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

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Objectives for this session:
1. Understand VMAX cloud edition architecture and components
2. Understand performance considerations.
3. Understand restful API and integration with orchestration.

Guiding Principles of VMAX Cloud Edition
Secure multi tenancy
Tenant performance isolation and control
Management isolation and role based management
Simplified management via abstracted entities
Manage applications instead of volumes
Use Tenant language rather than storage specific or array specific language
Integration with orchestration software via Rest API’s

I like the use of tenant language, today we use all the technical terms like fa ports, meta volumes, tdats. Moving to terms that our customers use like disk, datastore, drive may be useful.

Cloud edition is hardware and software. Cloud command center is provided by EMC. Your VMAX is connected via secure VPN similar to ESRS. No data will leave the data center, just management information and configuration. You would access Cloud Command via https.

The self service portal being ran in the command center allows for management, chargeback, and reporting. Data warehouse maintains storage resource usage and mapping between tenants and resources they are using. It is the source for reporting and chargeback.

Coordinator determines what resources are used from the data warehouse. It also applies reservations and commits. It uses placement rules and policies, like tenants only being aloe to use certain data centers or arrays. Enforces approvals. Creates execution plans and limits available service levels by tenants.

Automation engine uses the execution plan from coordinator. It executes array and SAN switch. commands. It also provides rollback if plan fails. You cannot use any additional tools other than the single solutions enabler. No prosphere, UniSphere, or symcli.

Collector collects configuration information. Capacity usage, zones, etc.

Metrics used for I/O workload definition. I/O rate and size, read/write, cache hit/miss, sequential/random, bursts/sustained, skew. Know these terms and you will be rewarded. I use iometer to play with the effects of these and do some of my own performance engineering. Skew and burst/sustained are hard to get. We should all know our io size and io rate.

I/O density is I/O per second per GB. Ie 500 IOPs over 1000 GB will be 0.5 IOPs/GB. Data warehousing is usually large io size, mostly sequential. OLTP is usually small i/o.

Each service level corresponds to a specific performance capability in terms of IO density. Service level designer will help you identify the right service level for your workload profile. Service level designer looks really nice and easy to use. Basic and advanced type interfaces depending on what metrics you know.

You buy drive packs that have SATA, SAS, and EFD. As you move up in service levels the mount of EFD increases, as you move down you have more SATA. More FA ports granted as service level increases. Bronze 2 FA’s, silver 4 FA’s, gold and higher 8 FA’s..

Service levels and capacity are linked. If you double the capacity you get double the performance. Forcing the consumption of performance and capacity in proportion. This helps those tiny work loads from running away and leaving no performance for the remaining capacity. Modern short stroking.

Users can change service levels. This is a big deal. Moving between service levels I think is a key feature requirement for cloud. The system will automatically change fast policy, fa count and port count, and host io limits.

Rest API supporting get, put, delete, etc.

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Abstract, pool, and automate are some new buzzwords from VMware and the software defined Datacenter.

Vblock has a widening portfolio with specialized system being a new model shown to the right of the 720. Wonder if this is where mine Vblock will be with its odd/even fa port cabling rather than odd/even director.

EMC is reinforcing that new apps are needed that are built on new platforms. Paul Maritz has been saying this for years. Pivotal will allow for apps to run on any cloud.

A key vision around security, understanding the intrusions as well as trying to block them. The intruders have excellent tools and their attacks are generating big data. Many times company spend on intrusion prevention only to have no vision of the intrusions that do occur.

Paul takes the stage…Pivotal. Cloud independence. Big data, fast data, apps.

Looking at the Internet giants like google, amazon, yahoo, and Facebook. They have built the ability to store and reason data at massive scale. They have rapid application deployment. Ingest huge numbers of events in real-time. Interact with legacy apps and infrastructure. Openly scale.

2nd generation apps need to be portable to 3rd generation platforms. I agree here, we cannot ask that all the worlds developers of business applications suddenly rewrite years of code. I do ask that they start to plan the cloudification of their applications.

Pivotal one is the new platform. This is Paul’s vision of the cloud and hardware independent operating system. Pivotal one should be available Q4 2013. All 3 fabrics. Data, application, cloud fabric. Some pieces are available now.

Interesting that General Electric has ownership in Pivotal. GE jet engines not being sold but delivered as a service. As in 15000 hours of power for a fee. The statement of 30 terabytes of telemetry data from a jet engine makes sense now.

It is no surprise that Pivotal needs some maturing. It will be worth keeping an eye on them as they evolve.

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ViPR is a new technology from EMC. Storage virtualization. Self service catalog and provisioning for the storage users. Storage as a Service?

ViPR was built for people who want to run their storage like google. Funny how we are all being measured by these web companies; google, amazon, Facebook.

I come from a 100% virtualized environment, the thought of storage not already being virtualized seems like yesterday a bit. I can see some uses here for environments with lots of storage array’s. it is difficult to “right place” your new workloads. Defining a service level and letting software and policy handle this is a step forward.

I saw some interesting items in the demo by UBS’s CTO. You can select storage array models, disk types, block vs file, even numbers of paths. Looks like it would be worth a closer look. “ViPR controller sets things up, but is not in the data path.” Sounds like management software.

Objects data services is the second part of ViPR. You can use commodity hardware for this.

Overall ViPR looks interesting enough. We typically assign block storage to VMware and manage from there. I can see some uses to help manage the “other” storage.

Syncplicity? Looks like Dropbox. Oh no DocLockin took the iPad. No worries it’s saved in he cloud and we can remotely wipe it. I want private cloud storage and Dropbox like functionality for the enterprise. Looking like this product does that. Integration with ViPR as well? Definitely worth looking at.

A nice demo of RSA Archer and big data security was given. The demo discovers a botnet payload and file breach. They work through the workflow of resolving a security incident.

ViPR to integrate DataDomain in the future. Viewing backup as an advanced data service.

Virtual edition of RecoverPoint (had my eye out for this), VPlex is next.

Confirmation that if you have small number of arrays, use native management. ViPR is targeted to larger scale of arrays. You can use it at any point though. Hope it’s not licensed per TB.

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In the past, deploying a new application took ten weeks and ten thousand dollars. Today with VMware you can do it in minutes with about three hundred dollars. We often forgot the total service delivery task which includes firewalls, storage, IDS, monitoring, which adds days and another $1,500. Automation can help here, virtualization it all may be even better. Define all of this in software.

Software defined data center can be defined as all infrastructure services virtualized and delivered as software. And the control of this data center is entirely driven by software. I’ll add that policy and automation are key pieces of this.

This session was sort of an overview session of the VMware vCloud Suite website content.

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Josh asks us a question, “do you have competition?”. I answered yes. Internally I always competing for my customers business. Bigger picture than public cloud here, outsourcing for instance. The question is focused on public cloud though.

Excellent point.. To those of us building internal private clouds, “have you used azure or amazon?”.

Automation center provides a way to provision VM’s into private or public clouds. This is a positive because it provides a single IT owned portal to use “cloud”. You become the broker of services.

vCAC supports hyper-v as well as physical servers. I wonder if Nutanix is included, Cisco, HP, and Dell is.

Custom catalogs based on who is accessing the portal.

Live demo time!!

In about 15 minutes, someone from the crowd was able to build a blueprint and kick off a request for a 1 vCPU 4GB memory VM.

vCloud Director is going to be absorbed into vCenter and vCenter Automation Center.

vCAC today only runs on Windows.

vCAC can send calls out to vCenter Orchestrator

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