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info@emc.com (EMC) — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 05:21:00 GMT

EMC Replication for Oracle in the Enterprise

info@emc.com (EMC) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 23:11:00 GMT

	Location : Online Date : Mar 02 - 02, 2010. EMC technologies and best practices can help you protect your Oracle database, as well as other business-critical data and applications, and ensure disaster recovery and restart in the event of an unplanned outage.
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How Google Apps Threatens Microsoft

info@emc.com (EMC) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 22:06:00 GMT

I was running around Digg.com when I saw Dave Vellante’s latest was trending.

How Google Apps Threatens Microsoft

It’s interesting watching these two go at it and Dave raises an interesting point. Decisions Microsoft make in their best interests might not be in your best interests and there’s a risk here of becoming a causality of war if you don’t take a moment and plot what your long term goals for messaging are.

It’s worth a read.

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Static backup deployments in a dynamic world

info@emc.com (EMC) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 12:34:00 GMT

Following on from various conversations over the weekend I don’t think the question isn’t if point in time copies and replication are backups which protect you from local and system failure.

They are.

The question for me is if such statically coupled technologies are the only backup and restore technologies which should be employed in increasingly decoupled virtualised environments?

I don’t think so.

Back in the days where this volume or file system was going to be Database Logs or some such and always was going to be Database Logs there wasn’t an issue. These days however a similar volume could be acting as storage for any number of virtual machines and those virtual machines might be moved between volumes, arrays or data centres while running at any time day or night with just a few mouse clicks.

With upcoming technologies such as long distance vMotion we’re not that far off from moving the workload not only out of the county or state but perhaps even across the country or out of the country if you’re chasing lower electricity costs by ensuring your workloads always follow the moon.

The storage array cannot become an anchor dragging on your workload when everything else isn’t. The CPU, the memory, the OS and even the apps have become abstractions but in a deployment model where data protection is solely inherited by nature of if you’re snapping or replicating the volumes where the virtual machine is currently located and the data protection isn’t part of the abstraction itself suddenly it’s the static backup deployment where you have all the granularity and most of the management overhead.

You don’t have to worry about the compute engines or the execution environment as they move in the container or will process the container but now to ensure you always have a backup it is a case of what storage you have, where it’s located and how it’s configured is what you have to worry about.

And I suppose that’s the issue I have with homogeneity in backup environments. You’ll have corner case somewhere with every approach, you always have, but when people move to increased levels of virtualisation density this particular corner case becomes magnified and can be an operational limitation.

But that’s just an opinion.

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The Web as a Platform for Innovation

info@emc.com (EMC) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 10:00:00 GMT

The discussion of the impact of the Web in the last 20 years and predictions of what it might look like in 2030 has continued with many bloggers. I am tracking the conversation in a wiki document in the new Innovation & Research community on the EMC Community Network. Andrea Meyer wrote a great post on the topic and introduced me to Jim Todhunter of Invention Machine, who agreed to have a discussion on the impact of the Web on Innovation.

JIM TODHUNTER | CTO of Invention Machine

→ Invention Machine is a innovation software company. Its technology, Invention Machine Goldfire, helps companies deliver the right products the first time and makes innovation a repeatable, sustainable process. Jim discusses building the high performance innovation organization on his blog.

Stuart Miniman: Looking at things through the lens of innovation, how has the Web changed business and innovation in the last 20 years?

Jim Todhunter: It has had a huge impact, especially in these times where we are still struggling to get out of this global financial crisis. The importance of innovation as a mechanism to build value for companies is becoming greater and greater. The web has become vital infrastructure for innovation by creating an environment of pervasive information. As an example, a client of ours, a plumbing company needed to take lead out of pipes. Through the Web, they found a solution from another country, which solved their problem and led to a partnering opportunity.

SM: I love examples of how the barriers of geography and industry are broken down to allow information and ideas to be shared everywhere.

JT: This leads to the second area where the Web has a huge impact on business and innovation. This is the notion of connectedness; business to business, business to consumer and consumer to consumer. We can see a lot of this in the expansion of social media platforms. This is helping customers in the notion of open innovation where businesses can bring external constituents into the process of innovation. The Web has become an infrastructure platform for global innovation where the long tail of information that consumers build can be leveraged. For example, a customer of Invention Machine, Leggett & Platt, has created a 70/30 plan where 30% of their innovation is created from sources outside of the company [see Leggett & Platt podcast].

