Tag: Dell

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Dell Technology World 2018 Announcement Summary

Dell Technology World 2018 Announcement Summary

Dell Technology World 2018 Announcement Summary
This is part one of a five-part series about Dell Technology World 2018 announcement summary. Last week (April 30-May 3) I traveled to Las Vegas Nevada (LAS) to attend Dell Technology World 2018 (e.g., DTW 2018) as a guest of Dell (that is a disclosure btw). There were several announcements along with plenty of other activity from sessions, meetings, hallway and event networking taking place at Dell Technology World DTW 2018.

Major data infrastructure technology announcements include:

  • PowerMax all-flash array (AFA) solid state device (SSD) NVMe storage system
  • PowerEdge four-socket 2U and 4U rack servers
  • XtremIO X2 AFA SSD storage system updates
  • PowerEdge MX preview of future composable servers
  • Desktop and thin client along with other VDI updates
  • Cloud and networking enhancements

Besides the above, additional data infrastructure related announcements were made in association with Dell Technology family members including VMware along with other partners, as well as customer awards. Other updates and announcements were tied to business updates from Dell Technology, Dell Technical Capital (venture capital), and, Dell Financial Services.

Dell Technology World Buzzword Bingo Lineup

Some of the buzzword bingo terms, topics, acronyms from Dell Technology World 2018 included AFA, AI, Autonomous, Azure, Bare Metal, Big Data, Blockchain, CI, Cloud, Composable, Compression, Containers, Core, Data Analytics, Dedupe, Dell, DFS (Dell Financial Services), DFR (Data Footprint Reduction), Distributed Ledger, DL, Durability, Fabric, FPGA, GDPR, Gen-Z, GPU, HCI, HDD, HPC, Hybrid, IOP, Kubernetes, Latency, MaaS (Metal as a Service), ML, NFV, NSX, NVMe, NVMeoF, PACE (Performance Availability Capacity Economics), PCIe, Pivotal, PMEM, RAID, RPO, RTO, SAS, SATA, SC, SCM, SDDC, SDS, Socket, SSD, Stamp, TBW (Terabytes Written per day), VDI, venture capital, VMware and VR among others.

Dell Technology World 2018 Venue
Dell Technology World DTW 2018 Event and Venue

Dell Technology World 2018 was located at the combined Palazzo and Venetian hotels along with adjacent Sands Expo center kicking off Monday, April 30th and wrapping up May 4th.

The theme for Dell Technology World DTW 2018 was make it real, which in some ways was interesting given the focus on virtual including virtual reality (VR), software-defined data center (SDDC) virtualization, data infrastructure topics, along with artificial intelligence (AI).

Virtual Sky Dell Technology World 2018
Make it real – Venetian Palazzo St. Mark’s Square on the way to Sands Expo Center

There was plenty of AI, VR, SDDC along with other technologies, tools as well as some fun stuff to do including VR games.

Dell Technology World 2018 Commons Area
Dell Technology World Village Area near Key Note and Expo Halls

Dell Technology World 2018 Commons Area Drones
Dell Technology World Drone Flying Area

During a break from some meetings, I used a few minutes to fly a drone using VR which was interesting. I Have been operating drones (See some videos here) visually without dependence on first-person view (FPV) or relying on extensive autonomous operations instead flying heads up by hand for several years. Needless to say, the VR was interesting, granted encountered a bit of vertigo that I had to get used to.

Dell Technology World 2018 Commons Area Virtual Village
More views of the Dell Technology World Village and Commons Area with VR activity

Dell Technology World 2018 Commons Area Virtual Village
Dell Technology World Village and VR area

Dell Technology World 2018 Commons Area Virtual Village
Dell Technology World Bean Bag Area

Dell Technology World 2018 Announcement Summary

Ok, nuff with the AI, ML, DL, VR fun, time to move on to the business and technology topics of Dell Technologies World 2018.

What was announced at Dell Technology World 2018 included among others:

Dell Technology World 2018 PowerMax
Dell PowerMax Front View

Subsequent posts in this series take a deeper look at the various announcements as well as what they mean.

Where to learn more

Learn more about Dell Technology World 2018 and related topics via the following links:

Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

What this all means

On the surface it may appear that there was not much announced at Dell Technology World 2018 particular compared to some of the recent Dell EMC Worlds and EMC Worlds. However turns out that there was a lot announced, granted without some of the entertainment and circus like atmosphere of previous events. Continue reading here Part II Dell Technology World 2018 Modern Data Center Announcement Details in this series, along with Part III here, Part IV here (including PowerEdge MX composable infrastructure leveraging Gen-Z) and Part V (servers and converged) here.

