A great way to stay in touch with what’s happening in the Microsoft space is to follow Sam Marraccini as he provides a fun perspective on what happens with EMC and Microsoft.

It’s a significant amount of work for one person to do his day job and produce informative videos on Microsoft infrastructure-related technology. Nice work Sam!

The video above you might find interesting – it’s a great discussion with Sam and John Hayden (a CTO in our Unified Division) that explores Microsoft’s ability to put applications like SQL Server or Hyper-V on top of filesystems based on SMB 2.2

EMC works hand in hand with Microsoft to make sure our storage platforms are compliant with SMB 2.2 for platforms like the VNX and Isilon platforms.

Do you like treasure? Do you like Apple products? Who doesn’t!

Please follow the clues for a chance to win an an iPod Touch, an iPod Shuffle, or 1 of 10 $15 iTunes Gift cards. The first person to make it to the end gets an iPad 2!

The Treasure Hunt Starts Now.

CLUE #1

• Go to the RecoverPoint ECN site and create a login. Await further instructions.
• Hint: On the left hand side on the RecoverPoint ECN home page, scroll down to Actions and click Receive Email Notifications. That way you will automatically get an email with the next clue (you need to be logged in to see this option)

COMPLETE RULES

• First person to complete all the tasks wins an iPad 2.
• All others who complete all the tasks before Nov 18th 5pm EST are entered into a drawing for 1 of 13 additional prizes: (1) iPad 2 (1) iPod touch (1) iPod Shuffle, (10) $15 iTunes cards.
• Winners will be announced on the RecoverPoint ECN site on Nov 28th.

FINE PRINT

• Only 1 prize per person.
• In order to claim your prize, you must respond to EMC’s notification within 48 hours, or risk will forfeiting to the next eligible participant.
• EMC employees are not eligible for the VNX Total Protection Treasure Hunt.
• This hunt is sponsored by the folks who build RecoverPoint - the ultimate replication solution for physical and virtual servers.

If you live in New England like I do, you have experienced some of the wettest weather on record in recent times. And, if you live in an old town like I do dating back to before the American Revolution, you know that some of those old paved paths can get flooded and become impassible when the rain comes.

Photo by Leon Reed

Well, if you’re using one of those data path solutions native to an operating system or hypervisor you can expect some limitations to the paths at your disposal. Most use a basic method like round robin which distributes I/O among all available data paths in sequence because it considers all paths to be equal.

Now, just imagine your data paths are roads and you’re in the northeast like I am. What do you do when a road is underwater? Keep traveling over the same road because that’s all you can do. I think not.  You might eventually get to your destination if you’re lucky, but you’re just as likely to arrive late or not at all.

Well, the same goes for multipathing software.

Want to deliver a clear way for your customers?  Want to ensure the best performance?   Take the high road and get EMC PowerPath Multipathing. Right out of the box, PowerPath will automatically select the right optimized data path algorithm for your data center environment.

The Enterprise Strategy Group recently compared PowerPath Multipathing with Windows native MPIO and showed the performance advantages of PowerPath in Windows environments.  Results ranged from about 20% to over 200% better performance with PowerPath depending on the application.

But don’t take my word for it. Read the report yourself!

Mark Prahl is a high-tech business and marketing professional who has been running businesses and talking or writing about products and gadgets for business or personal consumption for some time. Currently, he is a member of the infrastructure management group at EMC crafting his own corner of the world to share thoughts about infrastructure management software and more. When not defining or promoting technology products, Mark can be found playing guitar around the greater Boston area with whomever may invite him up on stage.

This article shows the simple steps required to complete the SVVP Support Policy Wizard to check support of your configuration.

• Step 1 Select the Support Policy Wizard on  http://www.windowsservercatalog.com/svvp.aspx?svvppage=svvp.htm
• Step 2 Select the Product and Version

• Step 3 Select Virtualization Technology, Guest OS and Guest Architecture

• Step 4 Review the Summary Support Statement

thanks Mike Morris for the blog post idea…

The Microsoft SQL Server Fast Track Data Warehouse 3.0 reference configurations were built, designed, and tested by Cisco, EMC and Microsoft to provide:

• Architectural guidance for customers, partners and reseller who are evaluating, planning, or deploying Microsoft SQL Server based data warehouse solutions
• Performance and capacity guidance for selecting server, storage and connectivity solutions where out-of-the box performance and ability for rapid deployments are important

Reference Configurations

These reference configurations use Cisco UCS C-Series rack-mount servers and EMC VNX5300™ storage systems connected through Cisco Nexus 5500 series switch using Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) protocol.