SM: I saw a great episode of Frontline which discussed the changing impact of the Web. Over the decades, people have considered that technology has been a force of removing people from communicating. We are now at a point where technology can be leveraged to pull people together and allow us to be interconnected.

JT: Absolutely, the volumes of information that are being created as people are pulled together is immense. People need to not only generate information, but use tools to be able to process the information.

SM: We’ve seen many changes in the last 20 years, what do we think the Web will look like in 2030?

JT: I think that the current trends of bringing consumers more directly into the environment will continue. The Web will fade into the background and become just another service, like phone service, which we use without considering how it works. The consumer experience will take the lead role. Task based applications will allow people to do things without having to think about how they are done.

SM: Will this help innovation or will technology become so pervasive that people won’t have any knowledge and will be so consumed that they won’t be able to think of innovations?

JT: I think that the needs of consumer will be put first and the technology will serve the consumer. In business, the Web has become a disruptive platform for redefining the way that different classes of companies do business. This has not only had a positive impact on businesses, but on consumers.

Listen to the full 6 1/2 minute interview with Jim Todhunter here (click the play button below) or on Cinchcast.

______________________________________________________________________________

What are your predictions for the future of the Web? If you are new to this site and interested in continuing the discussion of innovation, please consider subscribing to this blog.

Stuart Miniman

http://blogstu.wordpress.com

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Is VTL dead?

info@emc.com (EMC) — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 01:12:00 GMT

Short answer. It’s about as dead as tape.

Which means it isn’t dead at all.

After the jousting and pageantry of this week it’s time to sit back and take stock of the segment.

As Tony Pearson over at IBM pointed out a while back I was a big believer in tape being dead and then I came out and said I was wrong.

Because I was.

It didn’t matter that I was doing Backup to Disk on a Symmetrix with EMC Data Manager back in 1998/99 and it was eye poppingly fast. Tape is still here.

Sidebar: The EDM guys put together a beautiful Java GUI before it took two taps into the back of the head from NetWorker. When doing the first run through of the backup to disk demo I designed marketing at the time loved the hideous X11 based NetWorker for Unix GUI simply because it was verbose in it’s output by default and you could see the filenames shoot past when you were writing to a disk device.

Despondent after that particular phone call I pretty much felt how master architect I.M. Pei must feel every time he passes through suburbia.

I’ve always been a User Experience snob and I’ll keep pushing until all the rest of them are too.

So when does tape die?

Tape dies five minutes after the Mainframe does. Chances are the Mainframe will be the last computer still in action when the universe collapses into itself so there’s a long life in tape yet where it’s used for everything from primary storage for batch processing to backup and recovery.

Is there an increase in the use of Ethernet interfaces which don’t even pretend to look like a tape cartridge? Yes.

Does functionality like OST minimise the differentiation between what is a tape and what is a disk to a backup application? Yes.

Will there be an ongoing need for Virtual Tape Libraries in Open Systems and the Mainframe market. Yes.

The VTL isn’t dead and isn’t going to be a long time to come.

When it does die it’ll probably go after the Mainframe but before physical tape.

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Enterprise 2.0 - Now Comes the Hard Part

info@emc.com (EMC) — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 16:43:00 GMT

When I'd first heard the term, I thought Enterprise 2.0 meant the complete transformation of the enterprise to a new, more agile entity. Rather, it references the social software that's quickly becoming commonplace in the business world.

According to popular definition, I believe we've successfully deployed 'Enterprise 2.0'. Our internal community, EMC|ONE, continues to gain momentum and has become a pillar for internal collaboration at EMC. It's helped us achieve a degree of proficiency in the social web, and has helped us extend our reach outside the firewall with the EMC Community Network, our EMC bloggers, and a small army of EMC'ers on Twitter.

So, with regards to deploying social software, we're there. So the journey's done? Not even close...

Internally, EMC|ONE has helped us advance employee proficiency with the social web. It's helped introduce new collaborative tools (wikis, blogs, etc) that continue to be leveraged in a myriad or creative ways. In some areas, it's helped to streamline processes and improve productivity... But not to the extent that it ultimately will.

To me, the opportunity at hand is to work far smarter and more efficiently than ever before. Yes, the software tools (or Enterprise 2.0) will enable this, but the tools are the easy part.

Next up, the fundamental behavioral change that helps a workforce take it to the next level. Software by itself will not help realize the possibilities at hand.