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Cheers Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2017 (vSAN and vCloud). Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

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Part II Dell Technology World 2018 Modern Data Center Announcement Details

Part II Dell Technology World 2018 Modern Data Center Announcement Details

Dell Technology World 2018 Modern Data Center Announcement Summary
This is Part II Dell Technology World 2018 Modern Data Center Announcement Details that is part of a five-post series (view part I here, part III here, part IV here and part V here). Last week (April 30-May 3) I traveled to Las Vegas Nevada (LAS) to attend Dell Technology World 2018 (e.g., DTW 2018) as a guest of Dell (that is a disclosure btw).

Dell Technology World 2018 Venue
Dell Technology World DTW 2018 Event and Venue

What was announced at Dell Technology World 2018 included among others:

Dell Technology World 2018 PowerMax
Dell PowerMax Front View

Dell Technology World 2018 Modern Data Center Announcement Details

Dell Technologies data infrastructure related announcements included new solutions competencies and expanded services deployment competencies with partners to boost deal size and revenues. An Internet of Things (IoT) solution competency was added with others planned including High-Performance Computing (HPC) / Super Computing (SC), Data Analytics, Business Applications and Security related topics. Dell Financial Services flexible consumption models announced at Dell EMC World 2017 provide flexible financing options for both partners as well as their clients.

Flexible Dell Financial Services cloud-like consumption model (e.g., pay for what you use) enhancements include reduced entry points for the Flex on Demand solutions across the Dell EMC storage portfolio. For example, Flex on Demand velocity pricing models for Dell EMC Unity All-Flash Array (AFA) solid state device (SSD) storage solution, and XtremIO X2 AFA systems with price points of less than USD 1,000.00 per month. The benefit is that Dell partners have a financial vehicle to help their midrange customers run consumption-based financing for all-flash storage without custom configurations resulting in faster deployment opportunities.

In other partner updates, Dell Technologies is enhancing the incentive program Dell EMC MyRewards program to help drive new business. Dell EMC MyRewards Program is an opt-in, points-based reward program for solution provider sales reps and systems engineers. MyRewards program is slated to replace the existing Partner Advantage and Sell & Earn programs with bigger and better promotions (up to 3x bonus payout, simplified global claiming).

What this means for partners is the ability to earn more while offering their clients new solutions with flexible financing and consumption-based pricing among other options. Other partner enhancements include update demo program, Proof of Concept (POC) program, and IT transformation campaigns.

Powering up the Modern Data Center and Future of Work

Powering up the modern data center along with future of work, part of the make it real theme of Dell Technologies world 2018 includes data infrastructure server, storage, I/O networking hardware, software and service solutions. These data infrastructure solutions include NVMe based storage, Converged Infrastructure (CI), hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI), software-defined data center (SDDC), VMware based multi-clouds, along with modular infrastructure resources.

In addition to server and storage data infrastructure resources form desktop to data center, Dell also has a focus of enabling traditional as well as emerging Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) as well as analytics applications. Besides providing data infrastructure resources to support AI, ML, DL, IoT and other applications along with their workloads, Dell is leveraging AI technology in some of their products for example PowerMax.

Other Dell Technologies announcements include Virtustream cloud risk management and compliance, along with Epic and SAP Digital Health healthcare software solutions. In addition to Virtustream, Dell Technologies cloud-related announcements also include VMware NSX network Virtual Cloud Network with Microsoft Azure support along with security enhancements. Refer here to recent April VMware vSphere, vCenter, vSAN, vRealize and other Virtual announcements as well as here for March VMware cloud updates.

Where to learn more

Learn more about Dell Technology World 2018 and related topics via the following links:

Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

What this all means

The above set of announcements span business to technology along with partner activity. Continue reading here (Part III Dell Technology World 2018 Storage Announcement Details) of this series, and part I (general summary) here, along with Part IV (PowerEdge MX Composable) here and part V here.

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Cheers Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2017 (vSAN and vCloud). Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

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Part III Dell Technology World 2018 Storage Announcement Details

Part III Dell Technology World 2018 Storage Announcement Details

Part III Dell Technology World 2018 Storage Announcement Details

This is Part III Dell Technology World 2018 Storage Announcement Details that is part of a five-post series (view part I here, part II here, part IV (PowerEdge MX Composable) here and part V here). Last week (April 30-May 3) I traveled to Las Vegas Nevada (LAS) to attend Dell Technology World 2018 (e.g., DTW 2018) as a guest of Dell (that is a disclosure btw).

Dell Technology World 2018 Storage Announcements Include:

  • PowerMax – Enterprise class tier 0 and tier 1 all-flash array (AFA)
  • XtremIO X2 – Native replication and new entry-level pricing

Dell Technology World 2018 PowerMax back view
Back view of Dell PowerMax

Dell PowerMax Something Old, Something New, Something Fast Near You Soon

PowerMax is the new companion to VMAX. Positioned for traditional tier 0 and tier 1 enterprise-class applications and workloads, PowerMax is optimized for dense server virtualization and SDDC, SAP, Oracle, SQL Server along with other low-latency, high-performance database activity. Different target workloads include Mainframe as well as Open Systems, AI, ML, DL, Big Data, as well as consolidation.