Two reference configurations are introduced – the medium enterprise configuration and large enterprise configuration are designed to meet a broad range of data warehouse requirements, scaling from 8 up to 40 terabytes using compression capabilities in SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise.

• The medium enterprise configuration consists of Cisco UCS C250 M2 Extended-Memory Rack-Mount Server equipped with two Intel® Xeon® Processors X5680 (3.33 GHz, 12MB L3 Cache, 130W), 96 GB of memory and two Cisco UCS P81E Virtual Interface Cards. The storage system consists of an EMC VNX5300 connected through a Cisco Nexus 5548 switch. See Table 1 for the configuration details, Table 2 for the benchmark results, and Table 3 for Bill of Materials.
• The large enterprise configuration consists of a Cisco UCS C460 M1 High-Performance Rack-Mount Server equipped with four Intel® Xeon® X7560 Processors (2.26GHz, 24MB cache, 130W), 256 GB of memory and eight QLogic QLE8152 Dual Port 10 Gb Converged Network Adapters. The storage consists of two EMC VNX5300 storage systems connected through a Cisco Nexus 5548 switch. See Table 4 for the configuration details, Table 5 for the benchmark results, and Table 6 for Bill of Materials.

You can download the entire paper here.

Richard and Greg talk to Stephen Foskett about storage technologies. Stephen gives a history of storage technologies from RAID arrays to SANs, including Microsoft’s Storage Server. The conversation ranges over a huge number of storage technologies, including the new generation of low cost iSCSI targets, lamenting the death of Microsoft Home Server and even diving into obscure concepts like (get this) Fibre Channel over Token Ring! The show ends exploring the prospects of storage in the cloud and the possibilities going forward for data storage.

To subscribe and read more go here.

Download MP3 here.

So please, download our latest offering in the VNXe space.

Just don’t call it a demo! 

The download itself is about 150 MB and you can get it here or by clicking any of the pictures.

If you are looking for the download to start right now, you can click this link:

http://www.emc.com/collateral/demos/microsites/vnxe/vnxe-demo.exe

• The Unified Messaging server role is supported in a virtualized environment
• Combining Exchange 2010 high availability solutions (database availability groups (DAGs)) with hypervisor-based clustering, high availability, or migration solutions that will move or automatically failover mailbox servers that are members of a DAG between clustered root servers, is now supported.

This greatly simplifies deployments and should standardize configurations out there fo many of our customers who use VBlocks, Hyper-V and VMware Environments

http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2011/05/16/announcing-enhanced-hardware-virtualization-support-for-exchange-2010.aspx

• Number 10: Your One Place for Microsoft Infrastructure
• Number 9: MiniCooper and Teddy Bears
• Number 8: EMC SANd Box
• Number 7: Theater Presentations
• Number 6: Giveaways
• Number 5: Adrian’s session
• Number 4: Demo’s
• Number 3: Contests
• Number 2: Booth Bro’s
• Number 1: ????????    Subscribe to his blog to find out!

And of course – if you’re there, stop by and say hello!

B

Microsoft SharePoint 2010: Upgrade and Migration Tips & Tricks

Attend this webcast and learn how you can:

• Assess your current SharePoint environment and learn how EMC’s upgrade decision tool helps you decide on the optimal upgrade path.
• Employ best practices to minimize risk by identifying dependencies and using a tried and trusted methodology.
• Ensure users are prepared and trained to maximize the benefit you gain from upgrading to SharePoint 2010.

When:

Wednesday, May 18, 2011
9:00 am PT / 12:00 pm ET / 17:00 BST

Register now

Are you an EMC customer?  Are you thinking about becoming an EMC customer?   Are you interested in hearing about the latest in data protection technology?

If so, please join us for a live demo series around EMC’s data protection offerings, I will be presenting on April 28th, but you don’t have to wait that long to find out more    Each one will have a very short PPT and a live demo.  Hope to see you there.

“The Data Protection webcast series provides detailed technical discussions and demonstrations covering a range of topics from application recovery to increasing compliance in data protection and disaster recovery environments. Through this webcast series you will gain a detailed knowledge and best practices through technical tutorials and demonstrations.

