We’re off to a pretty good start here at EMC World. I’ve gotten to meet up with many other twitter folks at the ZDNet Blogger’s Lounge organized by @lendevanna. Last year social media was just a small lunch tweetup but this year we have the lounge and a lot more networking going on. There have been so many good conversations going on and social media is creeping into EMC more every day thanks to the hard work of @lendevanna, @stu, @davidkspencer, @gminks, @davegraham and many others.
I’ve spent quite a bit of time talking with my fellow GestaltIT.com bloggers (@storagenerve and @chrismevans) and others including the folks above and @basraayman, @storagezilla, @mike_fishman, @storageanarchy and many others.
Joe Tucci’s keynote was more or less the same as it has been in years past but he spent a lot of time talking about Cloud Computing. Their cloud view was the same as what VMware is pitching. Lots of talk about private and public cloud with federation between for traditional IT applications.
V-Max:
I attended a couple of V-Max sessions with @storagenerve on architecture and enginuity. The architecture really is built to scale but a I’m not sure who will be scaling beyond 8 or 16 engines. What will probably be more common is more V-Max engines able to federate data between systems instead of having one large global system. Federation will probably be a big focus for EMC because most customers aren’t running the same modular but monolithic array for 5-10 years, they usually roll them after 3-4 because of technology and financial reasons.
We also saw a lot of numbers on IOPs and performance that I had never seen before for both DMX and V-Max. I’ve always had the perception that EMC doesn’t publish much if any numbers but either that’s changing because of openness or the possibility that V-Max has good numbers and there isn’t much ambiguity on what is faster than what. The numbers we saw were more about architectual limits and not benchmarking.
Powerpath/Powerpath VE:
Powerpath is getting some licensing changes where there will be an option of using a license server so licenses can be much more easily managed. EMC did say that Powerpath VE for VMware will be released on May 21st. As some admins may already know, multipathing for storage in VMware is manual and difficult today. VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus will be required if you want to use Powerpath VE. It will do multipathing across VMs, load balancing and EMC array optimization.
