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EMC World 2012 (including demos + CWL II) –we hardly knew ye :-)

As EMC World 2012 fades into the history books – one last post (I’ll likely update this a few times as more assets become available) for posterity:

The awesomeness that was the 500’ screen and opening video!

Chad’s World LIve II – “The Comeback Tour” (click on the below to watch – including flubbed demos :-)

Read on past the break for demo assets, presentation content and more!

VMworld 2012 Session Voting Now OPEN–PLEASE VOTE!

With EMC World receding into the annals of history, it’s time for VMworld to start spinning up! :-)

I dig the way that VMware as started doing this – there is a public submission phase, public voting, and a VMware committee that looks at the top sessions.    The voice of the community and partners is there both in the content contribution phase, and the prioritization.

We do a drive every year to have EMCers (of all stripes and backgrounds) to make submissions.   This year, we made 109 by the deadline.   If you’re at an EMC competitor – before you start complaining about “EMC favoritism” (happens every year) – think about the effort/focus 109 submissions implies, and ask yourself if you are acting proportionally.   

BTW - It’s not just the EMC submissions that are solid – so I’m making some “Some Non-EMC submissions I think are cool”, “My Top 10 EMC Submissions” and “Top 10 Submissions that probably won’t make it, but should because they are cool”.

*** VOTE NOW!  (Voting closes on June 8th) ***

Some Non-EMC submissions I think are cool:

• Vaughn and I are doing these together, and those joint multi-vendor sessions are often super popular!
• 2979 The 'Do's and Don'ts' of Scale-out NAS with vSphere (EMC & NetApp)
• 2982 Stretched Clusters & SRM; How and When to Choose One, the Other, or Both? (EMC & NetApp)
•  2983 The Evolution of Storage Supporting Cloud Architectures (Forrester Research, EMC, NetApp, Pure Storage & Nimble Storage)
• In the category of “people and topics that are interesting”
• 1154 vCloud Director Infrastructure Resiliency: DR of the Cloud (Chris Colotti, Duncan Epping)
• 1159 Architecting and Operating a vSphere Metro Storage Cluster (Duncan Epping, Lee Dilworth
• 1545 Architecting Storage DRS Datastore Clusters (Frank Denneman, Valenin Hamburger)
• 1683 vSphere Cluster Resource Pools Best Practices (Frank Denneman, Rawlinson Rivera)
• 2221 Hadoop in the Cloud: Leveraging Your Cloud for Big Data Analytics (Chris Greer @ Fedex, myself) – a really, really cool story, from the voice of a customer.

My Top 10 EMC Submissions

1. Session: 1504 – Title: “Ask the Expert vBloggers” – Why?  Duncan, Frank, Scott, Rick (and little ol’ me) on a panel – any question goes.  was great fun!
2. Session 2619: Title – “Metro Storage Clusters: Two Storage Vendors Discuss Key Considerations for VMware’s Latest HCL Category” – Why?  Multivendor, on a hot, hot topic.   The two folks (Scott Lowe from EMC and Eric Siebert from HP) with solutions on the vMSC (as of this post)
3. (TIED with #2) Session – Title: “1593 To Stretch Or Not to Stretch (your vSphere Clusters), That is the Question.” – why? Ashish Pelekar is a key guy in VPLEX engineering and has been working hand-in-hand with the VMware team on these use cases for the last 3 years and I are co-presenting  Will be great content.  Pick #2, or #3 based on who you like for the presenters!
4. Session 2180: Title – “Best Practices for Using VASA and VAAI with Scale-Out NFS Datastores” – why?   two interesting, and emerging topics – together.
5. Session: 1475 – Title: “vSphere 5 Design Discussions” – why?  Scott Lowe + Forbes Guthrie – ‘nuff said.
6. Session: 2562 - Title “Protecting vCloud Director” – why?   Couple great presenters, and followup to Avamar vCloud Protector session from 2011.
7. Session: 1597 – Title: “A No-Koolaid” Deep Dive Performance Analysis of vSphere 5’s vStorage API’s for Array Integration” – why?  I know the content, and the presenters.   This session
8. Session: 1476 – Title “Rumble in the Jungle: VMware SRM vs. Stretched Clusters Smackdown” – why?  Great presenters (Scott Lowe and Mike Laverick), and now that stretched clusters and SRM are no longer mutually exclusive – I expect this debate to change…
9. Session: 1302 – Title: “Building Open Adapters for vCenter Operations” – why?ever wanted to monitor… anything?   Matt Cowger is the man!
10. Session: 1270 – Title: “Near Zero Downtime Migration of Oracle Database from Legacy RISC-based UNIX to x86-64 / Linux on VMware vSphere” – why?   Huge topic, huge impact.   Trust me – there’s a lot of people stuck in the past, and being held hostage.
11. Session: 2559 – Title: “How Heritage Auctions (HA.COM) Leverages vCenter Operations for Total Infrastructure Monitoring Across Their Environment During Critical Auctions”  - why?   It’s customer centric.  A real (and GREAT) customer example, and highlights how important performance is for them, and how they use vCenter Ops.

