’m just a conduit to ensure you folks in the community are aware of what is available to you today!

Good luck, and if you can find a way to make the calculations look terrible – Let me know… I’m failing to do that so far :)

!UPDATE! !UPDATE! !UPDATE! :)  I was informed apparently every thing is not as it seems? (Which frankly is a breath of relief, whew!)

Latest news on the street is, apparently there is a bug in the NetApp Efficiency Capacity Calculator – So after that gets corrected, things should start to look a little more accurate, let me breathe a sigh of relief around that, because apparently (after being heavily slandered for ‘cooking the numbers’) the only inaccuracy going on there [as clearly documented] was in the source of my data.

However, being that I’m not going to go through and re-write everything I have above again, I wanted to take things down to their roots, lets get down into the dirt, the details, the raw specifics so to speak.  (If any thing in this chart below is somehow misrepresented, inaccurate or incorrect, please advise – This is based upon data I’ve collected over time, so hash it out as you feel :))

What I’ve done here is take the information and tried to ensure each one of these apples are as SIMILAR as possible.

So you don’t have to read between the lines either, let me break down this configuration – This assumes 28 SATA 1TB Disks, with 4 PARITY drives and 1 SPARE – in both configurations.

If you feel that I somehow magically made numbers appear to be or do something that they shouldn’t – Say so.   Use THIS chart here, don’t create your own build-a-config workshop table unless you feel this is absolutely worthless and that you truly need that to be done.   

You’ll notice that things like Parity Drives and Hot Spares are identical (As they should be) Where we start to enter into discrepancy is around things like WAFL Reserve, Core Dump Reserve and Aggr Snap Reserve – Certainly there are areas of overlap as shown above and equally the same can be said of areas of difference, which is why in those areas on the EMC side I use that space to define the CLARiiON OS and the Celerra OS.    I did have the EMC Match the default NetApp Configuration of a 20% vol snap reserve (on the EMC side I call it Check/Snap Reserve) [Defaults to 10% on EMC, but for the sake of solidarity, what’s 20% amongst friends, right?]    (On a side note, I notice that my WAFL Reserve figures might actually be considerably conservative as a good friend gave me a dump of his WAFL Reserve and the result of his WAFL Reserve was 1% of total v raw compared to my 0.07% calculation I have above, maybe it’s a new thing?)

So, this is a whole bunch of math.. a whole bunch of jibber jabber even so to speak.   But this is what I get when I look at RAW numbers.   If I am missing some apparent other form of numbers, let it be known, but let’s discuss this holistically.     Both NetApp and EMC offer storage solutions.    NetApp has some –really- cool technology.  I know, I worked there.   EMC ALSO has some really cool technology, some of which NetApp is unable to even replicate or repeat.   But before we get in to cool tech battles, as we sit in a cage match watching PAM duel it out with FAST-Cache, or ‘my thin provisioning is better than yours’ grudge matches.    We have two needs we need to account for.

Customers have data that they need to protect.   Period.

Customers have requirements of a certain amount of capacity they expect to get from a certain amount of disks.

If you look at the chart closely, there are some OMFG ICANTBELIEVEITSNOTWAFL features which NetApp brings to bear, however they come at a cost.   That cost seems to exist in the form of WAFL Reserve, and Right sizing (I’m not sure why the Right Sizing is coming in a considerably fat consideration when contrasted with how EMC does it, but it apparently is?)  So while I can talk all day long about each individual specific feature NetApp has, and equivalent parity which EMC has in that same arena; I need to start somewhere.  And strangely going back to basics, seems to come to a 23% realized space savings in this scenario (Which seems inline with the EMC Unified Storage Guarantee) Which frankly, I find to be really cool.  Because like has been resonated by others commenting on this ‘guarantee’, what the figures appear to be showing is that the EMC Capacity utilization is more efficient even before it starts to get efficient (through enabling technologies).

Obviously though, for the record I’m apparently riddled with Vendor Bias and have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about! [disclaimer: I have no idea what I’m talking about when I define and disclose I am in this post and others ;)]   However, I’d like to go on record based upon these mathematical calculations, were I not an employee of EMC, and whether I did or did not work for NetApp in the past, I would have come to these same conclusions independently when presented with these same raw figures and numerical metrics.   I continue to welcome your comments, thoughts and considerations when it comes to a Capacity bound debate [Save performance for another day, we can have that battle out right ;)]  Since this IS a Pureplay CAPACITY conversation.

I hope you found this as informative as I did taking the time to create, generate, and learn from the experience of producing it.  Oh, and I hope you find the (unmoderated) comments enjoyable. :)   I’d love to moderate your comments, but frankly… I’d rather let you and the community handle that on my behalf.   I love you guys, and you too Mike Richardson even if you were being a bit snarky to me. {Hmm, a bit snarky or a byte snarky… Damn binary!}  Take care – And Thank you for making this my most popular blog-post since Mafia Wars and Twitter content! :)

The latest update to this is included here in the Final Reprise! EMC 20% Unified Storage Guarantee: Final Reprise

“What are the Top 5 things you learned or thought valuable at EMC World 2010”

I cannot guarantee I’ll give you 5 top things… or that I won’t even exceed 5 things, but at the very least I’ll outline what I found as the most valuable things, as well as discussions I had with various others as to what was the most valuable to be had/found!   If there are things you found particularly useful – Please do share it here so we can all benefit as well! :0

Yes, this was a big one for me, top of mind! So many useful things to talk solely about VPLEX alone! To share all of it would be a challenge! So let me break down some of the value points!

EMC has a great portal page around VPLEX which shares lots of useful information, collateral, white papers and more! (I’ll publish a nice one later with PowerLink things soon)

My good friend Bas Raayman collated all of the blog posts covering VPLEX from the general purpose Blogosphere and Media analysts too!  EMC VPLEX – Introduction and link overview

So to wrap up my own personal experience around the VPLEX from the sessions, prior knowledge and playing with the live VPLEX LAB – This is really cool – Live data access on both sides of a metro link = rockstar event! Check it out! Check it out! :)

After you pick yourself up after drooling all over VPLEX, it’s time to sign up for the Unisphere train, the Highlander of getting you to the Private Cloud “There can only be one… Private Cloud” and apparently, you’ll manage that with Unisphere!

