Challenge
People designing Exchange storage layouts often use the excellent Microsoft Exchange storage calculator. This is a great first step, but the tool does not include a couple important things. One is background database maintenance (BDM) which can sometimes cause a disk IO testing tool like JetStress to fail. Another is that it lacks in providing a visual view of the Exchange layout.
EMC Solution
EMC’s extensions add in some of the IOPS details (like BDM) that the base calculator might miss and we’ve also designed a tool called the DAG Instant Visualization Application (DIVA) that helps to visualize the environment in a more legible way. Watch this great video interview with Jim Cordes (creator of these tools) for more details!
To get the calculator with EMC extensions and DIVA, go to the Everything Microsoft site.
The direct link to the pimped-out calculator is here.
[updated 2/1/2013] Here is a link to a recent training module for this calculator.
We had a great time launching EMC AppSync in Las Vegas a few weeks back!
Some of the highlights were an on stage demo, an appearance on Chad’s World Live, 4 breakout sessions, and so much more. We got interviewed by industry analysts and taught our TCs what AppSync was all about.
We also launched a new ECN (EMC Community Network) space where I’ll be spending a lot of time in the future. The product becomes officially available later this year and now we’re handling all of the customer requests to join our beta program and learn more about the product.
If you want to find out more about the launch and if you want to ask a question – go ahead and ask one over here!
There’s something happening here
What it is ain’t exactly clear
There’s a man with a gun over there
Telling me I got to beware
Yes, it’s blasphemy to simply change a classic like Buffalo Springfield’s “For What’s It Worth” – but I will anyway to prove my point.
There’s something happening here
If you haven’t noticed, IT is changing rapidly. Just search for IT transformation, IT as a Service, and converged infrastructure to see how far we’ve come in only the past few years. This industry moves!
What it is ain’t exactly clear
We know a Cloud is built differently, operated differently, and consumed differently. So we know companies have begun re-architecting IT in order to offer more of a service in order to react faster to meet user needs. They know they must change their operational models and in many cases their organizational structure. They might also seek converged infrastructures to get moving faster. But… has protection changed to keep pace with this transformation?
There’s a man with a gun over there
Telling me I got to beware
It’s been said that in the song the gun is more of a metaphor for the tension between groups within the US before Vietnam. And in a much less violent analogy, the tension between the IT team and the application owners has never been stronger.
The application teams want to have great performance and protection of their application. But they’ve never been empowered by the IT department to protect themselves with storage-level tools. The storage team wants to let them, but they fear they might create too many copies of their data. Instead, the app owners went out and used tools for their own application, creating their own protection strategy which might not deliver the best protection they can get. To win back the hearts and minds of the application owners and DBA’s, the IT department and the storage teams need to get better at protecting applications as a service.
On the Road to Application Protection as a Service
Many companies have has attempted to do this in the past – with products that help you protect and restore your applications and critical virtual machines. They have tools that install on the server and can “freeze” and “thaw” the current transactions into the database, so that when a snapshot is taken, there is a clean copy that can be easily restored. The major benefit of these tools is SPEED as the copy process is incremental and the restore process is also lightning fast. Restoring a 1 TB database in minutes.
It needs to get easier. Like any “enterprise” tool, many of these products designed for snapshots and replication require a significant learning curve. We need something simple that integrates with the tools we know and love.
We should provide self-service capabilities. Instead of spending hours and hours making sure application owners are getting the protection they need, they should be empowered to simply protect and restore their own data.
We are driven by service levels. IT departments and storage teams need to offer “protection service catalogs” with various (e.g. Platinum, Gold, Silver, Bronze) levels of protection varied by RPO – from very low data loss (synchronous replication) to more sporadic application-consistent snapshots – all from one interface. This makes it easy for the app team and people with the checkbooks to really understand the value placed on the different applications in your catalog.
There truly is something happening here
And what is will be made clear at EMC World 2012!
Hope to see you there!
Brian
In the video below, Sam talks with Giri Basava about the latest EMC Storage Integrator, a free download that makes setup for Windows hosts a breeze.
You can get this plug-in at Powerlink (Support > Software Downloads and Licensing > Downloads E-I > EMC Storage Integrator)
Here’s the official product description.
EMC Storage Integrator (ESI) for Windows simplifies the management and provisioning of EMC storage for Microsoft Windows Servers and Applications in a physical as well as virtual (Hyper-V) environments. It maps application resources to Windows and in turn provides mapping to underlying Storage resources. With ESI, administrators can provision block and file storage for Microsoft Windows and Microsoft SharePoint Farms. ESI supports the EMC CLARiiON CX4 series, EMC VNX series, EMC VNXe series, EMC Symmetrix VMAX and EMC Symmetrix VMAXe. Version 1.3 adds virtualization capability using Hyper-V and support for File Stream Remote Blob Store.
Like finding a needle in a haystack, EMC’s ItemPoint helps you find and extracts emails from disk-based copies made by EMC’s Replication Manager.
Please take a minute to listen to Neil Salamack and I hit the big points of why and how you’d do this. (Links to an MP3 file)
Trivia: That’s Neil on guitar during the opening music.
For Microsoft SQL Server DBAs, EMC now offers yet another way to use Flash technology to improve performance of your databases and applications.
To review, here’s the first three ways to leverage Flash to speed up SQL Server transactions:
And now… this is pretty big for EMC… we are offering hardware for your server to accelerate IOs in read-intensive workloads. Yes, it’s true. I heard on a pre-briefing call describing the technology. Someone said “it’s the first time within EMC that you will ever see the server bigger than the storage array.” Yes, times are a-changing and we’ve got to stay on top of the market…
I believe this makes EMC the only vendor that offers 4 ways to use Flash to improve workload performance.
For more on the big announcement and why we did it and how it work, please check out the live webcast at 1pm EST.
So… back to my point, what does VFCache do for SQL Server?
It sounds made up, doesn’t it?
Ah, but it’s true. It was fully tested in our Solutions Group – people that put our technology through its paces within application-oriented use cases. To prove my point, I’ve attached the paper and put some of the best charts below.
Here’s some of the charts, and you can download the paper right here.
Remember to check out the live webcast at 1pm EST on February 6th
Update:
Here’s a great video from Demartek that shows real benchmark numbers