It's time to step back and look at how businesses are fundamentally wired. The way we work, our organizational models, corporate processes, etc;, often date back hundreds of years and have remained unchanged since inception. It's time to get back to basics and not only teach employees about emerging E2.0 tools, but also about new ways to work more efficiently.

Tomorrows workforce will feel more empowered than ever before, comfortable making decisions far more efficiently than today.

They'll understand the absolute need to share information broadly, and notions of protecting knowledge capital for job security will fade.

They'll be far more agile, able to shift priorities on the fly in support of business strategy.

So much more... But these won't come easily. With the availability of Enterprise 2.0 tools becoming more and more common, now's the time to start asking ourselves how we change our fundamental behaviors to most effectively leverage these tools.

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Celerra: Committed to the Windows market

info@emc.com (EMC) — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 02:58:00 GMT

While it’s obvious the opposition was caught not with it’s pants down but caught entirely in the nip outdoors on a winters morning while reaching for any rhetorical leaf, fig or otherwise, to hide it’s shrivelling dignity behind lets put things into perspective.

With EMC’s first submission to SPECsfs 2008 it is the first double digit IP storage market share holder to publish both NFS and CIFS benchmarks simultaneously.

No excuses around “No one uses CIFS anyway” or “It wasn’t the right time”.

One test rig. Two submissions. No avoidance. On the first benchmark.

Perhaps the Windows market was supposed to wait until version 9 or 128 Bit processing or whatever new bloated monstrosity needed to slither out of development to replace the car crash release touted as being the foundation of their platform for the next decade.

If it were a house your Engineer would have it condemned.

Getting back to those who count.

Windows customers of server and desktop stripe. EMC isn’t involved but committed to serving your files and your needs. That’s in black and white is about 118,463 IOPS and has an average response time of 1.92 msecs.

On a 32 Bit Operating System using DataMover hardware that shipped a while back Celerra is a speed demon. 0 to 60 2.36 times faster than the other guy with his 64 Bit OS and newer processors.

Lets look at the config. It was eight file systems striped across 48 mirrored pairs. Why? The SPECsfs 2008 CIFS benchmark requires a minimum of 17.2TB as while it accesses less than 2TB of storage it builds a data set of 130MB per 1000 IOPS. The greater the number of IOPS the more data sets therefore the more storage required.

If you look at the results of the second placed submission following it’s trend line Celerra’s NFS number should have been 45053 IOPS instead of over the 100,000 IOPS it came in at.

Critics of CIFS performance now need to look elsewhere. You are comparing apples to apples when you compare NFS and CIFS and when you end up with a devastating performance skew it’s because it hasn’t been implemented correctly.

These benchmarks prove that not only can you do over 100K IOPS for NFS and CIFS with two Celerra DataMovers but you can do so without any drastic performance skew.

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Enhancing SharePoint to Meet Your Information Management Needs (part of a series)

info@emc.com (EMC) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 23:19:00 GMT

	Location : Online Date : Mar 25 - 25, 2010.
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Enhancing SharePoint to Meet Your Information Management Needs (part of a series)

info@emc.com (EMC) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 23:18:00 GMT

	Location : Online Date : Mar 25 - 25, 2010.
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SharePoint Archiving and Storage Management (part of a series)

info@emc.com (EMC) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 23:18:00 GMT

	Location : Online Date : Mar 11 - 11, 2010.
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Protecting SharePoint Farms - What's Realistic and What's Possible (part of a series)

info@emc.com (EMC) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 23:16:00 GMT

	Location : Online Date : Mar 18 - 18, 2010.
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SharePoint Archiving and Storage Management (part of a series)

info@emc.com (EMC) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 23:15:00 GMT

	Location : Online Date : Mar 11 - 11, 2010.
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SharePoint Storage Design Guidance and Virtualization Best Practices (part of a series)

info@emc.com (EMC) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 23:14:00 GMT

	Location : Online Date : Mar 04 - 04, 2010.
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How do you feel at the end of the day?

info@emc.com (EMC) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 19:25:00 GMT

I’ve been busy lately, here on the SRM team within Ionix. My calendar fills up fast, and I’ve been logging in nights and weekends to sneak in work on my day job, never mind my blog (which explains the real gap in activity here!).

Why the sudden burst in activity? Why am I letting my day job run away with my life?

I’m not, really. The truth is my shift into a more technical role was just the first part of a two-part shift I didn’t see coming. I also inherited a handful of work from another colleague who had recently changed jobs within EMC. I did the best I could playing both roles for the month of January, but I basically spent the entire month stressed out and losing track of everything.