You can listen to and watch Chad present a video on using Unisphere to get you kicked off on things! Certainly, if you’re at some of those non-youtube type locations, ask your local EMC to get you a demo :)      Though once you get yourself settled on a single interface for fun and managing off this rocking system, well.. you likely want it to do a little more!

This video actually takes you through some of the new features discussed at EMC World – Sub-Lun FAST, FAST Cache, and Primary block storage compression!

1) Sub-LUN FAST = automated tiering of storage (think "VMware DRS for Storage") – lowers cost of storage by between 30-50% on average.
2) FAST Cache = up to 2TB of low cost read/write cache – get more performance for the same $. In some cases, like VMware View – it can deliver same performance at 10x lower cost.
3) Primary block storage compression = save between 30- 50% on average on your storage consumption.

All sweet features which are pretty damn cool if you ask me! (Feel free to ask me.. we could discuss for hours on end ;))

Another cool feature which was announced at EMC World which most people don’t usually think about, but I’m gonna get you to start thinking about it now!

It’s easy to be efficient with EMC.

EMC® unified storage brings efficiency to a whole new level. We’ve even created a capacity calculator so you can configure efficiency results for yourself. You’ll discover that EMC requires 20% less raw capacity to achieve your unified storage needs. This translates to superior storage efficiency when compared to other unified storage arrays—even those utilizing their own documented best practices.

If we’re not more efficient, we’ll match the shortfall

If for some unlikely reason the capacity calculator does not demonstrate that EMC is 20% more efficient, we’ll match the shortfall with additional storage. That’s how confident we are.

The guarantee to end all guarantees

Storage efficiency is one of EMC’s fundamental strengths. Even though our competitors try to match it by altering their systems, turning off options, changing defaults or tweaking configurations—no amount of adjustments can counter the EMC unified storage advantage.

Here’s the nitty-gritty, for you nitty-gritty types

• The 20% guarantee is for EMC unified storage (file and block—at least 20% of each)
• It’s based on out-of-the-box best practices
• There’s no need to compromise availability to achieve efficiency
• There are no caveats on types of data you must use
• There’s no need to auto-delete snapshots to get results

This guarantee is based on standard out-of-the-box configurations. Let us show you how to configure your unified storage to get even more efficiency. Try our capacity calculator today.

So, hmm.. What does this mean exactly?! Well, if you read above, that gives you a break down of what the deal offers.  But like you, I want specific use-cases which I can relate to!  

This basically says, by using the EMC Unified Storage Calculator – Without enabling features (like thin provisioning, etc) you know.. ‘magic’ features, out-right the system will save you 20%, and once you start to enable other features you’ll see it grow above and beyond that – Sounds pretty compelling when it comes to the value of your solutions right?!

This is actually pretty damn sweet because it lets you use YOUR figures to determine what your space and layout concerns are, instead of generating off some spreadsheet with a bunch of jibber jabber and you go ‘eh, I still don’t believe it’  – But hey, don’t let me be the judge, load up the EMC Unified Storage Calculator and give it a try your self :)

Oh, did someone say “Hey, Wasn’t there some cool Ionix UIM 2.0 and Vblock things going on?!”

But we cannot discuss the rocking unified world of Vblock’s and vSphere without at the very least mentioning the Next Generation vCenter Plugins!

So, while there were a REAL LOT OF COOL THINGS both Announced and able to be seen at this years EMC World 2010 – You’re going to come away from it, whether you attended or missed the opportunity with some questions! So let me help you address these questions in tangible ways you can take it to your TC/SE and Sales Guy so you can make them work for YOU and your Organization.

Pick up the phone/email – Reach out to your EMC Guys and tell them you want to hear about:

• EMC VPLEX – And how it’s ease of use and whether the various use cases, Local, Metro and beyond will be a fit for your organization
• EMC Unisphere – Taking next generation unified up a notch and enabling your datacenter to grow and scale with the Cloud
• But seriously, the last one is really cool (Check it out, get a briefing with your Unified Storage guys as soon as you can because…)
• Oh, and don’t forget to ask about FAST Cache! I’ll be covering this fairly deeply soon in some blog posts, including direct use cases, and my deep technical considerations and assaults on engineering I already have in the works to make sure that it works as I architect and not as marketing tells me to :)
• EMC Unified Storage 20% Guarantee – This isn’t 90 pages of caveats, this is heads up, you will save period.  Ask your TC to help you save! ;)
• EMC Ionix UIM 2.0 – If you remember all of my coverage on UIM 1.0, 2.0 is actually gonna be the cats meow!
• EMC vCenter Plugins! – These are pretty sweet, and will help manage your experience!

I’m sure there are numerous other things I did not cover (You be the one to tell me!) but the ones above I found particularly cool – So go check them out, ask your TC or Sales Rep (Let me know if you do… I’m pushy… :) But I particularly want to hear your experiences and impressions!)

Enjoy the new world, and share share share! :)

I had the great honor and privilege to run as part of an amazing team (Team EMC – Run as One) part of an Amazing Organization (EMC) to run on behalf of an excellent cause (Michael Carter Lisnow Respite Center) and let me tell you, I wouldn’t change anything about what I went through in order to get there.

But I’m getting ahead of myself…  Let’s go back many months and start at the beginning, shall we?

The day was September 14th, my birthday! Oh, and it also happened to be the first day I started at EMC as a Technology Evangelist in the Enterprise sector of Chicago.     My feet were not even the slightest bit wet from dipping my toe in the water, and then I see an email come out “Apply to be a part of TEAM EMC to run in the Boston Marathon!” (I’m paraphrasing.. I cannot find the original email ;))   I thought.. What do I have to lose? I’m new here, the worst thing that can happen is, by entering into this lottery, filling out an application and an essay; I don’t get accepted – Right, no skin off my feet (that would certainly come later ;)) – So I went and applied! And less than a month after I start, October 9th, 2009 I receive notice that:

Congratulations!

You have won an invitational, non-qualifying official number for the 2010 Boston Marathon.

