Chuck's Blog

Going To EMC World? Interested In Software-Defined Storage?

EMC World is right over the horizon (May 6-9 in Las Vegas) and we’re all busy making preparations. 

If you're debating whether or not to attend, I'd strongly recommend it -- every year the event is more amazing: more content, more big ideas, more great people to interact with -- and (yes!) more fun stuff!

One of the bigger themes at EMC World this year will be software-defined storage: what is it, why does it matter, and what EMC is doing about it.

But the EMC storage team isn’t the only part of the broader EMC federation focused on this topic: related efforts are well underway at VMware as well.

The fun part is that I’m now working with the VMware team: focusing on software-defined storage, software-defined availability and related topics.

This VMware team will be at EMC World 2013 -- and would very much like to meet with a small number of interested customers and partners: to share their strategy and roadmap, and get valuable feedback.

We’ll be scheduling small NDA sessions throughout the EMC World event. Figure about 60 minutes of your time – and conveniently close to the main show floor.

If this sounds like something you and your team might be interested in, please drop me a note at chuck dot hollis at emc dot com. We’ll try and accommodate as many of these as we can handle, but – understandably – space is very limited.

Looking forward to seeing you at a great show!

Offering Your Users Hadoop-As-A-Service

It's great to see so many businesses start to experiment with Hadoop and its unique toolset.  But I'm sure all this exciting experimentation is creating more than one headache for the IT team.

Today, VMware announced some very useful extensions to Project Serengeti, essentially allowing the creation of virtual Hadoop clusters with very different characteristics to be easily delivered as-a-service on top of existing VMware infrastructure.

While I'm sure there are Hadoop purists who might object to anything other than a dedicated, bare metal hand-crafted implementations, I think the VMware team has come up with a great capability that encourages increased experimentation of Hadoop's capabilities across the business without breaking the bank.

What I Mean When I Say "Enterprise Storage"

The recent announcement of the VMAX 10K brought up an interesting discussion for us storage folks: what -- exactly -- might "enterprise storage" be?

I find that the definitions offered by the industry analysts are incomplete and unsatisfying at best. 

And there's certainly strong motivation for any storage vendor to slap an "enterprise" label on their product in an effort to attract more potential customers.

My credentials to offer an informed perspective are substantial, but not impeccable.  I've been in the storage business now for almost twenty years.  I meet over a hundred customers and partners every year, and I've been doing that for many years.  My biases are to be expected: I've been at EMC now for 18 years, and have worked closely with the Symmetrix and VMAX product lines for virtually all of that time.

Like another infamous quote, I know an enterprise storage requirement when I see it.

Pluggable Databases Vs. Database Virtualization

I love this industry.

On one hand, you can clearly see the megatrends that are driving change.  On the other hand, not every vendor reacts to these trends in the same way.  That's what makes things so interesting.

Take virtualization -- as applied to servers. A powerful idea, but interpreted in different ways.

One camp saw the need for a new technology abstraction -- the hypervisor -- that encapsulated and extended the legacy approach.  A second camp decided to add server virtualization features to their existing operating systems.

In this case, VMware is the best example of the first camp.  Sun, IBM and Microsoft are probably good examples of the second camp.  You're free to debate which one is theoretically "better", but there should be no argument whatsoever around market adoption of the former over the latter.

A similar divergence of approaches appears to be shaping up over networking technology.

The database world is not immune to this megatrend, either.

As part of Oracle Open World 2012, Oracle gave their first peek into how they're going to address what I would call "database virtualization concepts" (expressed in their terms as the need for multi-tenancy) in their core database products. 

And, once again, we'll see a familiar argument play out: create a new abstraction, or simply extend existing database technology.

I know which one I'm betting on ...

Announcing VMware vSphere Data Protection

This week is the big VMworld show in San Francisco.  EMC pulls out all the stops for this event; Chad's blog has an excellent roundup of all the EMC VMworld activities.

But there are a handful of big announcements planned that got my attention. 

The first really isn't an EMC announcement -- it's a new VMware product based on EMC's Avamar technology. 

And definitely worthy of a quick blog post.

Game On For Oracle DBAs

Most of you reading this have had your hands in the IT world for a long time: maybe a decade or more. 