List of Topics

• Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery for Applications (March 17 – 2pm ET, 11am PT)
• Tuning Disaster Recovery for Microsoft Applications with RecoverPoint (March 31 – 2pm ET, 11am PT)
• Create Application Consistent Recovery Points for Assured Recovery (April 14 – 2pm ET, 11am PT)
• SunGard and RecoverPoint; Journey to Cloud-based DR  (April 21 – 2pm ET, 11am PT)
• Increasing compliance & reducing cost in RecoverPoint DR deployments (April 28 – 2pm ET, 11am PT)

You can register for all or any of these webcasts right here

• NEW Hyper-V SharePoint Solutions on EMC VNX (from Virtual Winfrastructure by Adrian Simays)
• The VSI Unified Storage Management Plug-in 4.1 supporting the VNX and VNXe platforms is now available. VSI USM 4.1 has been posted on Powerlink and can be downloaded here – (from the EMC Comunity Network / Unified Storage Community)
• Part 1 in a Series about Exchange Data Protection Options and Perfmon Counter of the Week: Disk Latency from Flipping Bits by Paul Galjan
• VNX breaks another world record (first NFS and now CIFS) from Virtual Geek by Chad Sakac:

Great stuff!

Top 5 Reasons to Deploy Virtualized Microsoft Applications on VNX Family
Thursday, March 10, 2011 – 8 am PT / 11 am ET / 16:00 GMT

Learn the top reasons why organizations have successfully implemented Microsoft applications like Exchange, SharePoint, and SQL databases on the new EMC VNX Family.

Click here to sign up!

Top 5 Reasons to Deploy Virtualized Microsoft Applications on VNX Family

And to think… so much has happened since 2010 – you have Isilon under EMC, you have VNX and VNXe, Data Domain getting better and more powerful, and the VMAX… it continues to do amazing things.

Backup and DR Software and Services

Typically thought of as a data protection appliance, the TwinStrata CloudArray is now also available as software so it can be run as a virtual appliance under Citrix, Microsoft or VMware hypervisors. CloudArray links backups to cloud storage services, including AT&T Synaptic, Amazon and services based on EMC Atmos.

Backup Hardware

The EMC Data Domain Global Deduplication Array (GDA) with EMC Data Domain Boost boasts a throughput of 12.8 TB/hour and can accommodate more than 14 petabytes of data. The EMC Data Domain Boost option can distribute parts of the deduplication process to the backup server to accelerate performance by up to 50%.

Disks and Disk Subsystems

EMC Corp. Clariion CX4 Software and Unified Management: The comprehensive software update for EMC’s midrange Clariion CX4 arrays includes Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST) for sub-LUN tiering, FAST Cache performance acceleration, primary data compression and virtual provisioning. It also uses new EMC Unisphere management software for common management of Clariion and EMC Celerra unified storage.

EMC Corp. VPLEX: This new architecture encompasses a set of products for federating storage inside data centers and across geographic distances. EMC VPLEX lets organizations move thousands of virtual machines and petabytes of information non-disruptively.

Isilon Systems Inc. Unified Scale-Out Storage: With its Unified Scale-Out Storage, Isilon has added iSCSI support to its OneFS operating system, giving it block storage capabilities to go with its fundamental scale-out NAS technology in a single system.

People learn in all sorts of ways and I wanted to take a minute to highlight  one of my favorite sources of free IT training – RunAsRadio.  I can download these MP3′s and listen to them on my commute (when I’m not on the phone).

From their website:

RunAs Radio is a weekly Internet Audio Talk Show for IT Professionals working with Microsoft products. The full range of IT topics is covered from a Microsoft-centric viewpoint.    RunAs Radio was launched on April 11, 2007 with a nod from its sister show, .NET Rocks!, which started as a weekly downloadable mp3 in August, 2002! Coincidentally, the first RunAs Radio show featured Patrick Hynds, who was also the first guest on .NET Rocks!  Richard Campbell, the third co-host of .NET Rocks!, hosts RunAs Radio along with Greg Hughes.   Each show promises to be about 30 minutes long and focused on a single topic.     A full range of audio formats and feed options are offered.

Some of the recent webcasts include (recommended ones in bold).

