EMC Corporation

EMC Information Calendar

info@emc.com (EMC) — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 05:21:00 GMT

Maximize SharePoint ROI with Atmos Cloud

info@emc.com (EMC) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 23:18:00 GMT

	Location : Online Date : Dec 09 - 09, 2009.
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Maximize SharePoint ROI with Atmos Cloud

info@emc.com (EMC) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 23:18:00 GMT

	Location : Online Date : Dec 09 - 09, 2009.
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Cut Data Protection Costs with Deduplication

info@emc.com (EMC) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 23:09:00 GMT

	Location : Online Date : Nov 19 - 19, 2009.
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The Information Heritage Initiative Honorees

info@emc.com (EMC) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:08:00 GMT

	EMC works with these museums, libraries, and other organizations throughout the world to help preserve and provide access to critical information archives.
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Iomega ScreenPlay Director. A first look.

info@emc.com (EMC) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 04:00:00 GMT

While a lot of people reading this are all about the Home NAS I'm all about the Home Media.

Earlier this month Iomega announced and started shipping the ScreenPlay Director in Europe. I had previously bought the ScreenPlay HD for my parents and the ScreenPlay Pro for myself. As the Director is to the Pro, the ScreenPlay Plus is to the HD. A device for every price point, capacity and need.

The Director has a similar form factor to the ScreenPlay Pro but the dimensions are slightly different to accommodate a roomy 2TB Drive, also, the reflective buttons have taken on a more matte effect while the blue LED on the front of the panel has been replaced with a not as eye catching white version. It's all about making the Piano Black device more subtle looking when it's under your TV.

This isn't a bad thing.

While the Pro's light was subdued the blue LED on the ScreenPlay HD blares at you somewhat and while others don't find it irritating I used to find my eye drawn to it a bit too often when I should have been watching the screen.

I never had that issue with the Pro.

The credit card style form factor for the remote control of previous ScreenPlays has been replaced with a proper sized IR remote, which means there's no more fat fingering the wrong button at the wrong time for me. One of the features which hasn't made the cut from the Pro was the ability to record directly into the ScreenPlay via composite ports in the back of the unit.

In all honesty this was of limited use and I'd have preferred it offer S-Video input support but I did manage to capture some home movies from VHS tape and it automatically saved them as MPEG-2 files. For any of you thinking you can convert your VHS movie collection this way I'm afraid you're out of luck as the Pro was capable of detecting VHS copy protection schemes and stopping the capture process. While I can understand the desire to put those classics you just can't buy into a digital format the film industry has driven DVD prices down to insane levels meaning you can find many mainstream titles for a pittance or even less if you go to the discount outlets.

The Director takes longer to boot than the Pro, a lot longer, but the upside is that there's now a fully featured operating system doing all the heavy lifting. The user interface scaling to 1080i resolution, it appearing on my MacBook Pro as a NAS device when it was attached to the home network and with various online video options, the ability to locate and communicate with any active media servers on the network and with BitTorrent functionality included.

Video playback is gorgeous. Indeed it's better than gorgeous and great to watch even when watching standard definition content. High Definition content, right up to 1080p, is as good as I've seen on more expensive devices, playback obviously benefiting from the latest codec support and the more powerful system on chip hardware running inside the case.

This matters as some of those more expensive devices offer a fraction of the storage and have enough fans in them that it can sound like you're standing on an airport runway when the unit gets hot. There are things which can ruin the home entertainment experience and unless you're willing to crank the volume because you have no neighbors fan noise is one of them.

The user interface is a significant improvement over what has come before it with some entrances and exits of various display elements gliding on to the screen but there are a few user interface elements I would have touched up slightly. Internet update capability is in the device so new code when available can be downloaded and applied with a few clicks of the remote control or sideloaded via your computer so I'd expect the system software to evolve as time goes on.

The biggest issue I had came with ordering the WiFi USB attachment from the online store. Though it's written on the site clear as day I did make the mistake of ordering the 802.11B/G adapter, which works with the Pro but doesn't work with the Director. The 802.11N adapter is supported by the Director (Larger file sizes require bigger transmission pipes) but though it is advertised in the materials and in an insert which comes in the box it wasn't available for purchase when I went looking for it. Th B/G adapter works fine with the Pro but does not work with the Director.

I'm guessing when the Director is available in the US the WiFi Adapter will be made available too. Still, while entirely my fault it's something others should check before they hit the Purchase button.

Since I buy my devices at the retail store like everyone else, to say Iomega is growing would be a drastic understatement on my part. I first noticed they were moving significant amounts of product at my local consumer electronics store when the store appeared to be selling and replenishing stock at a rapid rate.