The answer, in true EMC style, was to invest more time into work — but in a smarter way. I set aside chunks of “me” time at home (and at work, to be fair) to organize my tasks, organize my team’s tasks, organize my information. Cleaned my inbox. Set up a system for tracking open issues, for organizing my meeting minutes, all that. I didn’t do a full GTD reset or anything (I keep thinking I should, but …), but I did invest heavily into my work infrastructure.

The end result is that at the end of the day I’m tired and spent, but I’m not lost and overwhelmed. I know where I am, I know what I need to do tomorrow, and I know what my team is doing.

Mostly.

The truth is, how hard you work isn’t really the determining factor in how you feel at the end of the day. It’s how you do that work. For me, the weight of inheriting someone else’s “tracking system” was too much to carry, and I had to do extra work to create my own. It made the past calendar week pretty much unbearable, but now that I’m coming out of the weeds I can see February shaping up to be a pretty good month.

Busy, but good.

That’s how I like it.

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

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Paper, Paper Everywhere

info@emc.com (EMC) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 17:20:00 GMT

	Location : Online Date : Mar 03 - 03, 2010.
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Paper, Paper Everywhere

info@emc.com (EMC) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 17:17:00 GMT

	Location : Online Date : Mar 03 - 03, 2010.
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Prestidigitation

info@emc.com (EMC) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 12:05:00 GMT

Amazingly though they weren’t mentioned at all NetApp (or Vaughn) appear to have taken umbrage at EMC’s SPECsfs 2008 benchmark submissions. You know, the one showing that even above 100K IOPS there should be no performance difference between CIFS and NFS if you’ve implemented them correctly.

This defensiveness is incredibly telling when you consider:

The object was to prove you could push a Celerra DataMover running a 32 Bit OS on processors which aren’t the cutting edge of Intel’s offerings up to 7.4K IOPS per Core. With only 4GB of RAM in the DataMover.
Out of the seven NFS submissions NetApp have posted they haven’t once posted a single CIFS result.
Chances are the benchmark data wouldn’t hang around the place long enough to be counted as FAS appears to think a rename is a delete if you’re connected using a Mac. (This from the company who after recently cancelling their failed VTL offering will soon hit the bricks and say backup is dead.)

The slight of hand here is to try and portray the EMC benchmark as something it’s not while avoiding answering the question this raises as to why they haven’t submitted a single CIFS benchmark along with any of their NFS benchmarks?

Though I should thank all involved for raising this matter as I’m sure people would be interested in knowing exactly how broken CIFS is in ONTAP?

Besides the whole “What did you mean rename? I thought you meant delete!” thing of course.

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The Web is 20 years old, what now in the next 20?

info@emc.com (EMC) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 03:48:00 GMT

The most recent edition of ON Magazine contains fabulous articles and interviews industry luminaries reflecting on the 20th anniversary of the Web and on its potential over the next 20 years. Interviewees were posed three questions by EMC:

○ How has the Web changed your life?
○ How has the Web changed business and society?
○ What will the Web look like in 20 years?

The breadth and depth of responses has inspired fellow bloggers inside EMC and out to contemplate the same questions from their own unique perspectives. Colleague Kathryn Winkler, Vice President and Chief Sustainability Officer at EMC, has tagged me to contribute my story and encourage you to comment as well.

How has the Web changed my life?

I might otherwise have become a motorcycle mechanic. In the spring of 1971 I had wanted to take the Saturday course at the city high school on motorcycle engine repair, but when the registrar discovered I was a girl, I was blocked. Of course, that wouldn’t happen today. J My parents went to war with the city to get me admitted, and in the meantime as I shopped around for something else, my eye was caught by a computer course being held in the basement of Dalhousie University‘s Library, so I signed up. And within the first hour, I fell in love with the technology even though I was a terrible programmer. (Turns out I’m a pretty mediocre mechanic too). But I was helped by other high schoolers that were far more adept and felt sorry for me as I thrashed through my assembler subroutines. But it didn’t matter, I was enthralled. I went on to complete a Math degree with a minor in Computer Science, and later an MBA focusing on the Strategic use of Technology, and did get to practice mechanics on a dozen or so motorcycles over the years. But the glee of being around technology has never left me, even as it becomes pervasive. I remember the exact moment the penny dropped for me; I was stunned, realizing it would change everything. It was 1992 and my consulting colleague Ken Rossen showed me gopher while we were at Dow Jones completing an Enterprise Wide Architecture engagement, helping them strategize on how to make an electronic version of the Wall Street Journal that people might one day read on tablets on the trains. It was a vision then, but a reality now, 20 years later. This month, as I watch Apple’s ipad being launched, I feel a part of it and a sense of satisfaction as what we dreamed about, on that, and many other strategy engagements, unfolds.

