Chicago Law Firm Chooses EMC SAN for Exchange

Another law firm chooses EMC storage for their Exchange environment.

Nice little video

An EMC SAN storage and backup solution for a Chicago law firm was designed and implemented by EMC partner Integrated Data Storage, LLC. The storage area network replaced the firm’s server direct atttached storage, increasing ease of scalability and performance metrics. To learn more about the solutions provided by IDS–replication, deduplication, disaster recovery, server and desktop virtualization, among others–please visit http://www.integrateddatastorage.com

TechNet Events for Azure, Hyper-V, and Windows 7

Whether you are a customer, partner, or competitor to Microsoft, if you are in the IT business, you could probably learn something by attending a Microsoft TechNet in-person event in the US.  The next round of these well run events will focus on Windows 7, Hyper-V, and Azure.

I just signed up for the March 24th event to learn more about Hyper-V and Microsoft’s cloud strategy.  I’ll be there in person in Waltham MA.

(by the way, the best way to find out about these is to either have a connection to someone at Microsoft, or better, subscribe to a custom RSS feed that will show you when an event will take place in your state)

Event Overview
Join your local TechNet Events team for a lively tour of the latest tools and resources for IT Pros. We’ll start with an overview of Windows Azure, and explore how you can use this high-performance hosted platform to build customer-facing applications and add horsepower to your computing infrastructure. Next, we’ll look at all the tools and techniques available for building virtual environments in Hyper-V version 2.0 and finish the day by demonstrating how to simplify your Windows 7 deployments. TechNet Events are free, live learning sessions packed with hands-on technical content. Register today!

SESSION 1: The Next Wave: Windows Azure

The future of highly available, high-performance, secure, dynamically scalable, hosted computing has arrived with Windows Azure. In this session, we’ll demonstrate the basics of the Azure online service computing platform and how you can leverage it in your work. You’ll see real-world case studies, learn how to use Azure in your applications, and we’ll touch on the future of this exciting new platform.

SESSION 2:  Hyper-V: Tools to Build the Ultimate Virtual Test Network

Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V version 2.0 provide a powerful base for building a highly realistic test bed for servers, clients and networks. This session will demonstrate how to leverage valuable resources including a TechNet subscription, Windows Server 20008R2, Hyper-V and Disk2vhd. You’ll learn how to work with snapshots, create a virtual machine from a running physical machine, and apply all the tools and techniques available for building a great virtual environment in Hyper-V.

SESSION 3: Automating Your Windows 7 Deployment with MDT 2010

Deploying Windows 7 is easy if you’re using the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2010. In this session, we’ll drill down into the MDT Workbench and explore how the MDT process uses reference images to ease deployment to target computers. You’ll also learn how to configure the deployment environment, add operating systems, applications and language packs, and create a task-sequenced deployment to a target computer.

Again, that link is http://www.technetevents.com/

Sign up before they run out of seats.

Also – Subscribe to this blog

New Hyper-V Live Migration Videos

With Symmetrix Across a Distance (using SRDF Cluster Enabler)



With CLARiiON (locally with Exchange and SQL using Storage Load Balancing  aka NQM)

Hint #1: If it’s easier to see, you might want to double click on the videos to watch them on YouTube.

Hint #2: Subscribe to this blog to see more videos like this and coverage of Enterprise Windows topics. I recommend Google as your RSS reader. One weird thing I noticed is that I couldn’t subscribe to my blog using Google’s Chrome Browser.  Interesting….

Windows 7 God Mode in 47 Seconds

You will find lots of coverage in other places on what it does. But when I put this special folder on my laptop and played around with it, I figured it would give me an excuse to make my personal record for longest graphic ever.

Here’s a graphic with all the menu options that the God Mode folder provides

Print it out and put it on your fridge!

Here’s a quick (47 seconds long) screencast of how to setup Windows 7 “God Mode” which is really just a special folder with a lot of shortcuts to common tasks

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year – See You in 2010!

The little elves that work hard to bring you this magical blog have lots of surprises for you in the next year including guest authors, candy canes, new videos, candy canes, more EMC content, and some … candy canes.