• Brian Randell Uses Lab Management for IT Testing!
• Pam Lahoud is Proactive about SQL Server Performance
• Brad McGehee on the Remote IT Administrator!
• Susan Bradley Digs Into Small Business Server 2011!
• Joel Oleson Talks Office 365!
• Amit Agarwal Analyzes SQL Traces with Project Lucy!
• Ned Pyle Migrates from FRS and DFSR!
• Kevin Kline Recaps PASS!
• Alan Sugano Helps Us Migrate from VMWare ESX to ESXi!
• Mark Minasi Ask Questions About Cloud!
• Jeremy Moskowitz Troubleshoots Group Policy!
• David Mills on System Center Essentials!
• Clint Huffman Announces PAL 2.0!
• Sean Deuby Talks Identity in the Cloud!
• Jeff Stokes Introduces Us to xPerf!
• Don Jones Revisits PowerShell!
• Adam Hall Automates with Opalis in System Center!
• Jose Barreto Distributes Our File System!
• Alan Burchill Talks Group Policy Preferences!
• Rhonda Layfield, Queen of Deployment!
• Chris Jackson on IE6 App Compat!
• Stephen Rose on the State of Windows Today!
• Adam Gent Gets Us Started with OCS!
• Doug Finke on the OData PowerShell Explorer!
• Adam Machanic Does SQL in Parallel
• Isaac Roybal on Microsoft, Cisco and the Unified Computing System!
• Dana Epp Fixes a Security Vulnerabilty!
• Kim Tripp and Paul Randal Talk about Learning Effectively!
• Richard Campbell on the Differences Between IT and Dev!
• Mark Minasi on the Things Windows 8 Needs!
• Mark Minasi Digs Into Office and Presentations!
• Robert Smith Debugs Windows!
• Vijay Tewari Briefs Us on Hyper-V in 2008 R2 SP1!
• Joel Oleson Upgrades to Sharepoint 2010!
• Alex Payne Compares Online Offerings!
• Daniel Parker Adds Linux to Active Directory!
• Laura Chappell Wires Sharks!
• Brent Ozar Masters SQL Server 2008!
• Francois Doremieux Updates us on Office Communicator!
• Robert Hamilton Prevents Data Loss!
• Eriq Neale Puts Macs in Active Directory!
• Nick Simons Puts Office on the Web!
• Amy Babinchuk Deals with Security in EBS!
• Dave Sobel on Virtualization for Small Businesses!
• Robert Crane Manages Sharepoint 2010!
• Kevin Royalty Uses Home Server in Businesses!
• Doug Toombs Gets Us More Free Tools!
• Rolly Perreaux Manages with Microsoft Project!
• Clint Huffman Does Hyper-V Performance Tuning!
• Richard Hicks Gets Us Secure on the ForeFront!
• Rodney Buike Talks Office 2010!
• Brent Ozar puts SQL in the Cloud!
• Stephen Rose Deploys Windows 7 to Businesses!
• Kevin Kline on the State of SQL Server and More!
• Laura Hunter Upgrades Active Directory with Server 2008 R2!
• Mitch Garvis Gets Us Deployed with MDT 2010!
• Rhonda Layfield Deploys Everything!
• Bhargav Shukla Goes Deep on Exchange 2010 High Availability and Resiliency!
• Sumeet Bansal and Chris Featherstone Go Solid State Driving!
• Bhargav Shukla Deploys Exchange 2010!

• Screenshot Tour (Overview)
• Screenshot Tour (Exchange)

And – you may have heard some of the cool behind the scenes development tidbits from Chad Sakac’s blog here.

GUI and Redesign

The specific thing I wanted to mention is how important (I think) this new interface design is for EMC, especially with this product.  Well before the product released there was a lot of research done, test system pilots performed, and beta products put out.  Time and time again, three major themes kept emerging among this audience of small/midsized businesses:

1. EMC is known for being a trusted, reliable brand (that’s a good thing)
2. EMC is too expensive (ouch)
3. EMC is difficult to manage*

Then someone really smart said, “We really gotta fix #’s 2 and 3 if we want to play in the lower end of the market.”

And we put to work a team of usability engineer and designers with relative storage-industry outsider status who could take a fresh perspective on what it means to:

• Provision a shared folder
• Provision storage for virtualization environments
• Manage and report on storage utilization
• and so much more…

I think time will show that this investment was well worth it.   So far, every customer I’ve shown the VNXe demo, cannot believe how easy it is to use!

*This is a realization not much different from the excellent conclusions made by Thomas Goetz in his excellent Wired Magazine article and TED talk on how medical data could be redesigned by talented graphic designers to quickly enable clients and doctors to navigate a set of complex and inter-related factors…

Start out with a direct connection to your Exchange server, then network your storage if you need to!