Wow! Can I say wow here? I’ll try it again.  Wow!!! I did it! I’m part of the team! I’m on board to be part of something bigger than myself at my newly joined organization! Where do I start?!

At this point, my schedule is wracked filled with so many different things, but I took it upon myself to begin my [unorthodox] training regime as I would need to.   While my training did include some running with my personal trainer, it also included learning to breathe appropriately while running (a challenge of mine) as well as ensuring I was mentally fit for this task before me.

I began regularly attending Power Yoga classes at my favorite Yoga Studio – Sky Yoga Studio, which would help ensure I was limber, fit, and breathing constantly.   And also took up TaeKwanDo with my son, because it’s good for us, we needed to get our kung-fu on so to speak, and the type of activity you get in there is rather complimentary as training!

All the while, letting life happen – winter happen… and then… as if no time had passed at all, the fateful week was here!

Unlike others who had the extreme luxury of a cast of characters to cheer them on while they run the course, my options were a little more limited than that (Though I did receive a wonderful sound off and a hug at the start line by my good friend stv, so that was nice! :))  But before I was ever going to get to this point.. I needed to get to Boston!

I spent a fair amount of time on the road… more than would be needed, but I was tired and didn’t leave earlier in the morning as I had planned, so this is the challenge we bring upon ourselves!   I tweeted pictures along the way, but more importantly… I regularly tweeted updates of my status, including questions and whatnot to my friends and community on twitter!   The support I received while driving was amazing!   I was given updates of what the ‘appropriate’ speed to drive in areas, what to watch out for, and general ‘be safe’ type of messages.  The marathon drive was off to a great start!   And in the blink of an eye (of a very tired person….) I had arrived in the general Massachusetts area! very late on a Friday night! (I left Thursday evening)

Unable to make the kick-off festivities on Friday at 3PM, I was ready, able and capable of making it to the event at EMC 176 to meet/greet with all of those we are running on behalf of! and let me tell you, this was a beautiful experience!

The turnout on a rainy saturday afternoon was almost overwhelming! you can see from the photos above just a small sampling of those who turned out.    The number of people coming up to us, shaking our hands and sincerely expressing their gratitude for what is they’re doing for their loved ones – It’s beyond heart warming, I’m tearing up just typing this, and it’s been over a month!

The last photo there taken in front of 176, me in front of my car was taken by one of those gracious attendees who expressed how much we are able to do for her daughter who visits the Respite Center.  Beautiful is a word which cannot even grasp the sheer feeling or atmosphere here.    And this video, sums up the extents and effort they went to for us, as we were going to for them.

So, with all that behind us.. all that is left is to get my bib and get ready!

The sense of community in boston resonates in so many ways and the support you get – which I helped contribute to when on the day before the marathon I met a lost Vancouverian who had just barely gotten their Bib before the convention center closed.   Using the power of the iPhone and Google Maps, I was able to help her get the pre-race carb-loading dinner on, and through active directions, a way to get her back to her hotel on the T! Yay power of the internets!    But, the time is finally here… the fateful morning would be before us!

That monday morning I woke up early! (3am – read that to be 2am chicago time!) and started EATING! Yea, that pre-load.. my body knew what it was doing.  And then I headed on the road to Boston to drive in, park and take the busses back to Hopkinton!    It was a BRISK COLD MORNING.  For those of you who know me.. I’m a VERY cold person even in the best of environments.. but even given the circumstances I wasn’t nearly as cold as I should have been for the situation – Yay me? :)    But after the hearty long wait in line at a time I’d never normally be up.. I was boarded onto a bus and headed to Hopkinton and Athletes village. (Did I mention tweeting along the way entirely?   All of the photos I’m using are taken from my Tweet Stream, so the internet KNEW what I was doing at all times :))

Once in the Athletes village I encounter the great challenge of “Where do I change… why didn’t I change in the first place before showing up” These are definitely the lessons learned you don’t normally hear about considering this is my first marathon!   But I did ensure I was appropriately pre-stretched in the pre-race massage area – And then like a lark I headed down to the corrals ready to race! (thanks stv for taking my iPhone and taking that pre-race shot for me! :))

And… I ran! Taking my picture by myself in front of as many mile/km markers as I possibly could!   Let me tell you a little bit about the support both on the ground and in the clouds.    I’m sure some of you have run a 5k or other types of events, where it’s often you against yourself running, keeping and making a pace – And that is quite a feat to accomplish.  But a Marathon, and I cannot speak for other marathons.. but this marathon – You cannot ‘practice’ or ‘prepare’ for.    The sheer on the ground support you receive in the form of liquid (water, gatorade) food-stuffs (people giving you oranges, grapes, twizzlers) and even moreso importantly, the morale boost you get from the cheering, the hand slapping, people calling out your name – genuinely caring and cheering for you individually.   You CANNOT (not easily) replicate that in your own practice runs.   This is an enabler making you capable of things you otherwise would feel not possible.

(I do recall a certain bout/area whereby I was HURTING like you wouldn’t believe! and then a whole row of ~50 people cheered and had their hands up, which sent me into a power-sprint, slapping the hands of every one of them along that run!   If the entire race were lined that way I’m not sure people would ever stop!)

But when you’re not on the ground and have your head in the clouds like I do, you get support which transcends the mere physical.   I had friends, colleagues who were supporting and cheering me on via Twitter, Facebook, even LinkedIn!   People who were sharing my donation/sponsorship link (I raised an additional $195 DURING the race from their efforts!).   These were good friends who would inform me what the official BAA site was reporting as my current pace time, and offering up tips and guidance as I ran.   So as I said.. both of these channels of support… they cannot be replicated – only experienced and truly to give you that kind of extended feeling of gratification as you cross the finish line.