Top 10 Submissions that probably won’t make it, but should because they are cool

These sessions are always a little more “out there” (less common topics) – but are awesome topics, and I want people to vote for them!

1. Session: 2877 – Title: “Workflow Automation Made Easy with vCenter Orchestrator”.  - why?   I’m always surprised people don’t use vCO more.   Free.  Good.   This session will be deep, and will have solid HOWTO content.
2. Session: 2324 – Title: “Mirror, Mirror – An Introduction to Network Monitoring and Packet Capture in a Virtual Environment” – why?  A cool topic – and something we can all leverage more.   Plus the presenter will rock.
3. Session: 2537 – Title: “How VMware and EMC are Helping a Global Exchange to Put Critical Trading Services in the Cloud” – I’m a huge fan of customer-centric sessions, and this is a cool story.
4. Session: 1968 – Title: “Beyond Cloud Readiness: Is Your Organization Ready for vCloud Director?” – why?  We as technologists often underestimate these NON-tech issues as barriers to moving to *aaS models.   The presenters have a lot of experience on the topic.
5. Session: 1222 – Title: “Design, Deploy, and Optimize SharePoint 2010 on vSphere” – why?  Sharepoint is (IMO) a VMware sweet-spot, and the presenter is a ROCK STAR.
6. Session: 1849 – Title: “Cubeology 101 – “Cloudifying” Your Enterprise Applications” – why?  this is a crazy cool (and bizarre) story – and one that is more generally applicable than I think we make it.
7. Session: 2186 – Title: “Unleash Your Zimbra Message Services with a Scale Out Storage Architecture” – When I hate on Exchange, I wonder “how many people know about other choices they have?”
8. Session: 2628 – Title: “Real World Examples of How Changes in vSphere 5 and View.Next”
9. Session: 2000 – Title: “The Death Blow for traditional NAS File Sharing” – why?  Octopus.  Atmos.  Mashup – bam!
10. Session: 2007 – Title: “Multi-Tenant Hadoop / vHadoop”  - Why?  Hadoop is cool, and so is HDFS on Isilon – and running it all on vSphere in a multi-tenant way – hey that’s even cooler!

But – ultimately – YOUR vote is what matters.   Vote at the link below (you need to create a vmworld.com account) – it’s easy and fast!

 

Read on past the break for details, and the exhaustive list!   Of course, if you’re an EMC/VMware fan – vote for as many as you like! Input, as always welcome!

June “HOWTO” VMware/EMC Webcast series

Trying to continue the effort to make Webcasts useful, technical, and marketing free – June is “HOWTO” month.  HOWTOs are detailed step-by-step instructions/whitepapers/videos on how to make something work.

Remember – the EMC/VMware webcasts are at the same time, same day – every week.   Thursday at 8am PT/11am ET/15:00 GMT.

June has a lot of goodness.  Click on the picture below to register for one or all.

