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:
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.
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!
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!
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.
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)
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
I hear stories all the time about people who became celebrities and how often people from their past come out of the woodwork to pester them.
That’s how I feel about Iomega!
They have come FAR beyond those annoying zip drives that I’d dismissed in my head and are delivering the most advanced storage arrays in their class complete with dual GigE, iSCSI support, VMware certification, and Windows server 2003/2008 HCL certification. It could be argued that the Iomega division is the most innovative group within EMC.And dammit, now that they are the most popular group in EMC, they won’t return my calls (because I am pestering them for a freebie).
Simply put… a 4-drive desktop storage unit in 2, 4, and 8TB options – starting at $699.99 with an AMAZING amount of options. I’m quite proud (and surprised) that my company did this as we go further and further down market into the SMB and pro-sumer space.
Cool features for small businesses and networking:
Dual GbE connection
easy file sharing
iSCSI block access
multiple RAID configurations
UPS support
print serving
folder quotas
Device-to-device replication (yes it’s true – one in your basement, another in a buddy’s basement, and replicate em!)
user replaceable drives for business continuity and disaster recovery
RSA® BSAFE® encryption for protected installs and upgrades are included for advanced backup and security
Supports PC, Mac® and Linux® clients and is VMware® certified for NFS and iSCSI
Who might want this?
1. Small businesses who need advanced capabilities without a large budget. Somebody said – even your dentist requires their files to be kept intact, protected, and replicated. Solo-prenuers, Partnerships, and small businesses will love it.
2. Prosumer types who need to play with the latest and greatest technologies but don’t have the budget for something large scale. They will put this on their cube desk, in their office, or in their own basement. Not as noisy as pulling in an Ax4-5
I think it’s cool and I’m going to do my best to get Jay and Marc to send me a freebie. Then I can finally stop pestering them (now that they are celebrities).
I’ve got an EMC Live presentation set to go on July 30th. It’s part of a Summer Series called “Virtualize Everything!”
My session is titled:
Virtualizing Microsoft Exchange, SQL, and SharePoint with VMware vSphere
Thursday, July 30, 2009
8 am PT / 11 am ET
My main two points will be this:
Microsoft application owners should no longer be afraid to virtualize. It’s supported, proven, and there’s plenty of horsepower for most applications. Also there are very strong application-oriented benefits and best practices that I will explore. Gotta love best practices.
EMC’s Proven Solutions lower the risk of virtualized deployments and showcase all the benefits of a consolidated, virtualized Microsoft infrastructure. We run the bleeding edge cases so our customers don’t have to.
I’ll also share a little bit about vSphere 4.0 that is relevant for application owners.
Interesting article by Paul Robichaux over here on Windows IT Pro as he ponders a similar question I’ve been hearing a lot lately.
If I’m on Exchange 2003, do I upgrade to Exchange 2007 and then Exchange 2010 – or do I wait and go straight to Exchange 2010?
poll results here:
As always, this stuff (polls/surveys/etc) is never scientific and it could be as little as 100 people who responded to this, however the results are worth considering – especially if your company has products that are designed to work with Exchange 2007 today. Pretty soon your customers might start knocking on your door for the 2010 versions.
I’d say we’re starting to see the beginnings of a not-so-peaceful co-existence. These FUD battles are only part of a larger war that could take place over the next 5 – 10 years. No one knows where things will end up, but one thing that we can be sure of, it sure is fun to watch!
[Update June 15th 2009: Microsoft cannot get the parent partition to crash, however the claim of 750,000 downloads and fastest growth hypervisor could be seen as hyperbole - does that include downloads suggested through Windows Update?]
The opinions expressed here are my personal opinions. Content published here is not read or approved in advance by EMC and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of EMC.