I was fortunate to not have suffered some of the grave and life complicating challenges which others had experienced – I simply had a host of blisters (encountered in the first few miles due to getting splashed by water) and not to mention the chaffing… oh that was the worst, that shall be my bane!    But I was fine for the most part.    Shortly after the race, and I finally made it to my car to drive back home, my body temperature started having problems being regulated… and I’d encounter extreme shivers for the next 12-18hours.  But once I had that aside and settled in, albeit my body EXTREMELY sore.    I got back in the car… and headed on my way home! (After all I had work to get back to! :))

The road wasn’t too bad, I was stressed and strained moving around, but I spent a fair amount of time on cruise control thankfully!  Honestly the worst part of the journey home could be summed up into the experience of the rest stop terror on the right…. Those are not the kind of post-marathon stairs I want to spend my time climbing up/down (I did make it ;))

In the end, I made it home successfully, safely.. and in recovery for some time, but it was an amazing experience which I would do again and again if I could and have the opportunity.    The thought of would I drive again – Definitely.  I’d prefer to have someone drive with me, so I can go nearly-nonstop instead of continuous stopping and sleeping as I had, but these are the burdens I place upon myself.    For my marathon did not start and finish within 26.2 portions of one mile… No…  My marathon begins and ends with a 1000 mile journey, with a little running in the middle – And it is determination like that which will raise your mental fortitude every time – It’s not about me, nor the race; it is about the children and helping others.

I thank all of you my supporters – And gladly still take your sponsorship dollars to help those of the Michael Carter Lisnow Respite Center, even still!  Thank you all!

Day three of the EMC World Conference also happened to be Day 1 of the TC (That’s Technology Consultant if you’re asking) conference.  This is a great event where our finest TC’s, TC Managers and some various other ninjas get together and well.. Learn stuffs together!   In the picture above you see a small sampling of ~1700 of EMC’s finest, all collapsed into a single room to learn together as one!   I wish I would have gotten more photos on the whole of day three (or four, or five) but my coverage was limited and I was focused on the events at hand.. so you’ll need to take my word for it!    This particular session/meeting above is what kept me.. well, for quite some time, so long that I missed the “Bloggers Lounge” group photo.  So don’t take the word of some of the bloggers that I apparently don’t exist because I wasn’t in the photo! It’s not true! :)

We had the great pleasure of having a birthday here at the EMC World this year – the birthday of the wonderful @c_weil – As you can see by this beautiful Symmetrix cake above, there was definitely some planning which went in to it :) (I was so disconnected from things going on… I didn’t find out until I saw the cake! shame on me I say!)  It was great to finally meet her in person in this event of events where Christina was receiving an award as part of the Women’s Leadership Foundation (Please let me know if I’m bastardizing the name/etc :))

But that’s not all, right? I mean, seriously… how can that be all?!   I didn’t get many good photos to speak of later until we had our team dinner (but who wants to see photos of my entire team.. I’m not sure if they want that out there, so I won’t share :))   But I did get to have a great interview with a great organization!

I’d like you to meet StudioE! They’re the folks who the customer/community of EMC’ers are able to leverage and other magical mysterious stuff.. I’d say watch the video to find out more, as well as visiting their website.. I’ve talked with some others who are in StudioE and from what I hear, it’s a great program to be a part of, makes me wish I were a customer!

Being that they have Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and the new ECN… well, to tell you the truth, I dragged/stole the icons off of their site! Makes my work easier! :)

And on the final-final day I got the opportunity to attend what was a HIGHLY and HEAVILY attended session of the VPLEX Labs! (What does highly attended mean? After each lab session.. there were HUNDREDS waiting outside of the room ready to pile in to play with VPLEX.. I consider that to be fairly heavily attended :)) I heard there were similar things happening for the Unisphere demo labs as well, but hey… I like new juice and VPLEX is new! :)

What did I learn from the VPLEX session, well.. I learned… I’ll find out soon if (via access to the lab) whether I can expose some of the internals and share with you far more than you’d normally typically see! Oh, and be excited about some other things to come.. I talked with some groups and there will be some amazing things coming on the horizon over the next several months, which will equal a win for people all around!

So, in wrap-up, let me break down the high-lights of this past week and over the events of everything encountered!

• Counting Crows put on a rocking concert, and apparently I do not remember nearly as many songs of theirs as I thought! (++)
• I believe someone in my hotel at Colonnade stole my Counting Crows Concert glow cup, WTF?! Yea, no idea there, but it WAS in the room! (-)
• EMC definitely knows how to put on a Bloggers Lounge! OMFG that was amazing and really a shining beacon for the community as a whole! (+++++)
• EMC really has no idea how to coordinate the unique requirements of Vegans and Gluten Free folk, I wonder how Halal and Kosher is handled (—)
• The Partner Pavilion was populated by the best of breed in industry who really knew how to engage and take care of the customers in attendance! (++)
• VMware is a real stickler with their SWAG, making me ‘listen’ to their presentation and answer a question to win a T-Shirt #advertisingfail ;) (null)
• (Disclaimer… I merely hovered nearby at the end and knew all of the answers they were positing, I told them I could run the preso if they wanted)
• Labs, Labs, Labs – Wow, people could not get enough of these! Every one in attendance was a clear winner who got time with those (+++++)
• I lost my voice by the third day.   Imagine me barely able to speak, well, an extremely distorted version of my voice total suck (null)
• Boston as a city took care of us, with numerous highlights and an accommodating Public Transportation (T-Line) (+++)
• The Red Sox put on a great game which we had the opportunity to be a part of an amazing ecosystem of characters, they’re real family the fans. (+++++)
• Brocade put on an OMFG great event the likes of which were unparalleled the whole week, well done!  Yes they were strict on attendance but they made sure me and my people (you people :)) were taken care of, so I commend them for that, and a special shout out to @charleshood of charleshood.net! (+++++)
• Emulex put on a good event too, but I didn’t show up until the end, so I cannot really speak to the full character of the event but I heard good things from other attendees, so champion for Emulex (I do like Emulex, and they’re not paying me to say this – and I don’t drink nor eat food at events, so it’s not like they’re convincing me somehow :)) (+++)
• Beantown Bash was pretty good, I did spend a fair amount of time trying to get my customers who forgot their badges into the event, so… that should have been communicated to them a little better of the importance of the badge (That, and find better ways for me to circumvent your security to get them in, and yes Security does not stop me from getting what I want) (null)
• The TC Conference was by far the most amazing employee focused event I’d ever been to.  The care and attention and access we were given, both to our needs, driving us technically and enabling us as individual leaders, and not to mention the sheer number of our leaders who turned out to talk with us (not to us) including Joe Tucci, it’s no wonder this is one of the best places to work for (often not recognized outside of our walls).   If you were ever looking for a good reason to work with these rock stars, this event certainly shines as an example – Just let me know and I can get you in touch with hundreds of others who will tell you their take!