The Dell PowerMax is an all-flash array (AFA) architecture with an end to end NVMe along with built-in AI and ML technology. Building on the architecture of Dell EMC VMAX (some models still available) with new faster processors, full end to end NVMe ready (e.g., front-end server attachment, back-end devices).

The AI and ML features of PowerMax PowerMaxOS include an engine (software) that learns and makes autonomous storage management decisions, as well as implementations including tiering. Other AI and ML enabled operations include performance optimizations based on I/O pattern recognition.

Other features of PowerMax besides increased speeds, feeds, performance includes data footprint reduction (DFR) inline deduplication along with enhanced compression. The DFR benefits include up to 5:1 data reduction for space efficiency, without performance impact to boost performance effectiveness. The DFR along with improved 2x rack density, along with up to 40% power savings (your results may vary) based on Dell claims to enable an impressive amount of performance, availability, capacity, economics (e.g., PACE) in a given number of cubic feet (or meters).

There are two PowerMax models including 2000 (scales from 1 to 2 redundant controllers) and 8000 (scales from 1 to 8 redundant controller nodes). Note that controller nodes are Intel Xeon multi-socket, multi-core processors enabling scale-up and scale-out performance, availability, and capacity. Competitors of the PowerMax include AFA solutions from HPE 3PAR, NetApp, and Pure Storage among others.

Dell Technology World 2018 PowerMax Front View
Front view of Dell PowerMax

Besides resiliency, data services along with data protection, Dell is claiming PowerMax is 2x faster than their nearest high-end storage system competitors with up to 150GB/sec (e.g., 1,200Gbps) of bandwidth, as well as up to 10 million IOPS with 50% lower latency compared to previous VMAX.

PowerMax is also a full end to end NVMe ready (both back-end and front-end). Back-end includes NVMe drives, devices, shelves, and enclosures) as well as front-end (future NVMe over Fabrics, e.g., NVMeoF). Being NVMeoF ready enables PowerMax to support future front-end server network connectivity options to traditional SAN Fibre Channel (FC), iSCSI among others.

PowerMax is also ready for new, emerging high speed, low-latency storage class memory (SCM).  SCM is the next generation of persistent memories (PMEM) having performance closer to traditional DRAM while persistence of flash SSD. Examples of SCM technologies entering the market include Intel Optane based on 3D XPoint, along with others such as those from Everspin among others.

IBM Z Zed Mainframe at Dell Technology World 2018
An IBM “Zed” Mainframe (in case you have never seen one)

Based on the performance claims, the Dell PowerMax has an interesting if not potentially industry leading power, performance, availability, capacity, economic footprint per cubic foot (or meter). It will be interesting to see some third-party validation or audits of Dell claims. Likewise, I look forward to seeing some real-world applied workloads of Dell PowerMax vs. other storage systems. Here are some additional perspectives Via SearchStorage: Dell EMC all-flash PowerMax replaces VMAX, injects NVMe


Dell PowerMax Visual Studio (Image via Dell.com)

To help with customer decision making, Dell has created an interactive VMAX and PowerMax configuration studio that you can use to try out as well as learn about different options here. View more Dell PowerMax speeds, feeds, slots, watts, features and functions here (PDF).

Dell Technology World 2018 XtremIO X2

XtremIO X2

Dell XtremIO X2 and XIOS 6.1 operating system (software-defined storage) enhanced with native replication across wide area networks (WAN). The new WAN replication is metadata-aware native to the XtremIO X2 that implements data footprint reduction (DFR) technology reducing the amount of data sent over network connections. The benefit is more data moved in a given amount of time along with better data protection requiring less time (and network) by only moving unique changed data.

Dell Technology World 2018 XtremIO X2 back view
Back View of XtremIO X2

Dell EMC claims to reduce WAN network bandwidth by up to 75% utilizing the new native XtremIO X2 native asynchronous replication. Also, Dell says XtremIO X2 requires up to 38% less storage space at disaster recovery and business resiliency locations while maintaining predictable recovery point objectives (RPO) of 30 seconds. Another XtremIO X2 announcement is a new entry model for customers at up to 55% lower cost than previous product generations. View more information about Dell XtremIO X2 here, along with speeds feeds here, here, as well as here.

What about Dell Midrange Storage Unity and SC?

Here are some perspectives Via SearchStorage: Dell EMC midrange storage keeps its overlapping arrays.

Dell Bulk and Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS)

One of the questions I had going into Dell Technology World 2018 was what is the status of ECS (and its predecessors Atmos as well as Centera) bulk object storage is given lack of messaging and news around it. Specifically, my concern was that if ECS is the platform for storing and managing data to be preserved for the future, what is the current status, state as well as future of ECS.

