It’s almost time for my first departure to VMworld in San Francisco. As most of you know this is my first, hopefully of many, VMworld. I’ve got a lot going on – so much that I had to map my time out in a spreadsheet. What i’m looking forward to at VMworld: Some definitive information about Marvin or Whatever. We’ve been hearing and reading about Marvin being some type of hyper-converged offering from VMware, but not much else.  VMware has always stated they are a software company,  not a hardware company.  So I’m expecting some type of partnership or certification process for hardware vendors. It’s going to be interesting for people like Nutanix as this could open up that market in a vastly different way. CloudVolumes.  Oh man,  VMware recently announced this acquisition with a lot of social media buzz.  I see this as VMware’s answer to the container craze being drive by, largely, Docker.   I’m sureRead More →

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I know for many of you this will be the umpteenth time you’ve been to VMWorld,  but for me this is my first chance to go! I want to start by thanking the people who’ve helped me go, from the VMWare marketing guys giving me a blogger pass,  to a friend letting me crash at their hotel,  and everyone else – a HUGE thank you for making this possible for me.  I’ve excited tocatch up with people I’ve met on social media the last few years,  and hearing whats up and coming from VMWare and other vendors.   i wanted to share  from of the sessions i’m most looking forward to. 1)  EUC1155 – Enabling True Mobile Productivity John Marshall – SVP & GM, AirWatch Chris Hazelton – Research Director, Enterprise Mobility, 451 Research Tuesday, Aug 26, 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM 2) INF1864-SPO – Software Defined Storage – What’s Next? Chad Sakac, SVP, Global Systems Engineering Tuesday, AugRead More →

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It wasn’t that long ago when the mainstream technology world was all abuzz with this whole virtualization thing. It didn’t take long before every enterprise was developing a virtualization strategy. In fact virtualization is a requirement for most enterprise IT shops seeking to enable automation and standardization of infrastructure. Containers are quickly becoming mainstream due, in part, to Docker. What is a container? It’s another form of virtualization, but rather than emulating hardware like a virtual machine, it’s provided an isolated software environment on top of an existing operating system. Certain system resources, such as operating system binaries, are shared amongst the containers on an operation system. Other resources can be dedicates to ensure performance of a container. This containerization allows for the standardization of application deployment and delivery. This is a change in how we build and delivery software services. As more and more businesses move to cloud infrastructures services they are faces with the challengeRead More →

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At Mega Launch this year EMC announce a product called ProtectPoint which stands ready to change the way we think about backups in the datacenter.  With modern data protection solutions we struggle to maintain a delicate balance between backup performance, data protection, and recoverability. This balance has left us with host intrusive and backend intensive data protection processes on complex and costly backup infrastructure.  Many companies have looked to snapshots technologies to help improve the speed at which they meet stringent protection requirements, but snapshots are not backups unless the data is copied to a secondary media.  A snapshot depends on the original data existing and being functional. That means if the primary storage were to become unavailable so does the snapshot.  That is a huge gap in recoverability. EMC ProtectPoint will help you bridge the gap between snapshot technologies and backup storage media by combining the performance of snapshots with the functionality of backups.  ProtectPoint accomplishedRead More →

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Today EMC has released more information about something shown at EMC World called EMC ProtectPoint.  This new data protection offering brings direct backup from the VMAX3 to DataDomain.  In today’s work when a backup is kicked started data has to slow from the storage array to the application server.  This data then flows to the backup servers before being written to its final backup target.    Wouldn’t it be nice to cut out this middle man and write directly from the VMAX to DataDomain?   EMC ProtectPoint does just that.  This new offering will have native support for Oracle at GA, but I’m expecting this to grow quickly.  This will allow an Oracle DBA to use an RMAN directed backup to provide an extremely rapid and non-impactful backup.  The database will be put into hot backup mode.  Once complete, the VMAX data services layer will create SnapVX copies of the data LUNs.  After that completed the DB isRead More →

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EMC has unveiled its new message of Powerful, Trusted Agile at this redefined event today. Along with that comes the next generation VMAX hardware, the VMAX3. With this newest revision of EMC’s flagship product they look to bring the trust, and control of Centralized IT together with the cost, agility, and scale of modern Self Service IT. This release brings us three new hardware models: 100k, 200k, and 400k. Each of the new models are built on a single new architecture designed for hybrid cloud scale. This includes a new Operating System named Hypermax and a major overhaul of the virtual matrix. The RapidIO Virtual Matrix has been replaced with a 56GB/s Infiniband Dynamic Virtual Matrix.  What do they mean by dynamic? This new design allows for the vertical and horizontal movement of CPU resources inside the array.  CPU resources are divided into three groups or pools: front end host access, back in storage access, and dataRead More →

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In my last post I covered some settings to ensure you get the best performance from your XtremIO when running an Oracle workload.  When running any type of workload on XtremIO it’s a given that it will perform well, but what about helping us manage capacity as well? XtremIO offers inline deduplication, which we can leverage to save capacity without sacrificing performance. Any lun created on XtremIO will be thin provisioned at a 4k-granularity level.  That’s all well a good, but we know Oracle and thin provisioning aren’t exactly best friends so this won’t buy us a lot. XtremIO, however, does have an inline global deduplication that we can leverage to our benefit. Like thin provisioning this feature also operates at a 4k-granularity.  What that’s means is only unique 4k blocks consume physical capacity. How can we best use that to our benefit? The short answer is multiple copies of the same data. These copies can beRead More →

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XtremIO is EMC’s all-flash scale out storage array designed to delivery the full performance of flash. The array is designed for 4k random I/O, low latency, inline data reduction, and even distribution of data blocks.  This even distribution of data blocks leads to maximum performance and minimal flash wear.  You can find all sorts of information on the architecture of the array, but I haven’t seen much talking about archive maximum performance from an Oracle database on XtremIO. The nature of XtremIO ensures that’s any Oracle workload (OLTP, DSS, or Hybrid) will have high performance and low latency, however we can maximize performance with some configuration options.  Most of what I’ll be talking about is around RAC and ASM on Redhat Linux 6.x in a Fiber Channel Storage Area Network. A single XtremIO X-Brick has two storage controllers. Each storage controller has two fiber channel ports. Best practices are two have two HBAs in your host andRead More →

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With the announcement of ViPR 2.0 EMC is bringing some improvements and new features to EMC’s Software Defined Storage Software offering. The new and improved ViPR has major steps towards supporting a geo-distributed datacenter.  For object storage your multi-site geo-replicated ViPR environment will now be presented as a single global namespace.  The world of Active/Active writes is supported with strong consistency using a distributed erasure coding system, so you no longer have to choose between performance and redundancy.  Objects are now cut into chucks and stored in containers, this type of hybrid encoding allows for a very low storage overhead.  To allow for WAN optimized geo-disperse active/active traffic, ViPR looks for access patents and uses this information to accelerate the process. Object access is done via S3, Swift, or the Atmos API.  Another change in the object space brings the Centera API as ViPR CAS.  Today ViPR only supports the API, but a future release will allowRead More →

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