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.

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!

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)

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.

and application owners are running scared.

But they shouldn’t be afraid of virtualized Tier 1 applications anymore.   Why?

1. It’s supported by Microsoft and OEM partners.

2. There’s plenty of horsepower in the newest hypervisors from VMware and Microsoft.

3. You can get better SLA’s in a virtual world at a lower cost.

More information and a free webcast with some best practices here.

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).

What is this ix4-200d that I desire?

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
• Active Directory support
• Remote access from web

Cool features for home users:

• DLNA® certified UPnP® AV Media Server
• PTP (Picture Transfer Protocol)
• Torrent download compatibility
• Bluetooth® upload
• Cooliris™ slide show plug-in
• Award-winning EMC Retrospect® Express backup software
• 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).

More coverage:

http://chucksblog.emc.com/chucks_blog/2009/08/i-love-a-good-disruption.html

http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2009/08/and-now-something-just-awesome-for-small-vmware-shops.html

http://blog.fosketts.net/2009/08/27/iomega-ix4-200d/

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.

update: On Demand Link

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.

Act 1.  The Posting

VMware employee posts a video of a bluescreen in a Hyper-V VM which takes down the whole physical box.

It was available here.

Act 2.  The Revolt

The VM community rises up and demand facts.  Read comments here.

Microsoft gives some facts.

Video largely discredited as FUD without much detail.

Scott Drummunds apologizes.

Microsoft piles on: here, here and here.

Act 3.  The Aftermath

Bruce Herndon from VMware posts detailed results from the testing. Summary here. Very interesting.  Maybe it wasn’t FUD?   How will the saga end?

Oh, and here’s a Microsoft “myth-busting video“.

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?]

Please take my 4 question, anonymous survey.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is hard to backup.

You have a lot of moving parts:

• Multiple servers with different roles
• Various SQL databases (content, SSP, config etc)
• Index FS
• IIS customizations, web parts
• Logical architecture doesn’t translate into physical components

Although Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 does offer some native tools for backup and recovery (central admin, stsadm, recycle bin), each of these tools has major limitations.   Let’s look at each one:

The first is backup and restore through the Central Administration site:

Using this tool, a backup can be performed at various levels, the highest level being the entire SharePoint farm and the lowest level being an entire content database. It should be noted that this tool does not offer a great deal of granularity and does not provide coverage at the site, subsite, or item level.

Besides only providing granularity to the content database level, one serious shortcoming with this tool is that it does not natively contain any scheduling options. Thus an administrator will need to manually kickoff the backup processes each time it needs to be run or write a customized program to perform backups.

It should also be noted that this backup tool is not very robust. Errors or corruption in the backup file will cause the restore process to fail. Thus, it is good practice to backup the backup files and to consider a more frequent backup schedule.

Another option for advanced users is the stsadm command line tools:

Just like the Central Administration backups, this offers limited granularity.  These tools are cumbersome and manual command-line processes. While they are useful for performing various administrator tasks by a skilled administrator, they do not provide a true backup solution.  One other point about Stsadm is that a restore of the config database (which has many farm setting and a lot configuration data) is not supported with stsadm – VSS based solutions are needed.

An option for single item recoveries is the Recycle Bin:

The Recycle bin does a nice job of single item capture, but one minor issue with the Recycle Bin solution is that it does not allow any granularity when it comes to restore options.

If a user deletes an entire document library, but only a single document needs to be restored, the entire document library must be restored. An additional issue, and the reason why the Recycle Bin is not considered a true backup solution, is that it only captures deletion events. Errors, data corruption, or disaster events are still possible. These problems can occur at the entire farm level or down to the individual item level, and they will not be covered by Recycle Bin.

To address this, robust backup is required, and this backup needs to provide granular coverage down to the individual item level.

I’d recommend checking out the EMC Networker and the Microsoft Module which covers SharePoint, Exchange, SQL, DPM in physical and virtual environments.   Here’s the Networker Microsoft Module home page and here’s a whitepaper on SharePoint protection with Networker.

On June 17th, Windows IT Pro magazine is hosting a free-for-you technical webinar called “SharePoint: From Chaos to Success” and EMC is a participating sponsor. Specifically, I will be giving a presentation called Top Ten Considerations for Large SharePoint Farms (at 12:30EST).