EXCHANGE SETUP WIZARD – SEE AND CREATE EXCHANGE RESOURCES

NAME THE STORAGE RESOURCE

EXCHANGE 2007 OR 2010 SUPPORTED, INCLUDING DAG’S

SELECT MAILBOXES AND MAILBOX SIZE

CONFIGURE STORAGE POOL

ATTACH THE STORAGE TO A SERVER

CONFIGURE SNAPSHOTS FOR YOUR APP OWNERS

CONFIGURATION PROTECTION SIZE

SUMMARY SCREEN GIVES YOU ONE LAST CHANCE TO CANCEL

DONE!

click on a picture to enlarge it

DASHBOARD

SYSTEM LEVEL FUNCTIONALITY MONITORING AND CONTROLS

STORAGE SETUP WIZARDS FOR APPS, HYPERVISORS, SHARES, + ISCSI

GENERAL SETTINGS

HOST VIEW – PHYSICAL, VIRTUAL, REPLICATION PAIRS

INTEGRATED HELP OPTIONS – VIDEOS / FORUMS / LIVE CHAT

The program was a great idea – led by Microsoft’s Rob Simpson that highlights both DAS and SAN connectivity options. In the Exchange world, we’ve seen plenty of documents and programs and marketing against anti-SAN approaches to the dismay of many very smart folks we talk to in the data center. This program was a healthy dose of accepting reality by a very logical thinker within Microsoft.

But… there is no “DAS vs SAN.”  The DAS versus SAN debate is not a technology debate and it’s not a cost debate and it’s not a Microsoft versus storage vendors debate.    It’s a control issue.

Let me explain.

DEBATING COST AND HOW TCO IS ALWAYS WRONG

There’s been a ton of articles written and TCO studies done to show TCO in both directions.

When it’s a DAS discussion, TCO slides in favor of DAS.   Big surprise.  Here’s a few reasons why these TCO models are usually wrong:

• JBOD style DAS TCO calculations never take into account RAID protection – and I haven’t seen any large customer stop using RAID protection (mirroring or otherwise) on their crown jewels – their email systems.
• DAS-skewed calculations also crank up the price by utilizing very old technology prices…  so maybe we should be more transparent about pricing to show that these prices are typically WAY off and don’t take into account list & street price factors.
• Also they assume the wrong disk configurations which crank up the perceived price of a storage array – the configurations they are matching against DAS typically use thickly provisioned Fibre Channel drives – way more than you need for Exchange 2010.  Thin provisioning let’s you allocate storage capacity only as you need it and manage a simple pool of storage that has multiple Exchange databases across it.  Large capacity, lower cost/GB SATA drives often make up the bulk of EMC Exchange 2010 configs – unless you have a storage admin who just likes to put Tier 1 applications of FC as a rule (this does happen) and was not expressly told that Exchange 2010 should be put on SATA.
• Also the server to storage connection itself is wrong.  When I’ve seen competitive TCO’s against EMC, I see FC connections, FC switches, FC cards … and heck if I were selling against EMC I’d do the same.  But EMC can offer iSCSI, and sure, you can buy a lower cost iSCSI switch (but don’t get one that’s too cheap), and you can now get away with pure software iSCSI initiators in most circumstances these days (look out for embedded TOEs in the foot notes

However – when it’s a SAN discussion, we obviously suffer from similar blinders.  We don’t always know about the competitive storage option and what special sauce ingredient they might be using to make our TCO model look invalid.   The one thing we do is try to show TCO over a few years and we don’t see much of that from DAS models (we stress operational cost savings, DAS models focus on short-term acquisition or CAPEX costs).

Since we are on the topic, the word SAN is often used wrong when companies compete against EMC – the world leader in storage hardware, software, and services.   Taken literally, DAS and SAN are only differences in connectivity.  DAS is simply direct attached storage – going straight from a server to a storage array without a switch in between.  A SAN is a storage area network, formed with server(s), switch(es), and storage array(s).   Used in this context, storage vendors like EMC love DAS and SAN.  Although there are numerous benefits of having multiple servers sharing storage (for simplified management, protection, and virtualization), we can also let you connect directly from your server directly to an EMC array with your protocol and connection of choice.

While EMC does make the world’s best storage arrays – please do not think EMC =SAN and all SAN’s = expensive.  We have some amazing products in the lower end price bands that be configured “DAS Style” to lower costs.  Also, thin provisioning is regularly used on the Exchange mailbox database volumes to decrease the initial storage outlay (running numbers on this is quite easy:  5000 users at 5GB thick versus  5000 users that are thinly provisioned 500MB mailboxes.  The savings can be tremendous).