In conversations with the Dell ECS folks, ECS which has encompassed Centera functionality and it (ECS) is very much alive, stay tuned for more updates. Also, note that Centera has been EOL. However, its feature functionality has been absorbed by ECS meaning that data preserved can now be managed by ECS. While I can not divulge the details of some meeting discussions, I can say that I am comfortable (for now) with the future directions of ECS along with the data it manages, stay tuned for updates.

Dell Data Protection

What about Data Protection? Security was mentioned in several different contexts during Dell Technology World 2018, as was a strong physical security presence seen at the Palazzo and Sands venues. Likewise, there was a data protection presence at Dell Technologies World 2018 in the expo hall, as well as with various sessions.

What was heard was mainly around data protection management tools, hybrid, as well as data protection appliances and data domain-based solutions. Perhaps we will hear more from Dell Technologies World in the future about data protection related topics.

Where to learn more

Learn more about Dell Technology World 2018 and related topics via the following links:

Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

What this all means

If there was any doubt about would Dell keep EMC storage progressing forward, the above announcements help to show some examples of what they are doing. On the other hand, lets stay tuned to see what news and updates appear in the future pertaining to mid-range storage (e.g. Unity and SC) as well as Isilon, ScaleIO, Data Protection platforms as well as software among other technologies.

Continue reading part IV (PowerEdge MX Composable and Gen-Z) here in this series, as well as part I here, part II here, part IV (PowerEdge MX Composable) here, and, part V here.

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Cheers Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2017 (vSAN and vCloud). Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

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Part IV Dell Technology World 2018 PowerEdge MX Gen-Z Composable Infrastructure

Part IV Dell Technology World 2018 PowerEdge MX Gen-Z Composable Infrastructure

Part IV Dell Technology World 2018 PowerEdge MX Gen-Z Composable Infrastructure
This is Part IV Dell Technology World 2018 PowerEdge MX Gen-Z Composable Infrastructure that is part of a five-post series (view part I here, part II here, part III here and part V here). Last week (April 30-May 3) I traveled to Las Vegas Nevada (LAS) to attend Dell Technology World 2018 (e.g., DTW 2018) as a guest of Dell (that is a disclosure btw).

Introducing PowerEdge MX Composable Infrastructure (the other CI)

Dell announced at Dell Technology World 2018 a preview of the new PowerEdge MX (kinetic) family of data infrastructure resource servers. PowerEdge MX is being developed to meet the needs of resource-centric data infrastructures that require scalability, as well as performance availability, capacity, economic (PACE) flexibility for diverse workloads. Read more about Dell PowerEdge MX, Gen-Z and composable infrastructures (the other CI) here.

Some of the workloads being targeted by PowerEdge MX include large-scale dense SDDC virtualization (and containers), private (or public clouds by service providers). Other workloads include AI, ML, DL, data analytics, HPC, SC, big data, in-memory database, software-defined storage (SDS), software-defined networking (SDN), network function virtualization (NFV) among others.

The new PowerEdge MX previewed will be announced later in 2018 featuring a flexible, decomposable, as well as composable architecture that enables resources to be disaggregated and reassigned or aggregated to meet particular needs (e.g., defined or composed). Instead of traditional software defined virtualization carving up servers in smaller virtual machines or containers to meet workload needs, PowerEdge MX is part of a next-generation approach to enable server resources to be leveraged at a finer granularity.

For example, today an entire server including all of its sockets, cores, memory, PCIe devices among other resources get allocated and defined for use. A server gets defined for use by an operating system when bare metal (or Metal as a Service) or a hypervisor. PowerEdge MX (and other platforms expected to enter the market) have a finer granularity where with a proper upper layer (or higher altitude) software resources can be allocated and defined to meet different needs.

What this means is the potential to allocate resources to a given server with more granularity and flexibility, as well as combine multiple server’s resources to create what appears to be a more massive server. There are vendors in the market who have been working on and enabling this type of approach for several years ranging from ScaleMP to startup Liqid and Tidal among others. However, at the heart of the Dell PowerEdge MX is the new emerging Gen-Z technology.

If you are not familiar with Gen-Z, add it to your buzzword bingo lineup and learn about it as it is coming your way. A brief overview of Gen-Z consortium and Gen-Z material and primer information here. A common question is if Gen-Z is a replacement for PCIe which for now is that they will coexist and complement each other. Another common question is if Gen-Z will replace Ethernet and InfiniBand and the answer is for now they complement each other. Another question is if Gen-Z will replace Intel Quick Path and another CPU device and memory interconnects and the answer is potentially, and in my opinion, watch to see how long Intel drags its feet.

Note that composability is another way of saying defined without saying defined, something to pay attention too as well as have some vendor fun with. Also, note that Dell is referent to PowerEdge MX and Kinetic architecture which is not the same as the Seagate Kinetic Ethernet-based object key value accessed drive initiative from a few years ago (learn more about Seagate Kinetic here). Learn more about Gen-Z and what Dell is doing here.

