The EMC Infomercial

/ / Uncategorized / Leave a Reply

I guess I should have said really early on that before I came to EMC as a vSpecialist I had limited experience with EMC storage or products. I knew they were enterprise class, and I knew they were expensive, but aside from that I hadn’t worked on EMC since the old Clariion days. So I have been tossed into the deep end of the pool and told to learn to swim, only the pool is a product catalog that can answer just about every storage or datacenter question and swimming is forcing out knowledge about 80’s pop culture in place of something more useful.

Despite my useless knowledge replacement therapy, I have found that the onslaught of technology and information is like a late night infomercial that you get sucked into and want to buy everything from. Private cloud and replication have been my recent obsession, let me channel some Shamwow guy for you … 

Sure other companies have private cloud and replication capability but do they have the solution set to provide data recovery, virtual provisioning and bundle it all up in a proven reference architecture? Think of it as a family recipe for a cake that has been tried and true for generations.

In working our channel partners VPLEX provides a flexible solution for partner to add their own flare to the cake and make it the flavor the customer wants. That can take the shape of servers, networking or software components backed by EMC storage and management.

VPLEX enables customers and partners to leverage solutions sets like Atmos, Syncplicity, VNX or VMAX along with Data Protection solutions like Avamar and Data Domain.

With multiple site to site replication scenarios and technologies along with partner know-how VPLEX is proof you can have your cake and eat it too.

Whew … slowing down a bit I got to wondering what if that’s too many choices? (Wait a sec while I get my Billy Mays voice ready)

So what if you don’t want to bake a cake? Or what if you don’t know how?  Well we got a solution for you! VBlock is a scaled to solution pre-fabricated architecture complete with networking, compute and storage to meet your needs. All provided through VCE (I’ll spell it out as though some folks don’t know) this is the partnership corporation between VMware, Cisco, and EMC. VCE provides a single patch baseline management suite and simplifies the issues of patching conflicts and device management. VCE Block is a converged management architecture with all enterprise class technologies, and can arrive in a fully racked ready to roll state and be up and running in weeks from date of PO.

But wait there’s more … It’s EMC there is always more and as I figure it out I will share it.

Home Lab Gear

/ / Uncategorized / Leave a Reply

Add this to the long list of folks who blog about their home labs, but here is the config I just ordered. Once everything is in place I will post final specs and cost. Fortunately as a vExpert I have a year worth of VMware licenses. I also have access to some EMC virtual appliance licenses which will definitely make it in for testing to add to blog material and my education.

So here is the list of gear I am waiting to be delivered, (all gear is ordered from Amazon)

3 x Dell 1950 2xe5440 Quad Core 2.83ghz Processor 16gb RAM Raidperc 6i $210.00
Condition: Used – VeryGood

6 x C2G / Cables to Go 24240 18 AWG Universal Power Cord (NEMA 5-15P to IEC320C13) Black (1 Foot/0.30 Meters) $2.95

9U Wallmount Cabinet Enclosure IT Server Network Rack Glass Door Locking Casters $184.50

4 x WD Red 1 TB NAS Hard Drive: 3.5 Inch, SATA III, 64 MB Cache – WD10EFRX $69.99

2 x Cable Matters 5-Pack, Cat6 Snagless Ethernet Patch Cable in Blue 3 Feet $10.99

Cisco SG200-26 Gigabit Ethernet Smart Switch with 24 10/100/1000 Ports and 2 Combo Mini-GBIC Ports (SLM2024T) $279.99

ViewSonic VA2246M-LED 22-Inch LED-Lit Monitor $109.99

CyberPower CP1500AVRLCD Intelligent LCD UPS 1500VA 900W AVR Mini-Tower $149.99

Synology DiskStation 4-Bay (Diskless) Network Attached Storage DS413 $423.49

Once I get everything in and I know I don’t need any more hardware I will be ordering rails to mount the servers. The server config I believe is solid but you only know as much as the description when buying reconditioned gear.

Stay tuned for more on the home lab moving forward.

Would you like to Swing on a Cloud?

/ / @Mike_Colson, Cloud, Cloud 101, Cloud Architecture, Cloud Tiering Appliance, EMC, Solutions, ViPR, vSpecialist / Leave a Reply

It’s funny how conversations and new environments can stoke creative juices to make more posts. I recently was involved in talking about IT transformation and cloud. During the conversation the customer who was a solutions architect said that their mission was to make “cloud happen”. I laughed and expressed my sympathies it wasn’t my first time hearing this statement. It takes more than just words to transform a business from a corporate datacenter to a Software Defined Cloud Juggernaut. That’s surprising I know, there are some C level folks thinking but I just enter my AMEX number into Amazon and I get cloud.

While that’s true, the reality is to be transformative means you have to understand what it is you are getting into, and more importantly, WHY? Cloud is an awful term used to describe an architecture. I have written before about the types of “cloud” but how do you manage it once you get there. What is it that you will use cloud for? Is it going to be for application development? Rapid deployment and easily built and torn down architectures? How do you utilize the hardware that is already a sunk cost, and how do you plan for the future procurements?

That’s a lot of questions which lead me to ask, how do you plan for your organization to consume cloud? Do you want business units to be able to “self-provision” or do you plan to have your IT department manage requests for provisioning of IT resources? The idea of having a third party managing the requests is also an option though it presents its own unique challenges and questions, of outsourcing the labor as well as your corporate data.

Let’s say for a moment that architecture is settled either via a reference architecture or a public cloud services provider. There are still policy questions that need to be asked, such as: Who is authorized to provision more resources? What tier of service is this individual or group of individuals allowed to request? Is there business unit or line or business chargeback for consumption? What is and is not allowed to be placed in the cloud environment? The last question bring about the issue of security and what policies will be put in place to ensure data in the cloud is protected, safe, and removable. (If your proprietary data gets stuck in a cloud providers data center with no way to retrieve or secure it, is it really yours?)

Not all of these questions are easily answered and they require multiple pieces to make the puzzle whole.

Provisioning of storage can be done with multiple tools, ViPR which I have mentioned before is built to work with VMware Cloud Automation Center, OpenStack, and Oracle. Through these tie ins multi-tenant, multi-vendor solutions can be quickly deployed and automation tools like Razor and Puppet can help to ensure work flow success.

Products like Afore can ensure data encryption occurs across multi-tenant environments. The slick piece here is it’s multi-keyed, which means each tenant environment is encrypted with unique keys, and those keys can be maintained in corporate owned LDAP or RSA Data Protection Manager. So even if the data sits on a public cloud the key is maintain and managed within the corporate security framework. Making the data useless to any external persons with malicious intent.

Backup and recovery solutions such as Data Domain, and Recover Point can ensure data availability and recovery. When used in combination with VMware SRM point in time regeneration not dependent on replication time can quickly improve RTO.

As always there is so much more to go into with each of these products. As I dive deeper I will share more and try to pass my lessons learned along.