In 45 minutes, I will attempt to cover all aspects of the farm including networking, databases, web front ends, and give you specific insights on features that have shown to influence clear, real-world benefits.  Yikes.  But it’s not all about me, we got the data from various places:  a) our largest customers, b) from prominent experts in the field at other companies, and c) from our own Proven Solutions lab testing.

The best part about these events is the live Q+A, I will be joined by my colleagues Eyal Sharon and James Baldwin from the Proven Solutions team who really are the minds and hands behind what I will be presenting.

I promised them some tough questions, so please don’t let me down.  Send this to your smartest SharePoint pals and invite them to see if they can Stump these Chumps

We’ll also be giving away IoMega drives as part of the virtual conference, so on June 17th please check out our booth for more on that.

And for something really different, here is the Top Ten List in advance of the actual event.  I figure if you have this prior to the event, you might be able to research a bit and come to the event with better questions…

Every day a company is fooled by false advertising and claims that have no basis in reality.   Although EMC gets a fair share of knocks for being rough on our competitors, we’re equally rough on the applications and hardware platforms that we have to support.

Most everyone knows about EMC’s E-Lab

EMC E-Lab conducts the industry’s most rigorous interoperability testing, spanning every major platform and operating system. In the process, EMC E-Lab creates a deep pool of knowledge about complete environments as well as about every individual component you might use.  Most importantly, we share that knowledge with you so you can keep your environment operating safely and efficiently, regardless of your vendor mix  (this text lifted from our E-Lab website).

What many people don’t know about is EMC’s Proven Solutions

E-Lab basically stops at the OS.  Everything from the storage device up to the operating system and everything in between (HBA, switches, virtualization, and volume managers) is fulled covered by this excellent team.  No other storage vendors go that deep.

Then…  awhile back, someone had the idea that we needed to move our focus up a level and get serious about application testing.  Customers were demanding an application-centric view.  Customers wanted to see if 60,000 users could fit on a single CLARiiON.  They wanted to see how fast 20TB of Exchange data could be offloaded from a storage array to a disk library.  They also wanted to see it all together – what happens if I am replicating and archiving and cloning my data all at the same time?

The purpose of the group is to push the thresholds of the application and make sure we understand where the limits are – within the product or within our own products.  This has helped us to size storage layouts more effectively, understand bandwidth requirements, and how to manage and load balance a very large complex environment.  In some cases, we put Exchange, SQL, and SharePoint all in the same array and run heavy duty workloads for 24 hours to see what we can learn.    Needless to say, we end up breaking things a lot!

Check out this fun video that was produced in order to showcase Proven Solutions and how they can be used.   or click here.  Chris, the lab guy in the video, has a great sense of humor and sits right next to me in the office.  My favorite part is at 1:58 where he is bouncing back and forth between monitors with the keyboard tapping non-stop.  Fun stuff!

The tech industry is filled with “analysts” who will receive a buck and write exactly what a vendors asks of them.

In this installment, Symantec went to the “Tolly Group” and got them to blast EMC’s Networker for being slower than Symantec’s new feature for backing up and extracting single mail items, called GRT for short.   In their graphical depictions, they show how apples compare to watermelons.

It leaves one to wonder how much Symantec spent on that piece of marketing, and time will tell if users believe those claims. 

While Symantec offers what appears to be an interesting way to do a full backup and a brick level backup in one step,  this approach is unsupported by Microsoft.  Hmmmm, support is pretty important when you are talking about backups of a mission critical application, yes?

EMC and the Networker team do not recommend brick level backups, which are long, painful, direct MAPI scans and pulls.  Instead, they recommend using the Recovery Storage Group, as the Microsoft supported and recommended way to achieve single item restores with newer versions of Exchange such as Exchange 2007.   The Microsoft Exchange team in general is moving away from streaming backups altogether, so VSS (Volume ShadowCopy Services) and RSG recoveries are really the direction most companies will be taking – and the EMC NetWorker mailbox/message recovery solution does not have any of the long list of limitations offered in the Symantec solution.

And a really, really simple way to handle those quick “I need a piece of email back” requests is to turn up Deleted Items Retention to a larger amount.  This gives the user the ability to find their own mails that may have accidentally deleted without any administrator time lost.