Where to learn more

Learn more about Dell Technology World 2018 and related topics via the following links:

Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

What this all means

Dell has provided a glimpse of what they are working on pertaining composable infrastructure, the other CI, as well as Gen-Z and related next generation of servers with PowerEdge MX as well as Kinetic. Stay tuned for more about Gen-Z and composable infrastructures. Continue reading Part V (servers converged) in this series here, as well as part I here, part II here and part III here.

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Cheers Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2017 (vSAN and vCloud). Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

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Part V Dell Technology World 2018 Server Converged Announcement Details

Part V Dell Technology World 2018 Server Converged Announcement Details

Part V Dell Technology World 2018 Server Converged Announcement Details
This is Part V Dell Technology World 2018 Server Converged Announcement Details that is part of a five-post series (view part I here, part II here, part III here and part IV here). Last week (April 30-May 3) I traveled to Las Vegas Nevada (LAS) to attend Dell Technology World 2018 (e.g., DTW 2018) as a guest of Dell (that is a disclosure btw).

What was announced:

  • PowerEdge gen 14 four-socket rack mount servers
  • Preview of PowerMX Gen-Z enabled composable data infrastructure resources
  • Converged Infrastructure (CI) and Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) updates
  • Wyse 5070 Thin Client and other VDI related updates
  • VMware and NSX Cloud Updates

PowerEdge Servers Updates

PowerEdge servers enhanced with generation 14 technologies initially announced last May at Dell EMC World 2017, along with Intel July 2017 technology announcements. New PowerEdge R940xa and PowerEdge R840 are designed to support AI, ML, DL along with other analytics-related demanding workloads. In addition to new PowerEdge R940xa and PowerEdge R840 models, Dell Technologies also announced Dell Precision Optimizer 5.0 with enhanced ML algorithms to intelligently tune performance while boosting productive of Dell Precision workstations.

PowerEdge Rack Servers – New PowerEdge R940xa and R840 gen 14 servers. Dell announced two new four-socket servers that are part of the 14th generation of Dell PowerEdge server portfolio initially announced at Dell EMC World 2017 leveraging new Intel Xeon Scalable processors. These new four-socket servers support up to 112 combined cores (e.g., 4 x 28), along with 6TB of DDR4 memory as well as Non-Volatile DIMM (NVDIMM) options. Other standard features include NVMe drives for high performance, low-latency flash, and other emerging SSD or SCM media.

Dell PowerEdge R840

The Dell PowerEdge R840 2U rack server, features up to 26 2.5” HDD or SSD (24 in front, two in rear bays), of which up to 24 can be NVMe U.2 small form factor (SFF) drive form factor SSD devices. Other storage options include a mix of SAS/SATA HDDs and SSDs, as well as NVMe SSDs. Also supported are up to 48 DIMM DDR4 (RDIMM or LRDIMM up to 2666MT) slots, 12 of which can be for NVDIMMs enabling up to 6TB of memory.

Networking options for the R840 include 4 x 1 GbE, 4 x 10GbE, 2 x 10GbE + 2 x 1GbE, or 2 x 25GbE. Other options include support for two double wide graphics processing units (GPU) or two Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) for data-intensive computations. Other R840 features include integrated Intel ultra-path interconnect (UPI), smart adaptive cooling, secure instance erase of HDD and SSD devices, along with Dell OpenManager enterprise management software, as well as agent less iDRAC (Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller) for automated server management. View additional Dell PowerEdge R940xa speeds, feeds, slots and watts specifications here (PDF).

Dell PowerEdge R940xa

The Dell PowerEdge R940xa  rack server has the same CPU and memory configuration as the R840 however in a larger 4U package. The larger packaging of the R940xa enables 12 PCIe Gen3 slots (six x16 or two x16 and ten x8), dual M.2 boot devices, network options (4 x 1 GbE, 4 x 10GbE, 2 x 10GbE + 2 x 1Gbe or 2 x 25GbE). Other components include up to 32 x 2.5” SAS/SATA HDD and SSD, and four direct-attached NVMe devices, as well as four double-wide GPUs or 8 FPGAs. With the additional resources, the R940xa is designed for accelerating databases along with other onsite high-performance workloads combines up to four CPUs along with GPUs or FPGAs. View additional Dell PowerEdge R940xa speeds, feeds, slots and watts specifications here (PDF).

Converged and Hyper-Converged

Dell Technologies has enhanced its Converged Infrastructure (CI) as well as Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) portfolio with gen 14 servers, GPUs, NVMe along with 25 GbE networking. In addition to VxBlock solutions incorporating PowerMax, XtremIO X2 along with mid-range Dell Technologies storage, VxRail as well as VxRack updates were announced in support of VMware vSAN among other items.

Thin Clients and VDI

New Dell Wyse 5070 thin client workstation for on-site or cloud-based applications. Dell EMC VDI solutions leverage PowerEdge 14th generation servers including VxRail and vSAN ready nodes, as well as incorporate NVIDIA Quadro virtual data center workstation (vDWS) and Tesla P40 GPUs. In addition to Wyse thin clients, Dell has also enhanced OptiPlex PCs.

