The Systems Engineer

So long EMCWorld. I had some excellent conversations, learned a few things, and had a great time. EMCWorld for me is an excellent place to meet with some very key people to my success. There is always an abundant source of information available to all to consume. The environment is energetic, positive, and promotes creativity. At some point, we all must go home.

This week was full of meetings with my strategic partners in Converged Infrastructure, Data Protection, Storage, and Cloud. A healthy dialog of appreciation and opportunities for improvement is my goal every year, and it was definitely met this year. I made a critical improvement suggestion that was heard at the highest levels. In another conversation, I delivered my vision of where I want data protection in the cloud to go. It was well received and understood. I was happy to hear steps are already being taken in the right direction. I was able to thank a team of people who have, through their performance engineering knowledge, made me successful once again. Finally I met with an individual from the stage who shared with me the answers to some questions on where things may end up.

The presentations this year were endless. I’ve book marked many for review when I return home. Thankfully we have access to the content until next year. This is an excellent way to catch the sessions you miss or see the ones you liked again.

EMCWorld is not all work and no play. I had a great time with some friends from the Bloggers Lounge. Penn and Teller was an awesome show. I promise I am not one of the 900 hired actors . I got a picture with both and Teller talks!

Now it’s time to return home. Flights are already departing, and there is a steady stream of people leaving EMCWorld. Some I will see soon at VMworld, others I will have to stay in touch with before the next EMCWorld.

Thank you to all of those who make this show great. It is now time for me to depart as well. I feel prepared to return and Lead the Transformation!

Cheers!

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A new product announced by EMC this year is ViPR. I got some hands on time and I like it. The lab took my through self service provisioning, monitoring and reporting, visibility from VMware, and object data services.

Join me as we go through it together…..

We begin as an end user in the product requesting to add block storage to a host. Carving luns, zoning, masking, etc were all automated. We got a positive result at the end that let us know our storage was ready and took seconds. Next we are a storage administrator. We create a new service for the catalog. Here are some pictures of all of the possible services:

We now move on to look at approvals. As the end user we requested to add some block storage to a host. We switch over to administrator to approve this.

The next exercises are all monitoring and reporting. I thought it was excellent and was entranced. I didn’t take a single picture. I currently use ProSphere and I see this as an upgrade.

Moving on we are back to an end user. We need a datastore added to our VMware. We are growing wildly and things have been crazy. No problem we use self service to add a new 5GB high performance file based datastore.

Why don’t we go into some detail here around what happened.

As you can see every thing has been automated for us.

Create a file system
Create NFS export
Connect VMware to NFS
Created Datastore

The moment of truth is when we log into vCenter and add a virtual machine on our new datastore.

Closing in on the end of the lab we use vCOPs to monitor performance and some capacity. We find our data store is full but the storage array has plenty of space.

In the end we use Amazon S3 and ViPR to simulate an outside marketing firm updating an image. We then access it internally using CIFS and add our own updates.

Here is a summary of what the lab included.

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Alissa has made several cappuccino’s for me this week. This is keeping the blog posts going! She knows my order and its ready by the time I get there. I appreciate it!

This year, in the bloggers lounge, the espresso stand has rock candy on sticks for the espresso drinks. Genius!

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