From my own investigations it appears that Iomega have gone from the eight position to the third in the externally attached consumer storage market while Joe Tucci mentioned the division had significant double digit growth (Significant means something different to Joe than to you or I. He's not easily impressed.) in Q3 and that was before the insanity of the Christmas shopping season kicked off.

Overall it's a hot product and I'd have liked if there was support for an international version of Sonic Wall's Roxio CinemaNow, something which will be present in the American edition of the device, but since it isn't present you do get YouTube. Amongst all the tweener dreck of Miley Cyrus and Twlight which appears to be rated highly by the GooTubers you come across some unusual things you didn't find the last time you were there on your computer.

Carl Sagan meets Auto-Tune brought into my living room via a ScreenPlay Director. And there's billions upon billions of pieces of media available to fill that 2TB drive.

Carl never used the word "and" in that famous quote of his. Go watch Cosmos if you don't believe me ;-)

The ScreenPlay Director is available across Europe now and across North America soon.

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EMC World 2010

info@emc.com (EMC) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 23:20:00 GMT

	Location : Boston Convention and Exhibition Center (BCEC) Date : May 09 - 14, 2010. Visit us at EMC World, the ultimate information exchange and educational forum for all customers and partners. Attendees will gain unparalleled access to EMC's entire portfolio of software, platforms, solutions, and services.
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Disaster Recovery for Virtual SAP Environments

info@emc.com (EMC) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 23:18:00 GMT

	Location : Online Date : Dec 08 - 08, 2009.
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Exploring Cloud Technologies with AT&T and EMC

info@emc.com (EMC) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 23:17:00 GMT

	Location : Online Date : Dec 03 - 03, 2009.
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EMC and Brocade Solutions for VMware Environments (Part of a Series)

info@emc.com (EMC) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 23:15:00 GMT

	Location : Online Date : Dec 02 - 02, 2009.
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Leveraging Cloud as the Next Backup Tier

info@emc.com (EMC) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 23:06:00 GMT

	Location : Online Date : Nov 17 - 17, 2009.
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Quotables on Modern Management and Web 2.0

info@emc.com (EMC) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:13:00 GMT

Some notable quotables from a presentation I was in this morning as they relate to workplace organizational models and the movement away from the industrial era norm of "Command and Control:"

"'Policies' are for the 1% who do bad things. 'Guidelines' are for the 99% of your adult workforce population."

People have said to me, "I've worked my entire career to get to the top and tell people what to do. Now you're telling me to collaborate?!"

[Visuals from an EMC presentation the organizational model shifts taking place today.]

"People will not raise their hand and say they do not agree unless they feel connected and engaged."

"I often hear 'we can't do that at our company.' Then I bring them over to a computer and show them that their people are already doing it. Blogging, etc. Only, they're doing it outside your firewall. Wouldn't you rather listen to them? It takes thick skin, and courage. But it can and will self-govern, and you will be better for it."

####

--- Quotes from Jack Mollen, EMC EVP of HR at an EMC Vendor Partner Summit with an audience of about 90 leaders in the health care industry. ---

####

----------------------- Talk Back ----------------------

Anything strike you?

-- Polly Pearson
http://www.pollypearson.com

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Eastern Michigan University Graduates to New Level of Data Protection with EMC

info@emc.com (EMC) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT

	University Leverages EMC Storage Solutions to Streamline Data Backup and Save on IT Costs
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Iomega Partners with Sonic Solutions to Deliver Exciting New High Definition Media Player Products

info@emc.com (EMC) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT

	Next Generation Iomega ScreenPlay HD Media Players with Roxio CinemaNow Make it Easy to Rent or Buy Movies to Watch on the Big Screen TV Without a Computer
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The 2009 Heritage Trust Grant Recipients

info@emc.com (EMC) — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 23:09:00 GMT

	Learn about the 2009 Heritage Trust grant recipients: Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, NPO Memory of Showa Era, Instituto de Hermanas Catequistas Guadalupanas en Saltillo, Northeastern University Libraries, Canadian National Exhibition Archives, International Jacques Maritain Institute, and Van Papier Naar Digitaal (From Paper to Pixels).
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The 2008 Heritage Trust Grant Recipients

info@emc.com (EMC) — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 23:06:00 GMT

	The Information Heritage Initiative Honorees around the world work with EMC to help preserve and provide access to critical information archives.
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The EMC Information Heritage Initiative

info@emc.com (EMC) — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 23:05:00 GMT

	The EMC Heritage Trust Project awards grants to organizations that protect and enhance public access to the treasures of our global information heritage.
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Avamar v5.0

info@emc.com (EMC) — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:57:00 GMT

Today EMC formally announced the availability of Avamar 5.0, which is loaded with new features and functionality. I am going to briefly review some of them here, focusing on the changes that I think will be most significant from a customer's point of view.