Subscribe now so you don’t miss it!

EMC introduces FAST

EMC’s version of FAST stands for Fully Automated Storage Tiering and for a very basic definition it is a process by which data is identified as either hot or cold and moved (automatically or manually) to either faster or slower storage tiers.  Storage Tiers are a disk type (FC, SATA, Flash) and a protection level (RAID10, RAID5, RAID6).

There’s a lot of smart technology and smarter people (1, 2, 3, 4) who can give you the deep dive, but that is the basic idea.  EMC’s Chris Kusek has also done an incredible job collecting all of the detailed information for V-Max and FAST and placed it in one two spots:

FAST Central for V-Max FAST Central for Celerra & CLARiiON

The one thing to remember is that this technology is currently implemented at the LUN level, so administrator still need to be concerned with the placement of data on each LUN.  This limitation will be lifted in 2010 and the sub-LUN level stuff will get most companies where they need to be – truly automatic swapping of hot and cold bits of volumes.

Over time, this technology will be able to really impact the way storage is managed behind the scenes – from fibre channel drives to Flash drives or from SATA to the cloud…  this is very exciting stuff.

Introducing EMC SharePoint Guru, James Baldwin

I think it’s time to spread the word about my colleague James Baldwin – an engineer in EMC’s Global Solutions Group – who I was able to see in “full tech mode” at the SharePoint Conference in Vegas.  You see, most of us storage geeks have it – one sec we’re joking around, then we  jump into tech jokes, and finally we’re in “full tech mode” – arguing about why Exchange is actually cheaper on a SAN (more on this later).  Whether or not SharePoint SQL servers should be virtualized or kept physical. Or how native backup tools compare against third-party tools.  Keeping SharePoint data secure, yet accessible in multiple locations…  He’s really good at this full-tech mode stuff, which qualifies him as an expert, and his job gives him unprecedented access to HUGE SharePoint environments and  to very smart engineers from EMC and Microsoft…

James now has a blog going, so please go give him a read if you wish to learn more about keeping your SharePoint farm in order; he’s calling it Sustainable SharePoint.

James has already had his work spotlighted by Chad “virtual geek” Sakac for showing how to save over 70% of your power bills by virtualizing Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.  (link here)

Go check out James now, in full tech mode, over at his site!

http://sustainablesharepoint.wordpress.com

Tell him Power Windows sent ya!  Or something.

SharePoint Conference – Vegas! Next Week!

At this year’s conference, Microsoft will be looking towards the future with a broad array of deep content centered on the next version of SharePoint, SharePoint Server 2010 and at the same time be firmly planted in the present, sharing real world experience and guidance to help you maximize your investment in SharePoint Server 2007.

At the same time, EMC will be displaying some technology across all levels of the maturity/adoption curve.

So, hopefully what happens in Vegas doesn’t stay in Vegas!

Come talk to us, ask us tough questions, and challenge us to drinking contests trivia matches.   Here’s some highlights of what we are doing:

Bleeding Edge:

Eyal Sharon gives us a presentation on taking BLOBs (large objects/documents) out of SQL and store them in the EMC Atmos cloud.  Very new technology which can drastically reduce SharePoint’s SQL database sizes.

Cool Stuff:

James Baldwin will be showing us some incredible stuff around SharePoint with Hyper-V and how to create instant copies of your production database without any impact to the production SharePoint farm. Restores can happen at the volume level or at a single-item granular level.  Cool!

EMC Backup and Recovery for SharePoint Enabled by EMC CLARiiON CX4. Microsoft Hyper-V, EMC Replication Manager and Kroll OnTrack

Classics

One of our Microsoft Consultants talks about best practices for SharePoint DR.  We’ll see an overview of what our EMC Consulting teams have learned over years and years of experience.

And Me

I’ll be talking about how virtualization changes your management and protection strategy.  This is basically to describe some of the benefits of virtualizing SharePoint and will describe some of our DR technology that integrates with virtualized environments.