• June 7:  EMC/VSI (Virtual Storage Integrator) – our vCenter plugin, and something everyone should use.   It’s a great tool, always updating (lots of people still don’t know about the delegated controls and performance reports), and free.   Simon Seagrave is the presenter (vSpecialist on the technical enablment team), and a great guy!
• June 14: Application Availability (SRM and EMC) – I have yet to encounter a customer who’s not happy with SRM.  Perfect?  No (I still hear that the re-IPing is less than perfect when you have large scale) – but I hear great feedback.  lots new here in the latest SRM rev, and new use cases too (SRM **with** stretched vSphere clusters).   Presenters are Ed Walsh (vSpecialist extraordinaire from the northeastern part of the US) and Ken Werneburg from VMware.
• June 21:  Using tools to make application-integrated replicas in the VMware context, including (in the Exchange case) simple and easy mailbox level recovery.   Rick is a webcast veteran – and recently moved into the product team that does this at EMC (Replication Manager and AppSync)
• June 28: “Chad’s Choice” – A little out of the “HOWTO” list, but I’m thinking of making this month’s session a EMC World 2012 summary + VMworld 2012 preview (though I might be a bit premature).   Thoughts?

EMC World vLabs–CHECK IT OUT!

For those of you at EMC World, you have GOT to to check out the vLabs – where you can play with almost anything you want, live, hands on and on demand – provisioned out of the demo cloud, powered by vSpecialists, other EMCers, VMware (thanks guys!) – and EMC vLabs.  Oh, and a lot of blood, sweat and tears.

As we wrapped day 2, more than 2000 labs had been completed, with about 20,000 VMs being created and destroyed.   What was the most popular?   Unisphere for VMAX was #1 with 20%, vSphere integration with VNX in the #2 spot with 18% and Unisphere Analyzer and Isilon tied for 3nd with 12%!

 

For those of you NOT at EMC World – you’ll be able to play with the labs – we’ll be posting them to the vLab portal (portal.demoemc.com) a bit after the show…

To the team behind this – led by the incredible Jeff Thomas.. THANK YOU, YOU ROCK!

Project Razor… and my friend Nick Weaver

Today, EMC announced a partnership with Puppet Labs around something called “Project Razor”.  During Chad’s World Live II – “the comeback tour”, I demonstrated it, joined by the CTO of Puppet Labs – Nigel Kersten.  

Puppet is a very widely used (it’s a veritable “who’s who” of the internet - Twitter, Yelp, eBay, Zynga, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Google, Disney, Citrix, Oracle, and Viacom) IT automation package.  VMware is a partner and an investor.   Puppet is VERY cool, VERY powerful, VERY flexible.  It’s available in both open source and commercial models.   Nigel joined Puppet Labs (where most of the contributors to Puppet live) after being behind one of the largest uses of Puppet – at Google.

You can read Nick Weaver’s post on this here (you can never have a blog post with too much latin in the title).  The Puppet Labs team’s view is here.  We’ve contributed Razor to the open community – and you can play with it by checking out Puppet Forge here.

Why “Razor”?  Have you ever heard of the principle called “Ockam’s Razor”?…

So… What does something as weird, wonderful and strange as this idea…have to do with EMC?

Now THAT’S a funny story, and to me the story is as cool as the outcome.  Read on past the break!

How silly are EMC Technology Consultants Willing to be? VERY.

We work our tail off – always put the customer first, but also have a lot of fun and make laugh at ourselves – something I think is important.    Here are the winners of the 2012 TC Conference video contest!

I love them all.  “TCD” makes me cry laughing every time I watch, along with several others :-)  The production value in all of them is incredible – I can’t imagine the work that went into the Lego one.  Thank you to all that entered, and congratulations to the 9 winners!    I want the winners to post photos/videos of them living large in the fancy suites and limos you won and deserved!

Then… of course… we didn’t want to let an EPIC TC Conference/EMC World happen without participating in the fun ourselves :-)

Check out #CloudFreaky (and stick around past the credits for… quite a surprise for those in the cognoscenti ;-).   Billy Scannell, there is a challenge in there from us to you :-)

Also - check out #TCDay – the lyrics are a gas!