Having said that, please don't hesitate to ask questions or post feedback in the comments section if any of you are interested in any clarification on the material.

So what is new?

The big news is: bigger nodes, best server side task scheduling, more efficient checkpoints, new clients, desktop and laptop support, major performance enhancements for a variety of clients, and enhanced support for VMware environments.

That is the high level. Let's dive into these in a little more detail.

First off: bigger nodes. The 3rd generation of Avamar hardware is being release concurrently with Avamar 5.0 The new nodes offer 60% more capacity than the old nodes. New nodes are 3.3 TB of useable capacity each. This means that an Avamar grid can now grow to 52 TB of useable capacity. This compares to the 2.0 TB of capacity offered on the older 2nd generation nodes. The real benefit here: lower total cost of ownership. The new nodes are priced very similarly to the old, so the bottom line is simple: more capacity for your dollar. Incidentally, the underlying server hardware has been updated too, this is not just an increase in drive capacity, but an update to CPU, memory, etc. (all the good stuff that comes along with current server architectures).

Desktop and laptop support is also new. Now, truthfully, this could be done before. There was nothing stopping an Avamar user from taking a standard Windows client and sticking it on a laptop or desktop on it. However, this wasn't really the design point of the client, and there were some drawbacks with that approach. So, Avamar has addressed those by offering a web browser UI into the client. Clients can do backups, restores, search through restores, and examine their backup history through a web interface. Which really means that they can directly handle most common activities, rather than having to call the backup administrator. (And yes, Steve Jobs fans--myself included--can rest assured that it works on Mac too.)

Further improvements were made to enable desktop/laptop support: users can be authenticated with the domain service of your choice--either LDAP or Active Directory, or using Avamar user authentication if you prefer. Users can manually initiate backups. And clients can be remotely deployed using push installs to both Mac and Windows, with support for Microsoft SMS 2003.

Avamar has also added new clients: The big ones here are Oracle 11g, MS SQL Server 2008 and VCS support.

And finally we have enhanced our VMware support. I have written many times about Avamar's existing support for VMware: essentially there were two common approaches that users took--VCB backups and guest level backups. In either situation, Avamar offered a clearly better approach than alternative backup applications. Better in that backups were faster, used fewer resources, and were deduplicated at the source. Both of those options remain with the latest release of Avamar.

In addition, Avamar 5.0 offers integration with vSphere 4.0 environments, and leverages some of the native capabilities of vSphere and the vSphere APIs to provide a faster, better, deduplicated backup. Avamar 5.0 can now do image level backups (back up the virtual machine as a complete entitiy) and restores. Avamar can also take advantage of vSphere to do block level incremental backups of an ESX host--with the added capabilities of being able to do a file level restore of data (even if it has been backed up with block level incremental or image level backups).

So this is a big one. To the best of my knowledge, this makes Avamar 5.0 the first major backup product to market with significant vSphere 4.0 integration. Several parties have been asking for this (yes, W. Curtis Preston, I am thinking of you) and with this release, EMC has delivered.

On top of all this, there are numerous other major and minor enhancements, including enhancements to how the Avamar server handles and schedules internal administrative activity, how the Avamar server connects to EMC support, NAT support, dual switch support for high availability, secure deletion of data, improved performance and architecture for Oracle and NetApp filers via NDMP, improved support for multi-core processors to permit multi-threading of backups for faster performance, and system state backup and recovery for Windows Server 2003.

Next time... a more in-depth discussion of the new features in NetWorker 7.6 that I alluded to above.

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Take Control of Your SharePoint Environment

info@emc.com (EMC) — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 11:16:00 GMT

	Location : Online Date : Nov 17 - 17, 2009. Find out how you can introduce the essential governance models and compliance controls you need to centrally manage content across multiple SharePoint farms, and store SharePoint content in Documentum to meet retention and compliance requirements.
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Take Control of Your SharePoint Environment

info@emc.com (EMC) — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 11:13:00 GMT

	Location : Online Date : Nov 17 - 17, 2009. Find out how you can introduce the essential governance models and compliance controls you need to centrally manage content across multiple SharePoint farms, and store SharePoint content in Documentum to meet retention and compliance requirements.
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