28 posts tagged “emc”
You may or may not have heard that VMware is going to IPO and EMC will offer 10% of the company on the open market. Yes, IPO. It'll have it's own stock ticker and you'll be able to buy shares and everything.
In one sense I'm glad that other people will be able to get in on one of the biggest success stories in IT, but on the other hand I'm dissapointed that they've chosen offer a sliver of a crown jewel out to the open market in order to get EMC's woefully undervalued stock moving.
It's never dull around these parts.
Though his schedule was packed, EMC's Chief Development Officer Mark Lewis was gracious enough to sit down with me for a few minutes and cover a range of different topics relating to the business of information. Having listened to it back I think there's something interesting in there for everybody, but if there isn't then I only owe you 00:14:33 of your life back. Feel free to sleep in longer than usual tomorrow, and if your boss asks why you're late to work you can just blame me.
I don't think a person realizes how busy the folks at the executive levels are until you see them deal with a room full of reporters & analysts after they've announced some new technology, new service offerings, and an acquisition. I've RSA's Matt Buckley to thank for allowing me to sit in and watch Joe Tucci, Art Coviello, and Mark in action, and EMC's Dave Farmer for indulging me right in the middle of the maelstrom.
And my thanks to Mark Lewis for finding the time.
Locked away on PowerLink I'm afraid, and I'm not going to start reposting EMC content here, but if you're an EMC customer or are registered on PowerLink you can login and read the fascinating Secure DNA: Enabling Security in EMC Products whitepaper.
For anyone interested in how EMC approaches product security it's a must read.
A warning to the non-technical, it's written by engineers for consumption by IT Managers, IT Security & Storage System Professionals.
That's the big question now isn't it? It's also something people tend to throw out there when they're looking for some juice for a story. Having heard this question asked and having read about it all over the place I'm going to let you in on EMC's acquisition strategy going forward just so the guessing will stop.
EMC is looking to buy half.
That's right folks no matter what it is, even if it doesn't involve information infrastructure, the company will make an offer on half. Cool cars, sunny days, the family pet, EMC wants in for half. Why stop at just the family pet? For the right price it'll buy half of your family.
Yes I'm being glib, but the fact of the matter is that numerous times per month I end up seeing EMC's name attached to all sorts of things and it's usually just wishful thinking. Like little orphan Annie seeing dollar signs when Daddy Warbucks comes rolling into town you can't blame people for trying, but if they spent as much time looking at the integration points of what the company has already bought it would make for more interesting reading.
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Sticking with security, NIST have announced that they are going to run an AES style competition to replace the SHA-1 hash function. We're talking 2012 before they anoint a set of new functions, so in the interim we'll start to see a steady migration towards the SHA-2 series.
But then a lot of stuff has moved to SHA-2 already and you probably never even noticed.
Chuck name checked the monkeys and I over the east coast/west coast RAID 6 war, so I'm going to name check him.
Guess who's blog generated an article over at SearchServerVirtualization?
Got to go there are some good shows running here in London, and after dinner at Wagamama I plan to be at one of them. :)
With 2007 comes a new EMC Live line up of free online interactive demos.
I've had to do one or two of these before and I found them nerve wracking until I actually started digging into some of the very interesting questions attendees ask. You start out by wondering to yourself Why God? Why me! but before you know it you have people in the room telling you you need to wind it up and you're asking for ten more minutes as you and and a bunch of people sitting at their desks numerous timezones and countless thousands of miles away are working to solve all the great problems in IT. ;)
Regardless, the lineup for January has:
-Conversations with EMC's Microsoft Practice covering Vista, Exchange 2007, and SharePoint. (Updated: The January SharePoint session appears to be full, it's being re-run in March and you can register through the link)
-Coverage of FLARE 24 improvements (Ease of use via Navi Taskbar, new features such as Fast Bind, Pro-active hot sparing, and so on) for the Clariion range, the consolidated FC/iSCSI CX3 systems, and NQM. (NaviSphere Quality of Service Manager)
-The EMC/Oracle 10G GRID Solution
-EMC Celerra Virtual Provisioning
-EMC & Cisco: Disaster Recovery & Data Protection with EMC RecoverPoint
They're all free, won't run longer than an hour, and there will be folks on hand to answer your questions. If you can grab a moment and see something you're interested in you should give them a look. The sessions run on numerous days so check the site to find which day suits you or checkout the replays for things you can watch on demand.
For example, I'd watch the EMC and IBRIX replay right now were it not stupidly late..
Though 4:38am is early I suppose. Glass half full and all that.
Richard Bocchinfuso over at Got IT Solutions shows off his EMC Visual SRM Virtual Appliance. I've said it before and I'll say it again, I love virtual appliances, they're the easiest way to distribute pre-configured software.