To my 3,400 EMC TC, Velocity Partner SEs, Alliance/SI/SP partners – all my brothers and sisters, heck to the SE folks at our competitors who put on their armor every day to enjoin in the battle with us (and a special thanks for being a great sport Vaughn) – my hat is off to all of you!   Let’s laugh, have some fun!   To the TCs and Partner SEs here at the TC Conference – hang on to your hat, Wed and Thursday are all the breakouts!

Holy EMC Mega Launch II Batman!

BAM!   A ton of incredible goodness lands on DAY ONE of EMC World…  Details here:

VMAX 40K+5876 = (Powerful, Trusted, Smart) ^ More

Stretched vSphere Clusters- DR with SRM- Why not BOTH-

VNX Inyo is going to blow some minds… (includes details on the awesome vCenter Operations/VNX integration!)

Isilon X400 and Mavericks

More to come…. but for now – I need to run off and prep for Pat’s Keynote… Personally, it is my  first big high risk event.   It’s filled to the gills with lots o' stunts, demos and theatrics. Degree of difficulty = 11

Then – run to the TC conference and more (and yes, Chad’s World Live II – “The Comeback Tour” has a degree of difficulty of 12 :-)

Isilon X400 and Mavericks

There were two pieces of Isilon news today at EMC World – both big, but one being REALLY BIG.

First – the simple news… Isilon is releasing the update to their 4U node – the new X400 node.   This represents a new record-breaker when it comes to Isilon scale and performance in the center of the Isilon use cases.   Bigger, faster, stronger.

The bigger news (IMO) was the outing of Mavericks – Isilon’s upcoming next major software update.   Why is it big news?

The architecture of Isilon makes it ideal for extreme scale – Big Data NAS.    Read on for more after the break!

VNX Inyo is going to blow some minds….

VNX had an incredible 2011, and 2012 is looking as bullish!

So – what’s new?

In Rich Napolitano’s keynote – the standout to me is the preview of the upcoming (2H’12) VNX software upgrade – codenamed “Inyo” (because code names are cool).   This has 6 big features that will help our customers get more out of their existing infrastructure:

1. 50%+ higher core efficiency.
2. Mixed FAST VP pools
3. FAST VP pool automatic rebalancing
4. All-new snapshot behavior
5. Appsync
6. Storage Analytics package

Read on past the break for detail and some additional color.

Stretched vSphere Clusters? DR with SRM? Why not BOTH?

A VERY BIG release today with VPLEX 5.1 and Recoverpoint 3.5.    Why?  Here it is in a nutshell:

• EMC can help customers have true active/active storage target that has very rich local replication and remote replication in addition to the active/active property they love!    With VPLEX having an integrated Recoverpoint splitter creating point in time copies, Tivo-like continuous data protection, and also remote replicas with best-of-breed capabilities and efficiency…  Well, they are all simple, easy, and integrated.
• VPLEX has led the way on the vSphere Metro Stretched Cluster support model with VMware for many moons (welcome to the party HP Lefthand!), but the model of a stretched cluster isn’t always right.   Often people want to have a vSphere stretched cluster that is on the VMware vSphere Metro Stretched Cluster matrix – and ALSO have a simple SRM DR solution also on the support matrix.   While customers recognize that there’s no single tool for every use case – when they have a blended use case, they want the tools to be simple, integrated, and not mutually exclusive. They want an AND, not an OR.

For perspective – there are a TON of customers using VPLEX and RP.   Both are very feature rich – but have a shockingly low cost entry model – but can each scale to equally shocking levels – which means they range from small enterprises and tiny public entities, all the way up to the biggest customers in the world.

A mind-blowing fact when you consider that VPLEX is “relatively new” – there is currently 75+ PB of storage that VPLEX has made “active/active”, and in many cases, with non-EMC storage behind it.  That’s HUGE.  Some other neat VPLEX facts:

But those to new sets of use cases (active/active with rich services, and making stretched vSphere clusters/VMware SRM and AND not an OR) will create the next wave of customers.   Read on past the break for some of the nuts and bolts in these huge releases.