How has the Web changed business and society?

The paradox however, is that the web has leveled, empowered and liberated us, but also commoditized and distanced us from ourselves. Leveling the field of information lets us all see around corners, up and down, over, in and out, and helps makes the unfathomable more understandable. Seeing the latest Hubble shots helps us imagine our place in the multi-verse; watching 3d visualizations of hyperbolic paraboloids and fractals brings mathematics to life; connecting serendipitously through twitter or stumble upon makes it possible for us to question in hitherto unthinkable ways, and imagine ourselves into new ways of being. So many good things have happened through the web, crowdsourcing us together in a global community. But, at the same time, we all have experienced how a few clicks away can be so artificially close. Sometimes I long for the days growing up in Nova Scotia when people would just drop by for a cuppa, and catch up on the news over a long, leisurely conversation. Now, we pseudo-connect through Skype. The complexity is enormous and fragile, precarious. In so many ways, we’ve passed the point of no return. But let’s be clear: We don’t have a choice about this; business totally and absolutely depends on the interconnectivity of the web.

What will the Web look like in 20 years?

I don’t think there will be a web in 20 years. Last year conversion to LTE networks began, bringing the next generation of advanced mobile computing to life. Over the years what we know as the web will have morphed beyond the semantic web into a new kind of electronic fabric that will be so embedded in our lives it will essentially be an extension of ourselves. Ray Kurzweil talks and writes about the singularity, where technologies advance to the point of where we as humans evolve beyond our biological limitations – with profound social and spiritual ramifications. Ray estimates that by 2045, non-biological intelligence created in that year will be one billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today. So, 20 years from now, 2030, we will be well on our way….

What’s your story? How has the web changed your life, our society and business? What will it look like in 20 years?

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Changed Thinking. Cloud Thinking.

info@emc.com (EMC) — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 22:40:00 GMT

We know that IT in the cloud means change.

It’s different.

It’s deployed differently, operated differently and consumed differently. What’s implied but not always said is that it must be thought about differently too.

Like democracy, monarchy, communism or capitalism, cloud calls up a frame of reference. It sets expectations for individual behavior, organizational structures, decision making and point of view. (We could call it “cloudism” but I’ve just discovered that’s a religion. Yeah. Really.)

The cloud frame of reference isn’t confined to IT.

A recent article in the Boston Globe entitled The Leased Life prompted me to think how cloud IT relates to a broader trend. The article asserts that people own more stuff than they really want. Businesses too.

“The essential insight is that in many purchases, we don’t want the thing per se - we want what it can do for us. You don’t crave a lawn mower, you want shorter grass; the desire is not for a refrigerator but for cold, unspoiled milk.”

A construct that deals with this is called the “product service system.” While it isn’t new – rental cars, gym membership, Netflix – it is being applied in some new ways. For example, there are new websites that help you locate someone in the neighborhood with a power drill or a wheelbarrow you can rent for the day.

This also relates to sustainability. If we each own less stuff. We'll consume less resource individually. More to go around on a global basis and less impact on the environment. In theory.

At some level, it makes sense to think of the IT cloud as a response to not wanting to own things. Of course there are some very good business drivers as well. It’s a quest for better economics, higher value, greater flexibility, speed of purpose and more.

All good stuff.

But. There’s always a but.

“ But the biggest challenge may be cultural. Americans are accustomed to having many possessions - it is a sign of status and identity…”

To do this cloud thing successfully, we need to change the way we think. And, as John Kenneth Galbraith said:

“ Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everybody gets busy on the proof.”

I have no doubt that we will work our way through it. As we succeed in resolving technical issues, as we move from proof of concept to production at scale, we will get serious about the organizational changes, the new job titles, the new psychology, the transition from physical to virtual as the new frame of reference on a massive scale.

No more hugging the server before you go home.

In earlier posts I have pointed at the videos our own EMC IT team has been publishing to highlight their journey to the private cloud.

We are drinking our own champagne.

And while we haven’t resolved all the issues, we’ve identified many. And we're working hard at adapting to the changes required.

That’s why we call it a journey.

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