Of course we’re giving away a ton of stuff, I believe a lot of Iomega products, and you don’t want to miss out on your chance to get one of our compressed EMC shirts. Or – you might decide to leave those in Vegas.

Please stop by the EMC booth and say hi!

W2K8 R2 Hyper-V Live Migration with Exchange 2010, SQL 2008 R2, SCVMM, and EMC CLARiiON NQM

Longest title ever?  Thankfully I abbreviated SCVMM down from System Center Virtual Machine Manager.  Anyway…

Microsoft has announced their launch dates for Windows 7, Windows 2008 R2, and Exchange 2010.

EMC will be there to support them in many cities including Baltimore, NYC, Irvine, Raleigh, St Louis (to name a few).

I was asked to see if we could put together a quick demo showcasing some of the cool stuff we could do, and we hooked it up FAST.

My colleague Ryan Kucera and I worked together to put a quick little proof of concept together showing a combination of dynamic storage and server load balancing. In little over a week (just before his next proof of concept build-out), we were able to crank out a demo that  showcases:

• System Center Virtual Machine Manager R2 (beta)
• Hyper-V R2 Live Migration (not released yet)
• Exchange 2010 (not released yet)
• SQL 2008 R2 (not released yet)
• CLARiiON Virtual Provisioning (creation of thin LUNs)
• Storage IOPS thresholds (Navsphere Quality of Service Manager aka NQM)

The setup of the demo was this:

You’re setting up your virtual servers on Hyper-V servers and you’re moving stuff around pretty quickly…  You place two busy VM’s on the same host.  Performance is bad. You need to move the VM’s without downtime – we use Windows 2008 R2 Live Migration to show this.  Then you notice because we are using CLARiiON Virtual Provisioning and Thin LUNs for simplified management, we have multiple heavily utilized LUNs for different VM’s that are competing with each other on the same set of disks.  No problem. NQM gives you the ability to be able to place a threshold on LUN’s (like 500 IOPS max for SQL 2008 R2 in the video) and let others (like a standalone Exchange 2010 VM in the video) have more IOPS to service more requests.

Too many people don’t know most EMC storage devices can do this (in both physical and virtual environments).

But now you do.

(looking for higher resolution on the video – click here)

EMC and Private Clouds – From Vapor to Reality

We’ve heard folks talking a lot about Private Clouds lately.

And today, EMC announced real services and solutions that add real value in real customer environments.  And we have both strategic and tactical services which aim to help customers get it done right the first time with less risk.

We’ve taken the best practices from early adopter customers and EMC Proven Solutions testing to come out with a mammoth list of Private Cloud Acceleration Services (of which I selected a few interesting ones for readers of this blog):

• Assessment for Virtualization of Enterprise Applications—This application virtualization assessment helps clients understand the business impact, develop a strategic plan with resource requirements and alignment, and assess the readiness of the current environment.
• Virtualization of Enterprise Applications—This application virtualization offering helps clients implement virtualization technologies to enhance and optimize the performance of enterprise applications such as Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, and SQL Server. This service covers application architecture design/deployment, operational processes, and transition/migration.

From server migrations to health checks to backup assessments to capacity assessments and more, EMC can help you transform your datacenter and make the Private Cloud vision a reality.  We do an extreme amount of testing and validation to make sure what we are doing is reducing risk for you.  The quote below sums it up.

The last thing CIOs want to do is introduce risk as they transition their current data center to a private cloud. That’s why EMC Proven Solutions are so valuable to our customers. EMC performs rigorous solutions testing and documents best practices for achieving enterprise-scale virtualization of mission-critical applications, taking the risk out of the equation. That means we provide customers with predictable results and faster ROI as they deploy technology to virtualize their application infrastructures for Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft SharePoint Server, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, and SAP. –  Todd Pavone, Vice President, EMC Global Solutions

Mask Lesher from EMC Proven Solutions talks about virtualizing Tier 1 applications across your entire datacenter.

Dave Vellante (Wikibon.org) talks about the value of the private cloud and how to get there. I think this is one of the clearest descriptions of a Private Cloud that I’ve seen so far.