THE TECHNOLOGY DEBATE

Technology debates are almost always irrelevant. It’s usually a mindset debate. What is the mindset of the decision maker in the company for their Exchange deployment?   Is the IT manager responsible for final decisions on the storage for Exchange, or does the storage manager make that call?  Or is the Exchange administrator empowered to make their own choices.  You have three different storage choices in each case:

The IT manager

wants something that has a great price/performance – something that works but with a reasonable price tag.  They like “standardized solutions.”  Virtualization integration has become big on this persons list.  And they can’t forget the big cloud in the room too -  hosted/public cloud options.

The storage manager

wants more of what they know – keep it simple and make it easy for them to manage growing volumes of storage.  Integration with other tools and virtualization is big for them too.  They are into the storage hardware and you need all their requirements met to make them happy.

The Exchange admin

will go with what they know.  After a few classes and conferences and blog posts, they learn a mantra of “go with DAS… not expensive SAN” and they may associate EMC with SAN and forget to think that EMC storage arrays can be direct connected as well…  We could make a voice-controlled storage robot that costs $10 and an Exchange admin still may not like it as long as it’s controlled by someone else and has the words EMC on it.

Our storage arrays keep getting better and better (like our storage robot like, zero-management, set-it-and-forget-it functionality in EMC’s Fully Automated Storage Tiering), but again it’s not a technology debate…

It’s all about control.

For years, putting Exchange on high-end storage arrays was almost required, to get that many FC disks in one place.  Now that Exchange 2010 is here, anyone can use lower cost SATA drives.  It doesn’t mean they have to go with a direct attached deployment model…  If the Exchange administrator is in control, they will choose the deployment model prescribed to them again and again.  It’s not their fault, it’s just what they are told and it’s all they know to recommend.  Just about anyone can ride their bicycle to work – but do they?

The same exact discussion is also taking place with regards to public or private cloud for email…. who controls it?  You or the hosting provider?  And are you comfortable with that?   Some folks are, and some aren’t, and some never will be.

CONCLUSION

In the end, I am very happy to see an alternative approach with this new program.  I’m happy that we participated in the program and drove two successful solutions from it.  And I’m happy that we offer a choice to customers – whether it’s the Exchange admin, or the storage team, or the IT manager that wants to decide to control the storage direction for Exchange… we have a wide range of price points (wait until you see what we have coming next week) and allow any connectivity type our customers want.

I’m disappointed when Exchange 2010 deployment discussions turn into a vendor vs vendor debate, and when bad TCO data is shown, and when our own reps are not aware that Exchange should be on SATA on not FC drives in most cases.

It’s tough educating a lot of people at once and it’s even tougher to change their mind.  The best thing to do as companies is to work together and let our customers tell us where to go next.

Best Hardware: Storage

• Gold Community Choice Award for EMC CLARiiON
• “Great build quality, powerful performance, and low price—the CLARiiON series is a winner.”

http://www.windowsitpro.com/article/review/2010-Windows-IT-Pro-Editors-Best-and-Community-Choice-Awards/3.aspx

Best SharePoint Product

• Silver Community Choice Award for EMC SourceOne

http://www.windowsitpro.com/article/sharepoint/Editors-Best-Awards-and-Community-Choice-Awards-Announced-for-2010.aspx

One of the sessions that stood out to me was Lee Donahoo’s presentation on Project Carnation.

The aptly-named project was a Microsoft IT initiative to consolidate a lot of midrange hardware products into a few Enterprise storage hardware platforms – saving enough money to power the entire town of Carnation, Washington for a year.

And with that, I will let the chart speak for itself.

More Details:

• Technet write-up
• Lee’s PPT for SNW here.
• Video

Some of the answers were great:

My favorite (written by Matt Whitfield):

1. Performance. Most SANs allow you to attach extra shelves to the array, thereby giving you an easy way to up performance by throwing spindles at it.
2. Scalability. Same reason again, more spindles = more space, as well as more performance.
3. Redundancy. Using a SAN puts your data on a separate physical entity. SANs generally offer the facility for redundant controllers, fabric connections and power supplies. That way you can connect the SAN to multiple servers over a totally redundant fabric to achieve full redundancy. That fabric might be fibre channel, or it might be iSCSI, but either way, it’s the redundant part that counts.
4. Maintenance. When a disk dies (which it will), then on a SAN you just pop out the old disk, and pop in the new. If you have been sensible enough to assign a hot-swap spare or two, then one of those will have already caught up with the array, and the disk you put in will become the new hot-swap spare.
5. Flashing lights. People who look round data centres are typically impressed by flashing lights, and SANs tend to have a lot of them.

