So after the first day at EMC World what Marvels of technology have been announced ?
What groundbreaking nuggets of geeky goodness to be announced. So, first things first VPLEX ! looks like they may have cracked it.. Active/active storage over a synchronous distances, Geoclusters will never be the same again !!.. and also a slightly ambiguous announcement around integration with Hadoop opensource (more to follow on that).
What was the message of the day though ? What was this years theme.. This year EMC are talking about Big data and the cloud. Clearly recent acquisitions of Isilon and Greenplum have planted EMC’s head firmly back in the clouds. Greenplum giving end users the ability to scale out Database architectures for data analytics to mammoth scale with Greenplums distributed node architecture and massive parallel processing capabilities. To br frank, learning about the technology was borderline mind numbing, but my god its a cool technology. Then we have large scale out NAS with Isilon and its OneFS system giving the ability to present massive NAS repositories and scale NAS on a large scale. So obviously, EMC are talking about big data.
I also had the opportunity to sit in on an NDA VNX/VNXe session and what they’re going to do is…. aaah, I’m not that stupid. But needless to say, there are some nice additions on the way, the usual thing with higher capacity smaller footprint drives and getting more IO in less U space, but also some very cool stuff on the way which will enable EMC to offer a much cheaper entry point for compliance ready storage.. watch this space.
In true style EMC threw out some interesting IDC touted metrics further justifying the need to drive storage efficiencies and re-iterating the fact that there will always be a market for storage. So, our digital universe consists of 1.2 Zettabytes of data, currently, of which 90% of that is unstructured data and that figure is predicted to grow by x44 over this decade. Also 88% of fortune 500 companies have to deal with Botnet attacks on a regular basis and have to contend with 60 Million Malware variants. So making this relevant, the 3 main pain points of end users are; firstly our time old friend budget, then explosive data growth and securing data.
So how have EMC addressed these ? Well, budget is always a fun one to deal with, but with efficiencies in storage by way of deduplication, compression, thin provisioning and auto tiering of data, end users should get more bang for their buck. Also, EMC easing up on the rains with pricing around Avamar and the low entry point of VNXe, this should help the case. Dealing with explosive data growth again tackles with deduplication, compression, thin provisioning and auto tiering of data, but also now with more varied ways of dealing with large sums of data with technologies such as Atmos, greenplum, Isilon. Then the obvious aquisition of RSA to tie in with the security message, all be it that has had its challenges.
I’m also recently introduced the concept of a cloud architect certification track and the concept of a Data Scientist (god knows, but I’ll find out). So I went over to the proven professionals lounge and had a chat with the guys that developed the course. Essentially it gives a good foundation for steps to consider when architecting a companies private cloud, around Storage, virtualisation, networking and compute. If you’re expecting a consolidated course which covers the storage consolidate courseware, Cisco DCNI2, DCUCD course and VMware install configure manage, then think again, but it does set a good scene as an overlay to understanding these technologies. It also delves into some concepts around cloud service change management and control considerations and the concept of a cloud maturity model (essentially EMM, but more cloud specific). I had a crack at the practice exam and passed with 68%, aside from not knowing the specific cloud maturity terms and EMC specific cloud management jargon anyone with knowledge of servers, Cisco Nexus and networking, plus virtualization shouldn’t have to many issues, but you may want to skim over the video training package.
There was also a nice shiny demo from the Virtual Geek Chad Sakkac showing the new Ionix UIM 2.1 with Vcloud integration using CSC’s cloud service to demonstrate not only the various subsets of multi tenancy, but also mobility between disparate systems. When they integrate with public cloud providers such as Amazon EC2 and Azure, then things will really hot up, but maybe we need some level of cloud standards in place ?… but we all know the problem with standards, innovation gives way to bureaucracy and slows up… but then again with recent cloud provider issues, maybe it couldn’t hurt to enforce a bit of policy which allows the market to slow up a little and take a more considered approach to the public cloud scenario.. who knows ?
Anyway.. watch this space.. more to come
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