VMware NSX and Cloud

In addition to the recent April SDDC cloud foundation and March Cloud announcements, VMware also announced NSX software-defined networking enhancements. The VMware NSX updates include NSX Cloud support for applications running in Microsoft Azure cloud, Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN) via its Velo cloud acquisition, along with NSX for container cloud-native and bare metal applications, along with Telco/Network Function Virtualization (NFV) updates.

Introducing PowerEdge MX Composable Infrastructure (the other CI)

Dell announced at Dell Technology World 2018 a preview of the new PowerEdge MX family of data infrastructure resource servers. PowerEdge MX is being developed to meet the needs of resource-centric data infrastructures that require scalability, as well as performance availability, capacity, economic (PACE) characteristics flexibility for diverse workloads. Read more about Dell PowerEdge MX, Gen-Z and composable infrastructures (the other CI) here.

Where to learn more

Learn more about Dell Technology World 2018 and related topics via the following links:

Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

What this all means

Dell is moving to converge not only technologies, tools, management of their technologies, as well as the data infrastructures of their client customers; they are also doing the same for their organization. We have seen the combination of Dell and EMC into Dell EMC and now into Dell Technologies. What was also noticed is the reinforcement of the Dell Technologies family or what in the past was referred to post-merger (or acquisition) as the EMC Federation.

Dell Technology World 2018 Party Walk The Moon and Sting
Dell Technology World 2018 Party with Walk The Moon before main act Sting

Dell Technologies World 2018 in some ways was a proof point of where the company is as well as how they have progressed in the twenty-some months since the integration of Dell and EMC. While there are still signs, messaging, naming and vestiges of the former EMC, along with EMCworld, make no mistake, this is a Dell Technologies event. From desktops to datacenters, Dell Technologies is showing its technology breadth as well as product lineup.

There were some questions from the press not answered such as what is going on with Dells financial organizational restructure, which as Michael Dell told the attendees, read the SEC 13D documents ( here, here and here) if you have not, as all the answers that Dell (Michael Dell and Dell Technologies) can talk about are there.

Here are some additional perspectives of what Dell Technologies may or may not due concerning business restructuring:

Via SearchStorage: Dell EMC storage strategy talk buzzes Dell Tech World
Via SearchStorage: Dell EMC storage IPO, VMware merger plans still unclear

Leaving Las Vegas and Dell Technology World 2018
Leaving Las Vegas and Dell Technology World 2018

Overall Dell Technology World 2018 was a good event, and I look forward to hearing more from Dell in the weeks as well as months ahead as they roll out more of what was discussed (or previewed) last week.

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Cheers Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2017 (vSAN and vCloud). Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

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September and October 2016 Server StorageIO Update Newsletter

Volume 16, Issue IX

Hello and welcome to this September and October 2016 Server StorageIO update newsletter.

In This Issue

  • Commentary in the news
  • Tips and Articles
  • StorageIOblog posts
  • Events and Webinars
  • Industry Activity Trends
  • Resources and Links
  • Connect and Converse With Us
  • About Us

    • Enjoy this edition of the Server StorageIO update newsletter.

    Cheers GS

    Industry Activity Trends

    Recent Industry Activates and Trends

    EMC is now Dell EMC – What this means is that EMC is no longer a publicly traded company instead now being privately held under the Dell Technologies umbrella. In case you did not know or had forgotten, one of the principal owners of Dell Technologies is Michael Dell aka the founder of Dell Computers which itself went private a few years ago. Read more in this Server StoageIOblog update post.

    While Michael Dell and Dell Technologies continues to expand by acquiring companies (granted also shedding some assets to support that growth), HP Enterprise (HPE) is taking a different approach. Similar to Dell, HPE has been offloading some of its divisions and assets since its split into two separate companies about a year ago.

    More recently HPE has announced it is selling off some of its software assets to which follows other deals where HPE created a new partnership with CSC to offload or park some of its services assets. What’s not clear is HPE CEO Meg Whitman leveraging the trend that some Private Equity (PE) firms are interested in acquiring under performing companies or assets to prepare them as part of a pivot to profit scenario, or something else?

    • HPE selling off business units including software group here, here, here and here
    • HPE looking to boost its HPC and super compute business with $275B acquisition of SGI
    • Announced new shared storage for SMB and mid-size environments including for sub $10K price points. These include HPE StoreVirtual 3200 and HPE MSA 2042.
    • HPE and Dropbox partnership
    • Various other HPE news and updates

    Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) startup vendor Nutanix finally IPO (NTNX) after a not so consolidated IPO cycle. Prior to the IPO NTNX acquired other startup Pernix (VMware cache software solution) and calmio to beef up their product portfolio. Congratulations to NTNX and best wishes, hopefully the public markets will provide risk vs. reward, on the other hand, now being public, the spotlight will be on them.