So in final… I’d like to thank EMC, the Partners and other Vendors, but most importantly the Customers which made all of this possible.   If not for you, well, there’d be no cool technology to be solving problems… and I’d have no reason to go out to Boston! :)

I hope you find these summaries and break downs useful, I know I will go back and reference it and probably end up getting yelled at about the SWAG (Hey, it’s for my customer! And it’s true, it is!   Don’t you dare tell me I can’t get my customer the little trinket you have, or you’ll find yourself staring down the gaze of an upset @cxi and I don’t get upset ;))

I hope you all had a great time, and I’d love to hear your take, experiences and more, and how to make the next one just as successful! (Anything you share I’ll be sure to communicate it upstream to people who will not only listen, but even take action!)

EMCWorld 2011 will be in Las Vegas, so that’ll be quite a unique experience… :)

In closing.. it’s good to be home with my family, and my dogs! I wish you all well and get ready for the onslaught… the technology is only getting better! :)

Welcome to Day 2! Woohoo! I don’t know about you, but every single day is LONG, not in a bad way.. and getting back to the hotel late after being out with peers, colleagues, customers, partners and beyond until the late hours… writing these blog posts and waking up early in the morning certainly doesn’t help.  But it is all good – And I apologize for the lack of tweets… the ATT network just cannot sustain thousands of people DDoS’ing the 3G and Edge networks by simply trying to use their devices in a very small area :) [re:keynote, session, anything ;)]

I’m sure the first words out of your mouth when you see my blog posts is WTF IS UP WITH ALL OF THE RED PHOTOS! Yea, I know, I get it. No seriously, You’re preaching to the choir, or more specifically to roxanne – I wish she didn’t have to turn on the red light.. or atleast if the iPhone would have the ability to not take the powers of Suck and combine them with red lights to produce photos which look like this.. but we’re going to walk past that.. and we’ll start by quoting my good friend Charles Hood (@charleshood) to do that!   The masterful blogger Charles Hood said it right and properly in a recent Flickr photo he appeared in, where he said “When it comes to Social Media, EMC *gets it*.”  And let me tell you just how true that is.

So, our journey into Social Media at EMC and EMCWorld begins… at the Bloggers lounge!

The cast of characters in the photos above.. the sheer mindshare is enough to take on the world, twice and come out prosperous multi-fold!

Starting in order of sequence, It is paramount that I bring to you, the amazing, hyper-intelligent, cat loving and beautiful Jamie Pappas! (@jamiepappas)   If it weren’t for her, everything that Charles Hood and so many others have had to say would not be true as it is today, and we have her to thank for this!   Infact, if you have the opportunity to meet and talk with her, you will be better for it :)    I guess I cannot leave Stu-master @stu “Stuart Miniman” out since he is after all in the photo.  Stu is great too, and helps make the EMC Social Media experience what it is today as well, not to mention if you want to know about Fa-ko-ee, he’s definitely your man there too. ;)

I’m sure everyone has met, read and knows Barry Burke (@storageanarchy), I mean how could we not know the man who gave me the Symmetrix sticker which sits on my laptop.. ;)

Challenge me to say otherwise.. but I have to say.. the smile on Steve Todd’s (@stevetodd) face… if that doesn’t bring a smile to your face, I think you need to re-evaluate your priorities!

Bringing us on to Photo #4 which is the rare shot of the beautiful Mark Twomey (@storagezilla) deep in conversation with the mysterious non-blogging Gilda Farvid! (Hey! How did Gilda get into the bloggers lounge?!?! ;)) We’ll see about getting Gilda back on the blogging circuit since she joined our ranks of champions :)

HELP! HELP! HELP! There’s a Virtual Army at my door and I need some vSpecialists to extract my VM’s of Mass De…. eh, this example is going nowhere fast!  But people who are going up, up and up!, the motherload in this photo definitely calls for an “OMFG HOWZ CANS i MEETZ THEM!”  – Incase you cannot make out their names or faces… You’re looking at (from left to right) Simon Seagrave (@Kiwi_Si), Alan Renouf (@alanrenouf) and finally the champion master himself, the infamous Scott Lowe! (@scott_lowe)

Finally we have a group shot with the lot of us, you know of all of us, however on the far right the other hidden vSpecialist, Ed Saipetch (@edsai)

So what does this mean? Are you trying to say that everyone at EMC not only maintains a blog but a transparent relationship with the community, customers, partners and even competitors through mediums like Twitter and beyond?   No.. I’m not saying that, but you can.   This entire relationship around how EMC handles it’s social media is akin to that old adage, keep your friends close, and frankly we don’t have enemies.    For those of you who think we do… just remember how closely knit the entire tech community is – We’re not enemies, we’re all friends who at one point or another in the past (and in the future) will work together and collaborate on one thing or another – Welcome to EMC 3.0 – The future of not only doing things right, but doing it transparently.   (Disclaimer: Hopefully no one spanks me for in any way claiming what EMC’s social media strategy is, I’m just an observer, it’s pretty damn obvious ;))

But, that’s enough about the Bloggers lounge, social media strategy, ninjas and giant celerras! (err….)

I did attend a session! In between being unable to get a cell signal in order to make it onto conference calls, and meeting some absolutely great people at lunch.. no.. I did attend a session! Later in the week I’ll also have some mega-deep dives on sessions.. but being that I was only into one session today a little bit, I’ll give you a brief overview:  Architectural Deep Dive of the VPLEX! … Hmm, Yea I knew that, damnit, how dare I do my home work before these sessions…. Good session, absolutely informative for the FULL BALLROOM it was in (Can we say STANDING ROOM ONLY) around just the Architecture of the VPLEX alone? Yea.. Definitely good things coming from this bad boy.   So, sorry I won’t tell you much more than… you’ll see the deep dive later on the sessions I attend… (I hope I’m allowed to share what I learn from the sessions… because I will be anyway, grin)

Afterwards, with mega-sessions running continuously and constantly everywhere, I headed back down to the Bloggers Lounge where Steve Todd was interviewing people on the moment they realized their future was in technology (the watershed moment) [Oh, did I mention that the explanation of what the watershed moment involved Steve Todd serenading me with an indigo girls song? How can you not love this man?! :))   So, I did my interview (and separate other interviews which I’ll publish details on when I find out where it’s posted) And good thing… as my voice is dead from this point forward!   Dead how and why?!