That summarized a lot of major points (flashing lights especially ), but it’s missing a few details:

• No mention of Automated Data Placement type features which leverage Flash drives – EMC’s Fully Automated Storage Tiering is an example of this
• No mention of advanced protection functionality like replication and space-efficient snapshots
• No mention of virtualization awareness and integration (Hyper-V and VMware)
• No mention of dynamic capacity management functionality – i.e. thin provisioning

I helped write a recent Top 5 Reasons Why EMC Unified Storage for SQL Server document – and I think we did a great job capturing a lot of these details without too many words – and used some really talented graphic designers to turn my stick figures and chicken scratch into works of art.

Check it out!

In a nutshell, EMC’s RecoverPoint/Cluster Enabler extends a Microsoft cluster across two sites.  A Microsoft cluster normally provides local site “HA” or high availability of server nodes, and RecoverPoint/CE adds “DR” or disaster recovery (AFTER) by stretching the second node to anywhere outside of your primary datacenter.  This presentation walks you through the basics behind that simple idea and provides some additional background.   Slide building credit goes to Gary Archer, a great guy who is always keeping me sharp on RecoverPoint’s latest features.

Recovery Time Objective: Targeted amount of time to restart a business service after a disaster event

Recovery Point Objective: Amount of data lost from failure, measured as the amount of time from a disaster event

Various approaches for DR and their RTO rankings

Microsoft Failover Clusters (formerly MSCS (or Wolfpack if you go back really far)) provides local HA, not DR across a site.  For this, you need to S-T-R-E-T-C-H your cluster. EMC’s Cluster Enabler is one way to do it, and using RecoverPoint with it would be like have your iPhone on Verizon.  Not the best analogy, but you get my point I hope!

Basic requirements – use SYNCHRONOUS or ASYNCHRONOUS - distance is not the issue but 400 ms latency ASYNC and 4 ms latency SYNC

Leverages majority node set clustering.    If you have 2 nodes/servers on Site A and 2 nodes/servers on Site B you will need a “tiebreaker” for deciding how to remain online after a failure – most common method for this tiebreaker is File Share Witness.  Many articles can give you additional background on majority node set clustering – it’s a good thing to know – I will point you to the blog from an old friend of mine John Toner, who writes about geographically dispersed clusters.

The architecture. 

What each piece does:  CE is a filter driver that “catches” Microsoft Cluster failure events and let’s the RecoverPoint-managed disk systems know to failover as appropriate.  Very sophisticated logic is built-in to prevent cluster split-brain – scenarios where the link is down and the application (such as a SQL server database) doesn’t know what is the correct owner of the disk resources.

See if you see what is happening above – AUTOMATIC FAILOVER.

Integrates with and supports Hyper-V

Works with latest features like Live Migration – so you can Live Migrate workloads locally for HA and failover remotely for DR.  You can control if you want to failover locally before failing over across a site.

Self explanatory – the failover steps in detail.

More detail of Live Migration support – note synchronous requirement.

Multi-array support.  We can create consistency groups with storage devices from multiple arrays in the same group.  This allows fora lot of interesting failover implementations (failover locally first, not remotely for example) and lets you keep components grouped together… like an entire SharePoint farm.

Hey, it works with Oracle on Windows too.

Recap of the benefits – hopefully it makes sense and it’s the reason that customers love this integration – with RecoverPoint/CE you get more control, less bandwidth required (3-12x savings on bandwidth as reported by RP customers), and it’s integrated with Microsoft Clusters to enable seamless failover.

Now that is a cool product.

You get groceries as you need it – daily, weekly, bi-weekly – and you save on potential space in the fridge or freezer and the cost of the power and cooling to keep the groceries cold or frozen.

The same logic applies for your storage environments.

Had a few customer briefings yesterday and this picture came in handy to explain my point…  and although the pic above is Exchange specific, the benefits aren’t just limited to Exchange.  One other area where it makes perfect sense is for SharePoint content databases.  They start small and then grow like a balloon over time – but you don’t need to allocate all of that expected space up front.

Just remember when formatting to use Quick Format in Windows Server 2008 and for SQL Server database use the instant file initialization feature for database files so you don’t write zeros to the disk, destroying any benefits you might get from these features.

And to clarify – while thin provisioning is the industry-standard term for just-in-time allocation of storage versus “thick” or full allocation of storage, Virtual Provisioning is an EMC term that describes our management construct for delivering pooled storage… – how we eliminate the need for complicated RAID Group build-outs and have shifted towards virtually provisioned Pools of storage (thick or thin).