As someone who's had to suffer through creating my own screen cap'd demo movie for EMC Sales, good job Richard. ;)
Hu has a post up about HDS's ProtecTier VTL offering which caught my eye. Lets watch..
I recently saw an article by Beth Pariseau about reasons why people are not buying deduplication products. The main reason given was the slow speed of backup compared to non deduplication VTL solutions. Compared to tape libraries and VTLs which top out around 500GB/s, the Diligent ProtecTier solution is cited at 220 MB/s. While that is better than the 100MB/s that is cited for Data Domain, it is judged to be too slow.
That might be because for Enterprise customers it is too slow. I'm not saying that it's too slow for all customers, just customers who have large environments and require a higher transfer rate than what's effectively performing on par with four LTO 3 drives. (LTO 3 having a native drive transfer rate of 80MB/s.)
I have another take on this. The speed of backup was a concern when backup was done during backup windows. Today most users will create a snapshot or clone copy and do their backup in the background without the need for backup windows.
Backup windows haven't gone away, they're alive and well and still causing people pain. Indeed VTLs evolved from the need to help customers get their backups done within their window by leveraging the speed of backup to disk but without having to drastically overhaul their existing backup environment.
As is mentioned further down while the backup is fast the restore is just so much faster as it's coming off disk and you're not dealing with multiplexing or mount operations. The other issue is that customers might not have chosen or just can't deploy Array based instant copy (Snap/Clone/BCV/Whatever) technologies across all the systems they backup.
For some folks it's a mission critical thing only, and involves taking numerous significant point in time backups during the day to ensure a fast restart. Ideally customers doing that should be looking at CDP, but that's another discussion. There's also a lot of DAS and NAS out there which needs to be backed up, the DAS pouring across the LAN while the NAS devices might be streaming off via NDMP over FC. The NAS devices might be using snapshots, they might not. So while backups do happen in the background a lot of backups don't, and people are still playing beat the clock with their backup window.
The main concern today is the recovery speed of backups. For recovery, we achieve 400 to 500 MB/s using one ProtecTier in front of an AMS 1000 modular array. So while the backup time does take longer today, it can be done using a shadow image copy, without impact to the application, and the recovery times are still comparable to other VTLs. The major advantage of Diligent’s deduplication is to reduce the amount of data backed up by a factor of 25 to 1, and that is money.
Spot on with the money thing but it's my understanding that ProtecTier doesn't reduce the amount of data backed up, it reduces the amount of backup data retained. Yes I'm nit-picking and that isn't what Hu meant I know, but it's an important point to mention about VTL de-dup. Everything still gets backed up even if only the unique pieces are kept. Avamar on the other hand does reduce the amount of data backed up as it de-dups globally, both at the client during backup and at the storage target. So you could see a de-dup ratio in the order of hundreds to one before it leaves the client, as it's only sending subfile changes and not the entire file containing the change, and up to 30:1 when all data from all the clients lands on the back end. So you've reduced your storage requirement when the data is at rest as well as drastically reducing the bandwidth requirement when the data is in motion.
By writing this post I haven't set out to bash anyone's solution. I know that there are people out there quite happy with ProtecTier, but I would like to point out that the performance levels we're seeing when de-dup happens at the VTL could be significantly better than they are now. We're starting to see a number of different approaches spring up in the market, Sepaton with DeltaStor, FalconStor with their Single Instance Repository, Quantum have the Rocksoft Blocklets technology now shipping in their DXi series, Data Domain have their new DDX array, Diligent/HDS are going to add clustering, and so on, but when I look at the EMC DL 4000 series and see that the throughput of something like the DL 4400 is 2200MB/s you kind of realize that for some approaches there's a very long road to get to that level of performance, and all the while customers keep asking for even faster VTLs.
The question I suppose this raises is where is EMC's VTL de-dup offering? I'd imagine EMC will answer that question soon enough.
Making predictions would take too much of my time away from Marvel Ultimate Alliance on the XBox 360, and right now The Avengers are in the middle of battling Loki for Asgard.
It's important work.
As EMC exits 2006 I'm confident about EMC in 2007. This is down to the fact that internally everyone who should be speaking to one another now probably is speaking to one another.
EMC's internal communication channels are alive and humming with people from all parts of the business. Be they people who have been there for years or people who have just joined us from acquisitions, and new ideas get kicked around all the time.
It hasn't all been smooth sailing as you can imagine, some companies found their place in the grand design quicker than others, and I remember when some of EMC's earlier purchases might as well have been located on Neptune for the level of interaction I saw coming out of them. Thankfully that's gotten a lot better as time went on, and these days people are not hesitant to go looking for opportunities to work with other groups. The more successes they have together the more successes they want, the more they want the more people they have to speak to, the more people they speak to the more ideas they generate. The more ideas they generate the better it is for EMC customers.
2007 is going to be interesting, the company has been generating a lot of ideas and is working on a lot of stuff.
Lets see where it takes us. :)