    Nutanix Stock via Yahoo 10/31/16
    NTNX Stock Trading via Yahoo Finance 10/31/16 (Click to see current status)


    Microsoft has extended its software defined storage (SDS) along with software defined data center (SDDC) as well as software defined networking (SDN) capabilities by formerly announcing Windows Server 2016. A month or so ago Microsoft announced the 20th birthday or anniversary of Windows Server as well as having previously released Tech Previews (TP).
    See what’s new in Server 2016 here. For those not aware, With Windows Server 2016, you can configure it to be CI, HCI, legacy or various hybrid ways to meet your needs, along with your choice of hardware from your preferred vendor or solution provider. Read more about Microsoft Windows Server 2016 and related topics in this Server StorageIOblog post.

    Needless to say there is a lot of other activity in the works including VMware enhancements with vSphere 6.5 as well as VMware vSphere (and related tools) being announced as hosted on bare metal (BM) dedicated private servers (DPS) via AWS among other updates.

     

    StorageIOblog Posts

    Recent and popular Server StorageIOblog posts include:

    View other recent as well as past StorageIOblog posts here

     

    StorageIO Commentary in the news

    Recent Server StorageIO industry trends perspectives commentary in the news.

    Via InfoStor Top Ten Data Storage Performance Tips: Improving Data Storage
    Via ChannelProNetwork Your Time Will Come, All-Flash Storage
    Via FutureReadyOEM When to implement ultra-dense CI or HCI storage
    Via EnterpriseStorageForum Top 10 Enterprise SSD Market Trends
    Via EnterpriseStorageForum Storage Hyperconvergence: When Does It Make Sense?
    SearchCloudStorage: EMC VxRack Neutrino Nodes launched for OpenStack cloud storage
    EnterpriseStorageForum: Looking Beyond the Hype at Hyperconvergence in Storage
    CDW Digital: Transitioning Data Centers To Hybrid Environment
    SearchDataCenter: EMC, VCE, CI and Hyperconverged vs. Hyper-small
    InfoStor: Docker and Containerization Storage Buying Guide
    NetworkComputing: Dell-EMC: The Storage Ramifications
    EnterpriseTech: VMware Targets Synergies in Dell-EMC Deal 
    HPCwire: Dell to Buy EMC Focus on Large Enterprises and High-End Computing
    EnterpriseStorageForum: Storage Futures: Do We Really Need to Store Everything?

    View more Server, Storage and I/O hardware as well as software trends comments here

     

    StorageIO Tips and Articles

    Recent and past Server StorageIO articles appearing in different venues include:

    Via Iron Mountain  Is Your Data Infrastructure Prepared for Storm Season?
    Via Iron Mountain  Preventing Unexpected Disasters: IT and Data Infrastructure
    Via FutureReadyOEM  When to implement ultra-dense storage
    Via Micron Blog (Guest Post)  Whats next for NVMe and your Data Center
    Redmond Magazine  Data Protection Trends – Evolving Data Protection and Resiliency
    Virtual Blocks (VMware Blogs)  EVO:RAIL Part III – When And Where To Use It?
    Virtual Blocks (VMware Blogs)  EVO:RAIL Part II – Why And When To Use It?
    Virtual Blocks (VMware Blogs)  EVO:RAIL Part I – What Is It And Why Does It Matter?

    Check out these resources techniques, trends as well as tools. View more tips and articles here

     

    Events and Activities

    Recent and upcoming event activities.

    December 7, 2016 11AM PT – BrightTalk Webinar: Hyper-Converged Infrastructure

    November 29-30, 2016 – Nijkerk Netherlands Workshop Seminar (Presenting)
    Organized by Brouwer Storage Consultancy
    Converged and Other Server Storage Decision Making

    November 28, 2016 – Nijkerk Netherlands Workshop Seminar (Presenting)
    Organized by Brouwer Storage Consultancy     – Industry Trends Update

    November 23, 2016 10AM PT – BrightTalk Webinar: BCDR and Cloud Backup
    Software Defined Data Infrastructures (SDDI) and Data Protection

    November 23, 2016 9AM PT – BrightTalk Webinar: Cloud Storage
    Hybrid and Software Defined Data Infrastructures (SDDI)

    November 22, 2016 10AM PT – BrightTalk Webinar: Cloud Infrastructure
    Hybrid and Software Defined Data Infrastructures (SDDI)

    November 15, 2016 11AM PT – Redmond Magazine and SolarWinds
    Presenting – The O.A.R. of Virtualization Scaling

    November 3, 2016 11AM PT – Redmond Magazine and Dell Software
    Presenting – Backup, Data Protection and Security Management

    October 27, 2016 10AM PT – Virtual Instruments Webinar
    The Value of Infrastructure Insight

    October 20, 2016 9AM PT – BrightTalk Webinar: Next-Gen Data Centers
    Software Defined Data Infrastructures (SDDI) – Servers, Storage and Virtualization

    September 20, 2016 8AM PT – BrightTalk Webinar
    Software Defined Data Infrastructures (SDDI)
    Enabling Software Defined Data Centers

    September 13, 2016 11AM PT – Redmond Magazine and Dell Software
    Windows Server 2016 and Active Directory
    What’s New and How to Plan for Migration

    See more webinars and other activities on the Server StorageIO Events page here.