Pools are good – and they are not just for the rich!

EMCLive-Exchange 2010 Private Cloud-final-clean

On-Demand Webcast link

Hope you found it helpful!

Denny Cherry is one of those guys.  He presents topics not for the storage geeks among us, but for SQL geeks who could benefit from understanding more about how a SAN is set up and configured.  A couple of days ago, he wrote a post summarized a recent presentation he gave to a group of SQL pro’s – a dry run for his upcoming SQL Pass presentation.  What caught my eye is that he was generous enough to share his presentation materials online, for all to share and digest – great stuff on storage and virtualization for the SQL DBA.

credit: Denny and http://www.flickr.com/photos/randysonofrobert/385847732/

A very smart dude – and I’ve happy to say I’ve had the pleasure of meeting him at EMC World in the bloggers lounge.  I think I also walked past him a few times on Bourbon Street at TechEd, but … I can’t be sure

Anyway…. as an EMC employee, I was very happy to see the references to EMC, but (there’s always a but isn’t there) I did want to correct two minor corrections I would make on the materials:

1. Slide 22 indicates Exchange belongs on FC disks.  I would just mention that at EMC, we’ve seen a lot of people put Exchange 2010 on SATA.  RAID-protected SATA nonetheless, but SATA combined with Virtual Provisioning (EMC’s term for Thin Provisioning) works very well for most situations.  Caveats apply when using SATA and replicating that data, of course – but tread carefully, and it can be done.  Thin Provisioning is great for Exchange 2010 because Exchange teams want to give their users enormous mailboxes (up to 25GB in some cases) and they don’t want to buy and allocate all of that space upfront.  SATA with Virtual Provisioning is a great way to cut the cost of an Exchange infrastructure that used to demand those Tier 1 FC disks.

2. Slide 43 indicates EMC can only do EMC to EMC array replication. One nice surprise comes from EMC’s RecoverPoint product.  It’s a journaling appliance that implements a write-splitter that sits on the host, SAN switch, or in the storage array itself.  This replication appliance that splits the writes and keeps a copy in a local or remote journal and uses policy- driven bandwidth reduction and data compression technologies to shrink bandwidth significantly – sometimes by a factor of 5-10x.  This is usually enough to justify the purchase of the product, due to the cost savings in bandwidth.  Oh… so back to the main point… we have a lot of customers that use EMC storage at their primary site and another vendor’s storage in a secondary location.  It’s heterogeneous.  You don’t even need an EMC array and it works with FC or iSCSI protocols.

I’m hoping Denny doesn’t take this the wrong way – I learned a lot about what SQL DBA’s need to know after reading this… and I bet you can too.  Remember to check out his PPT consider following him on Twitter and check out his blog here.

Here’s one possibility – platter racing.

How about a computer case catapult?

What about bagel spinning?

Step 2.  Find a BAP (Big A–* Printer)

This thing is 40 inches by 25 inches!

Maybe send it to your local photo developer or print shop.

Or maybe just download the PDF and keep it handy.

I love graphics that have an insane amount of detail embedded into them!

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* this word is blocked by Microsoft Forefront

I’ll be talking about “Getting Microsoft Exchange 2010 into the Private Cloud” – a recommended new approach towards your company’s Exchange strategy with technical best practices to help you understand the term Private Cloud and turn it into something actionable and real.

Please sign up today!     Other sessions include:

• Building Blocks for a 100% Virtualized and Protected Data Center
• Disaster Avoidance with VMware vSphere and EMC VPLEX
• vCenter Plug-ins from EMC

vSpecialists

The other three webcasts are being delivered by some really smart folks:  Scott Baker, Scott Lowe, and Tee Glasgow – they are all vSpecialists!   The level of talent on this webcast series is daunting.  How can I measure up to these vSpecialists…  It’s like the Karate Kid trying to take on 3 ninjas.

Since vSpecialists are pretty much driving the virtualization agenda at EMC  …  and there’s three of them and one of me…  I thought it would be proper to not try to beat em, but join em, and become a “virtual” vSpecialist for the month of August.

Check it out (gotta love PhotoShop):

I've been working out - with Windows !

Oh yeah, read more about these vSpecialists here.    They’re doing amazing things and they are always looking for a few good geeks.

Great chart, eh?

Don’t you just love charts?? Me too.

Check this out this great tune, dedicated to charts – it’s a rocker!