A few last data points worth mentioning:

The Symantec GRT Solution

• Exchange GRT Recoveries are only is valid for backups to disk folders.
• Exchange GRT Recoveries are a single, TWO PASS backup. Granular backups/recoveries take longer to allow NetBackup or Backup Exec to index mailbox/public folder information
• Support for Exchange Full Backup only
• Microsoft Services for NFS must be installed on the Exchange server

The EMC NetWorker Solution

• Follows the best practices of the Microsoft Exchange Team for mailbox and message recoveries
• Allows mailbox and message recoveries from backups made to disk, tape or VTL
• Supports mailbox and message recoveries from source-based and target deduplication backups
• Can recover a large Exchange mailbox from the RSG in less than 8 minutes and an Exchange mail message from RSG in less than a minute

Microsoft has confirmed the Release to Manufacturing (RTM) (aka general availability) date for Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 as October 22, 2009.  RTM/GA code will be delivered to partners and TechNet/MSDN subscribers at the end of July.

According to an informal survey on ZDNet, this could mean the beginning of a delay period for many new PC purchasers.

Here’s a snippet and poll results from the ZDNet article:

__________________________________________

“Now, this presents anyone thinking about buying a new PC with a dilemma. Do they buy a PC now and skip 7 until they buy another? Buy a PC now and upgrade it when 7 is released? Wait until the tech guarantee is on offer, buy a PC with Vista on it and upgrade when the OEM delivers the upgrade? Or do they just wait for a PC with 7 pre-loaded on it? What would you do?”

• Wait until you can pick up a PC with 7 pre-loaded (54%)
• Wait until the tech guarantee is on offer, upgrade when 7 is available (27%)
• Buy the PC now with Vista on it, upgrade to 7 when it’s available (5%)

__________________________________________

It’s apparent from this data that, in general, people don’t like upgrades (54%) compared to those that are comfortable doing the upgrade (32%) so they may delay their purchases until the PC’s pre-loaded with the fresh OS is available (October).

Could this mean trouble for Microsoft?

Probably not.  First of all, not many people who go to buy a laptop online or at the local tech superstore are going to be aware of these dates (unlike us early information seekers).  Also Microsoft is obviously a large company with a large array of revenue streams, so that a slight downward turn in Vista revenues might only be a short blip on the radar.

I am guessing Windows 7 is going to be a huge hit, with the overwhelming majority of users who’ve tried the OS providing very positive reviews.  Unlike Vista, it’s small and fast enough to be loaded onto netbooks.  Early tablet users (shout out to Ryan!) are enjoying the enhanced multitouch capabilities.  Native VHD and boot from VHD support will be huge, once people understand it. Built-in Wireless anywhere will allow you to have mobile-phone like access to the web from anywhere.  And Wordpad.  Wordpad looks nicer.

Probably not. Old habits are hard to break.

But I do like this video preview of Microsoft’s NEW search engine which should be announced sometime today.  It was formerly code-named Kumo (I got several hits from kumo.com spiders) and has been rebranded to have a slightly goofier, monosyllabic name – Bing.

In the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, Al Ries and Jack Trout talk to us about the Law of Leadership and how it’s so hard for a company to carve out mindshare when they are second to a market (such as NetApp to EMC). The way to break this down is through additional focus and through expansion of categories.  An example from the book was delivery services.  UPS was one upped by FedEx when they started offering overnight.  Then DHL comes along and drives the “international delivery” message home…   In the storage space, NetApp went hard for NAS and a mostly single-appliance and they carved out a nice little niche for themselves.

Microsoft’s Bing appears to have the tools to do something really different here, but unfortunately because we’re talking about software/web services as opposed to hardware, it will be easy for Google to play me too as Microsoft wins a battle here or there.  Google is the recognized leader, and they have achieved the invincible “common term” status.  Instead of searching the web for stuff – you ‘Google’ it.

But… what Microsoft appears to have done (which is hard to quickly replicate) is to build up a nice set of partners with companies on the web who are known for given high-quality authoritative content in field like electronics, medical advice, and making travel plans. They are also  compensating them in a big way, I’d imagine.   Google let’s everyone fight it out – whether you are CNET or Joe’s Tech Gadget Review Site – you are treated equally as a paying customer.  As time goes on and as people desire more trustworthy content, I can imagine Microsoft’s approach will begin to gain some popularity.

On the video they show a great feature that aims to tell you when a particular airfare is going to be the lowest and I could imagine using that today.  But I also wouldn’t be surprised if someone told me that Google is already doing this…