I think that helps explain the first bit of it… My first Red Sox game, and they won! (Wow, the ENTIRE crowd really comes together as one large ecosystem, feeding upon each others emotions and the relationships and bonds from simply sitting near others.. this is definitely a reflection of social dynamics – It’s no wonder they do so well…! The cubs are similar.. except that’s purely alcohol driven. ;))   But after that involved spending an amazing time with my good friends at Emulex for a good bit before the night closed out and we headed off for some Karaoke!

Hopefully YouTube doesn’t block this wondrous short video I captured because it has ‘music’ included in it.. but I have a tendency to sing along… loudly… and lose my voice. #fail? ;)

I hope you other attendees have been taking advantage of everything the vendors, partners and beyond have had to offer because this is the time and place to enjoy yourself! :)

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

$Wait!%$! You can’t end your post there! What? Why?! You barely even mentioned Emulex! Sure, but who cares about them, even though I really like their CNA’s.   Hmm, didn’t you meet someone who is an absolute rock star over there? Think.. think back.. ringing any bells?! ;)

Yes, I think it is important that if you’re not aware of Thomas Jones (@niketown588), a rockstar over at Emulex now is the time for the introduction!   Thomas GETS it.  You know how we were talking about EMC “Get’s Social Media”, well Thomas Jones really GETS it. (It doesn’t hurt that he’s buddies with Louis Gray ;)) But his take on things, his character, demeanor, Emulex should be proud to have an (I’m refraining myself from using expletives because of how much Thomas rocks :)) … amazing guy like this to take the company forward into the future :) – Oh and be sure that you get to see his Shirt which is signed with everyone’s Twitter ID’s :)  Okay.. enough… Time to crash.. have a GREAT Day 3 and be sure to enjoy all of the rest of your time at EMCWorld! :)

My day actually started off a little similar and yet extremely different than everyone else’s!  Not only did I get to take in Joe Tucci’s keynote, but in the final moments of his speech and presentation, as the clock ticked past 10:30AM, I was no longer under marching orders which entitled me to deliver this blog post!  EMC and AOL use VPLEX to reduce complexity in migrations, eliminating downtime!  What a way to start off the day, right?!

I was able to get that published, online and out to you guys from the amazing Bloggers lounge, where I had the great honor of finally meeting so many of my peers, good friends, colleagues and industry champions!    I’m not sure I have the power in me to even be able to reference even half of the folks of you… so feel free to make yourselves known:)

Knowing I had matters to attend to, I headed out from the Bloggers lounge over to the Partner Pavilion, a man on a mission as I was.. to visit my good friends at Brocade :)    It was at this point I finally got to officially meet in person the lord master, @charleshood of the infamous blog Welcome to my valve on the series of tubes.  Charles is quite a dynamic character, great guy and an absolute gentleman!  

So, other than Charles playing with my iPad (or that might be his.. I honestly forget.. doesn’t matter, right?! :))  As I was curious to talk to one of their masters of the IP stack solutions which Brocade brings to bear, I had the amazing opportunity to meet my new best friend from Brocade, Seth Fiermonti!  Watch the video to see Seth take me and your on a whirlwind tour of the NetIron MLX-16 IP switch from Brocade (all the benefit of Foundry with the honor of the Brocade name! :))

The time was however on… to take a trip back over to the Bloggers lounge… I did tour about a bit, visit a session.. and then came back down to catch this random glimpse of my best friend and honorable executive, Joe Tucci!   While I didn’t have the opportunity to shake Joe’s hand, I do have the honor of him understanding and respecting what we do as bloggers :)

After this point, it was time to head back out to the Pavilion floor to show all of the wonderful Sponsors, Partners and more that we truly appreciate them being there.. by taking their SWAG! :)

Check out these sexy new VMware stickers, they’re not only sweet! (No, they’re not pink.. but that’s the photo I took.. me thinks you ought to deal with that! :))  And one of the best ways to deal with this, is by watching @mrdenny compete to provision storage using the SMC for the VMAX – And realizing.. wow, it really IS EASY to win prizes! :)

But hands down, the best of the best is the photo of my fellow TC on the right there, Greg.  He said this (unprompted) which forced me to not only take his photo, but to share his quote :)

“This is what I envision heaven being like”.  And if you were there in that particular area, you’d find it to be sooooo true! Both from the stand point of how bright, lively and airy that section is, but equally taking other undertones of the premise of the Cloud giving you that ultimate kind of Nirvana, whereby… your future is heavenly! (and no, not because you’re dead. ;))

After this point, we headed off to the House of Blues for the Brocade event, where there were literally casts of thousands in attendance! The event itself was amazing, great, my feet are DIEING! My phone was low as it was, and the subsequent battery death resulted in fewer photos. :)  Perhaps my phone will last longer here on Day 2, so I’ll have the opportunity to share more with you :)

I hope if you’re attending you are having a great time! If you’re not, hunt me down and I’ll be sure you get the most out of this experience, whether it be through meeting who you need to meet, learning what you need to learn, and solving what you need to solve!   Rock on everyone, and ready for another raucous EMC World Day 2 coming soon!

OMG! IT’S FINALLY HERE! Yea baby, you heard it here first! The VPLEX is a REALITY! But no, it’s not just vapor, and no, it’s not just ‘oh look an announcement’ what I’m really excited about is those who have actually been using it.   In particular, I’d like to showcase AOL who has used it, in this whitepaper – “AOL extends Virtual Storage to cloud computing with EMC VPLEX clusters” It’s pretty short, to the point but so succinct in the message it delivers.

Referencing a few quotes from this whitepaper really speaks volumes to the types of challenges we all face within the Enterprise space.

Stevens said, "We take disaster avoidance very seriously because the costs are so high if our systems aren’t available. Not only are there huge administrative costs and logistics involved with recovering hundreds of systems, but we risk losing customers forever if they can’t access our services."