You've probably noticed that certain events occur along the way that signal a change in approach: it becomes clear that it no longer makes sense doing things the old way, and there's a new (and better) model at hand.

TCP/IP changed the way we did networks: goodbye to SNA, BSC, X.25, even OSI.  Shared storage arrays changed how we store data: no more per-server dedicated storage.  Cloud is changing the way we think about producing and consuming IT services. 

And, of course, VMware has permanently changed the way we thought about servers. 

Yes, it might be hard to imagine our IT infrastructure world before those developments, but it wasn't all that long ago.

But there's a pattern that's worth taking note of: once the new technology is in the marketplace and has demonstrated its advantages, the IT world immediately splits into two groups. 

The first group recognizes that there's been a fundamental shift, and starts working to incorporate the new thinking in their environments.  They know where they want to be down the road.

The second group remains either unaware of (or perhaps opposed to) the new approach, and thus resolutely keeps with well-established practice.  And, of course, as an industry we do like to argue: members of the two groups will inevitably debate the perceived merits of their chosen approach.

As a familiar example, consider what happened in the server world over the last decade. 

You'll occasionally meet the pioneers who were using early versions of VMware's GSX product way back in 2003 to virtualize modest servers.  What was once esoteric and exotic is now common practice.

Such is now the case with many Oracle environments, and the database administrators (DBAs) who look after them. 

With the availability of vFabric Data Director 2.0, there will shortly be two classes of Oracle DBAs -- those that recognize the shift and are moving in that direction, and those that aren't.

History does repeat itself.

VMware's Project Serengeti And What It Means For Enterprise Hadoop

Virtualize something -- anything -- and you make it easier for everyone to consume: IT vendors, enterprise IT organizations -- and, most importantly, business users.  The vending machine analogy is a powerful and useful one.

At a macro level, cloud is transforming IT, and virtualization is playing a starring role.

Enterprise-enhanced flavors of Hadoop are starting to earn prized roles in an ever-growing variety of enterprise applications.  At a macro level, big data is transforming business, and Hadoop is playing an important role.

The two megatrends intersect nicely in VMware's recently announced Project Serengeti: an encapsulation of popular Hadoop distros that make big data analytics tools far easier to deploy and consume in enterprise -- or service provider -- settings.

And if you're interested in big data, virtualization, cloud et. al. -- you'll want to take a moment to get more familiar with what's going on here.

VMware To Acquire Cetas: Making Analytics Easier To Consume

Today VMware made an acquisition that's extremely interesting from several perspectives: cloud, virtualization stacks, big data analytics and more.  

While certainly no Instagram, I think we'll all look back in a few years and agree -- yes, this was an important one.

Cetas describes themselves as ".. an early stage startup that delivers Analytics-as-a-Service to customers and is driving the democratization of analytics and business intelligence by dramatically lowering the barriers to entry for all companies, from SMB to large enterprises."

Yes, quite true when they were a standalone entity.  

But as part of the VMware (and, by extension, the EMC) family, it gets much more intriguing indeed ...

Doing More With Less: VCE Vblocks and EMC UIM

OK, I admit it, I'm a big fan of the Vblock concept, and -- by extension -- UIM, the Unified Infrastructure Manager provided by EMC.

Why?  It represents some of the very best thinking in cloud-like infrastructure available today.  More and more IT professionals now realize that -- yes -- there's now a better way of doing things. 

I think that anyone who's looked closely at IT-as-a-service concepts realize that rampant standardization coupled with intelligent automation is where the real action is; the hardware simply is an enabler. 

So, it was with great interest that I got a preview a while back on what was coming soon with the next major release of UIM. 

The Ascendency Of VMware

Last week at VMworld was an eye-opening experience for me on multiple levels.  

I thought I was doing well to get four posts out around specific announcements made at VMworld, only to be completely schooled by my EMC colleague Chad Sakac.  If you haven't read his posts, you should.

Since that event, I've had time to think and reflect on everything I saw and heard.  For me, VMworld 2011 marked the clear recognition that VMware has become the next great data center operating system.

Almost like a line of demarcation, that week in Las Vegas made it very clear that one era was coming to a close, and the next one was in full swing.