That particular point is especially resonating – How many times have you lost a customer due to services being down, imagine if you can take that burden off the table from a storage stand point, that’s particularly cool if you ask me (not to mention being able to actually set and meet a true 5-9’s Forever SLA)

Stevens explained, "Because there is no downtime with migrations, we don’t need to devote huge amounts of time coordinating with application owners, database administrators and system administrators, and even our external customers. The actual migration itself is much less complex for our storage administrators."

"We’re no longer delaying migrations to avoid disrupting a peak load cycle.  So we’re returning our systems before the lease expires and not getting hit with high fees."

I’m not sure how many of you have to deal with regular lease cycles, even when you OWN the equipment scrap the leasing… dealing with the maintenance burden and moving data and equipment around non-disruptively in order to meet the needs of your application owners and the business without the hellacious burden of downtime windows managing apps unique SLA requirements.

And to think, in the use case and example above – This is something any customer can do TODAY by leveraging VPLEX, and that just opens the doors to extending your datacenter across geographic boundaries and the infinite number of other really cool things that the VPLEX will offer.

I’m glad such a renowned organization like AOL was able to be a part of this from the beginning, not only to provide this blog post I’d be able to share with you, but especially to be able to solve real world challenges today by using the technology of the future (Available now! :))

No day would start off any perfectly than having the opportunity to meet with the honorable Judge Wopner, presiding over affairs of foods.

The wonders and powers that conversation and CLEARLY looking like a geek will do (No, not Neil.. me! :)) as we engaged in a conversation with this Canadian SE from Dell – Great guy, Dell – You really struck it rich with a good guy like this!

The concert really kicked off to some good madness… this is the only photo I took of it… but it turned out decently for the iPhone.. so I’ll buy off on that one!

Yes, there were a LOT of others of us social folks than those shown here.. but these are the best three complimentary shots I can really get without lots of solo’s!

Each of these photos speaks… so many volumes about the social dynamic, the interaction and the pure culture we resonate whether it is peer to peer, customer to peer, or even out-lyers :)

Other than the gangsta street DBA’s who apparently bring their DataWarehousing to the STREETS of Boston for the late night crowd like some of us..

I think if there is much to be said… it would be in the form of this fortune I acquired for dinner.   So I look forward to you new people, new realizations, and your issues! :)

And if you see any of us that are shown pictured here.. come up to them, introduce yourselves, say hi.. and if you see my CXI shoes.. say hi ;)

I came across something disturbing so I had to inform you the public BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE!   This morning while showering, I saw something which I felt needed to be shared.  I have a shower curtain which happens to be a map of the world (Hey, don’t judge! :)) and I noticed something… OMG LOOK OUT, WHAT IS THAT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE MAP?!

That’s right! LOOK AT THAT! THE LENGTHS EMC WILL GO TO SPREAD IT’S MESSAGE OF VIRTUALIZATION!

I immediately rushed to WikiPedia to find out details about what this means – And according to WikiPedia:

Chad Sakac, Officially known as the “Republic of Chad” is divided into three major geographic regions.  (Storage, Networking, Compute?!?)

Apparently, the demonym of these folks are called “Chadians” (which is a far stretch from vSpecialist, but hey, I’m not WikiPedia…)

And then, outrageously.. I read this, “Beginning in the 7th millennium BC, human populations moved into the Chadian basin in great numbers. By the end of the 1st millennium BC, a series of states and empires rose and fell in Chad’s VCElian strip, each focused on controlling the Cloud”

Obviously, this entry in WikiPedia is making reference to one by one all of the top tier talent in the Virtualization, Computing and Networking industry were joining one by one to be a member of Chad’s forces.   So what does this all mean? Let me sum it up for you in a few points…

• Chad Sakac apparently has FAR more reach and influence than previously realized.  The fact that his blog gets so much attention is definitely understandable now!
• I came to this realization of Chad’s influence on the WORLD days leading up to EMC World! Coincidence?! I think not! (I’ll see you at EMC World if you’re attending @cxi/emcworld2010 )
• And if you think this revelation and announcement is paramount, keep your eyes on the blogosphere come the rest of this week, Chad’s overtaking a country will look feeble in comparison!

See you at EMC World 2010! Be sure to follow on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and whatever! :)

Talk about coming down to the last minute! Yes! It’s almost here! EMC World will be in full swing next week!

I don’t know about you, but I’ll likely be busy in various sessions, meetings, and who knows how many other things – all the while trying to Tweet, and Blog to the best of my ability – Oh, and doing everything in my power to meet every single one of you who I know so well and dearly.. and yet, we’ve not had the opportunity to meet in person!

So, what you might be saying is.. hashtags aside, how will we stay in touch? Sync up, get to know who is where, doing what, and so on?

Other than Len Devanna’s great “Bloggers Lounge” breakdown which shows you who will be where and what not..

I’ve also created a List you can follow on Twitter! My simple list @cxi/emcworld2010 will enable you to follow all of us madness folks – Oh, and wait there’s more! If you’re on Twitter, and want to get yourself added to this list for mutual communication and collaboration.. Just let me know and I’ll be sure to add you to this list! This is an opt-in sort of list, as I do prefer to respect your boundaries of sorts!   So, follow along, be sure to hunt me down and say hi, and let’s have an amazing time! Oh.. and learning stuff, yea learning stuff too! :)

Look for a potential slew of blog posts, tweets and other crazy times (Did someone say non-stop twitpics?! :))  See you there next week! FYI: I’ll be arriving early on Sunday!

So, for those of you who are not so sure what all of the obscure numbers listed really seem to reflect to in form of exams.. here is the breakdown of what gives you a SECOND SHOT and 50% off! (Remember – Second Shot is available for all exams and all countries… but this 50% off deal is limited to these exams listed!)

70-432 TS: Microsoft SQL Server 2008, Implementation and Maintenance
70-448 TS: Microsoft SQL Server 2008, Business Intelligence Development and Maintenance
70-450 PRO: Designing, Optimizing and Maintaining a Database Administrative Solution Using Microsoft SQL Server 2008
70-452 PRO: Designing a Business Intelligence Infrastructure Using Microsoft SQL Server 2008
70-562 TS: Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5, ASP.NET Application Development
70-564 Pro: Designing and Developing ASP.NET Applications Using the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5
70-693 Pro: Windows Server 2008 R2, Virtualization Administrator
70-669 TS: Windows Server 2008 R2, Desktop Virtualization
70-680 TS: Windows 7, Configuring
70-682 Pro: Upgrading to Windows 7 MCITP Enterprise Desktop Support Technician
70-659 TS: Windows Server 2008 R2, Server Virtualization
70-652 TS: Windows Server Virtualization, Configuring
83-640 TS: Windows Server 2008 Active Directory, Configuring

So, just like all of my other announcements around vouchers and such… let me know if you need vouchers and I’ll give you what I can! Second Shots! 50% off! 20% off,10% off vouchers!

Hit me up via email, comments, twitter, facebook! etc :)

What do you need to win? Comment on this blog post – that’s it! That doesn’t take much! Oh, preferably.. comment on how you’d go about using it – As far as I’m aware.. this voucher is good for ANY country, so I’d love to hear whatever your story is, of how this voucher will benefit you, your life and your career! or.. whatever!

So, simply comment away, and WIN! – It’s literally THAT easy – do your best to share this among the community and with others, because this won’t be the first voucher I give away and I love champions of the cause!   I’ll give out the free voucher.. lets say…the week or April 19th.   

And, not that this will help your cause (Although, it won’t hurt it ;))

I’m still looking for donations to help me in supporting children with disabilities – as I run the Boston Marathon on their behalf 2 weeks from today! So, please support me if you can

As seen in this blog post: Putting my life on the line to improve another’s – Please RT and donate

Thanks, and good luck on the vouchers! If I’m able to meet my goal of $2500, I’ll immediately offer up one more FREE voucher for give away!   Thanks!

And then I got the actual census, riddled with inaccuracies and insanity – I’m sure if I mail in my Census now.. it’ll be invalid since it speaks about “April 1 2010” as the date I get to choose who ‘lives’ here.   But even that… I simply tweeted and vocally complained.. but I didn’t actually go so far as to write this post.

However, I can remain silent no longer.   … Why you might ask?

I received this in the mail today.

Seriously? Seriously? I mean, SERIOUSLY FRANCINE?!  WTF IS THIS?!@?

That’s right.   Not only did I receive one piece of post which effectively said “Save the date”, and then I received “the date” and now I’m given… not a tutorial.. not anything which WASN’T disclosed in previous mailings… No.  I’m not even sure WTF this is about and why my tax dollars and TREES, screw the tax dollars, my frakking TREES are going to waste for this utter BS. (Yes, first time I’ve ever used the acronym BS)

I totally get that you need to do this Census.  I’m willing to let it slide that in the year 2010. What’s that? the Year twoooooooo thousand and ten.. you don’t have a DIGITAL option, yet all of your forms you mail are effectively keyed to individual.. but no, I get that.   But do you seriously need to SPAM my frakking home mailbox? Destroy millions of trees? Make me write stupid blog posts?

So what will come next? Can I expect to receive a swimsuit catalog of the Census?   Will there be a “Best of the Census”, or a continuous revisiting of this experience again?   I hope I don’t see YET another mailing to come on this same topic, but we’ll see…

I’m not sure what the cost of this is to the tax payers (hey, that’s me!) but I thought TWO mailings was a bit severe.  Three is downright idiotic.

Though for what it’s worth… I’d love to hear if you agree, or disagree even, especially disagree! 

What this really means is… I’ve said this a damn lot! So why am I saying it again?!!$!?   Because June 30th is coming up, and that is when all of the vouchers will expire – Second shot AND the 20% off vouchers! So what this means to you is… Let’s get rid of all of my vouchers!

I currently have vouchers for EVERY country which give you a “Second shot” on your exams – so if you want insurance if you fail, let me know and I’ll hook you up!

If you want 20% off on your Certification Exams though, I’m limited to the following countries:

It bears repeating – I only have vouchers with 20% off in the above mentioned countries.   It’s either 20% off or Second Shot – Only!

As far as how many of these vouchers I have available.. most of the countries I have 10 or 20 total.. except for the US, where I have ~150 vouchers left.  So don’t be afraid to ask for as many vouchers as you need!

Now get out there and get certifying before this opportunity passes us all!

Disclaimer: I was asked not to publish this data until a week after it was released, so I honored that (and then got busy the month after the Forum, so the lesson is.. don’t embargo me ;))

If you’re anything like me, you’d love some of these slides which were published, and if not.. well, here are some rocking slides! Two in particular which really speak to most organizations as a whole!

However, there were so many sessions to speak of, so make sure you go and download the respective slides and decks you missed!

So, for those who enjoyed the EMCForum in Chicago, I know I did! It would take me hours to walk a few feet, but it was great to see old friends, new friends and more!

If you find yourself still missing some details from the Forum, don’t hesitate to let me know and I’ll get those details taken care of for you!

So, a hearty Welcome Jeremy is in order, but what does this mean for the organization?

EMC up until this point has not had an emphasis on marketing, however in Jeremy’s role he’ll be reporting directly to Joe Tucci, and in Joe’s words on Jeremy’s joining:

“EMC has the people, vision, technologies, and partnerships to lead what we believe will be the most significant wave of change and opportunity the IT industry has ever seen – cloud computing.  Jeremy’s deep software industry experience and marketing leadership credentials provide a strong complement to our executive leadership team.  We look forward to the contribution he can make in helping us extend EMC’s presence and relevance on the world stage, in building and guiding our global reputation and brand, and in further enabling the success of our sales teams and partner ecosystem.”

So it sounds like not only is this role ready to be fulfilled, but I’m sure the inbox is filling with opportunity for ways to take EMC from a shining star to the appropriate Super Nova of industry it has been exhibited itself out to be.  

You’re fresh in to the hot seat Jeremy, though you’ve been served up a smoldering hot hand.    With opportunities abound I look forward to how you help drive our success forward even further.  Welcome Jeremy, You couldn’t find yourself in a better place, at a better time, I know we certainly have the right person.