     

    Server StorageIO Industry Resources and Links

    Useful links and pages:
    Microsoft TechNet – Various Microsoft related from Azure to Docker to Windows
    storageio.com/links – Various industry links (over 1,000 with more to be added soon)
    objectstoragecenter.com – Cloud and object storage topics, tips and news items
    OpenStack.org – Various OpenStack related items
    storageio.com/protect – Various data protection items and topics
    thenvmeplace.com – Focus on NVMe trends and technologies
    thessdplace.com – NVM and Solid State Disk topics, tips and techniques
    storageio.com/performance – Various server, storage and I/O performance and benchmarking
    VMware Technical Network – Various VMware related items

    Ok, nuff said, for now…

    Cheers
    Gs

    Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, vSAN and VMware vExpert. Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2023 Server StorageIO(R) and UnlimitedIO All Rights Reserved

    Posted on

    EMC is now Dell EMC, part of Dell Technologies and other server storage Updates

    EMC is now Dell EMC and other server storage Updates

    server storage I/O trends

    In case you missed it or did not hear, EMC is now Dell EMC and is future ready (one of their new tag lines).

    What this means is that EMC is no longer a publicly traded company instead now being privately held under the Dell Technologies umbrella. In case you did not know or had forgotten, one of the principal owners of Dell Technologies is Michael Dell aka the founder of Dell Computers which itself went private a few years ago. The Dell Server division which sells direct as well as via channels and OEMs is now part of the Dell EMC division (e.g. they sell Servers, Storage, I/O and Networking hardware, software and services).

    Dell EMC Storage Portfolio
    Dell EMC Storage Portfolio – Via emc.com

    Other related news and activities include:

    • Dell EMC sells Content Division (e.g. Documentum (bought in 2003), InfoArchive and LEAP) to OpenText for $1.62B USD
    • Dell is selling its Sonicwall and software division (e.g. what was a mix of Quest and other non-EMC related software) to a Private Equity group. The new company to be called Quest has ironically as one of its investors, activist PE firm Elliott Management. You might recall Elliott Management was the activist investor pushing for more value out of EMC for shareholders.
    • Expands Data Protection Portfolio For VMware Environments
    • Hybrid Cloud Platform Enhancements
    • XtremIO New Features and Management for Virtualized Environments
    • Combines DSSD and PowerEdge Servers for SAS (Software) Analytics
    • ScaleIO Ready Node Offers All-Flash Software-Defined
    • Expands Microsoft Support across Cloud and Converged Infrastructure
    • With approximately 140,000 employees worldwide post merger Dell EMC has announce some expected layoffs.

    Dell EMC Enahncements made today

    • Announced a new entry-level VMAX (200F) with very small physical footprint, affordable starter system price and flexibility to scale as you need to grow. Also announced were SRDF third site enhancements as well as VPLEX updates.
    • Data Domain enhancements including OS 6.0, flash and tiering across private, public and hybrid cloud
    • Unity mid-range storage (e.g. the successor to VNX) enhanced with all-flash and UnityOE software updates that include in-line compression along with cloud tiering. All-flash Unity models using 15.36TB SAS Flash SSD drives (3D NAND) can support up to 384TB in a 2U rack. Cloud tiering includes support for Virtustream, AWS and Microsoft Azure.

    Dell EMC VMAX storage family
    Dell EMC VMAX family and new 200F – Via emc.com

    Note that in-line compression on Unity and VMAX systems is available on all-flash based systems, while tiering is available on both all-flash as well as hybrid systems.

    Where To Learn More

    Dell Updates Storage Center Operating System 7 (SCOS 7)
    EMC DSSD D5 Rack Scale Direct Attached Shared SSD All Flash Array Part I
    Part II – EMC DSSD D5 Direct Attached Shared AFA
    EMCworld 2016 Getting Started on Dell EMC announcements
    EMCworld 2016 EMC Hybrid and Converged Clouds Your Way
    Dell-EMC: The Storage Ramifications
    VMware Targets Synergies in Dell-EMC Deal 
    Dell to Buy EMC for $67B; Sharpen Focus on Large Enterprises and High-End Computing
    Dell SAN strategy examined after move to go private
    EMC VxRack Neutrino Nodes launched for OpenStack cloud storage
    EMC Under Pressure To Spin Off VMware
    EMC Bridges Cloud, On-Premise Storage With TwinStrata Buy
    Top Ten Takeaways from EMC World
    When to implement ultra-dense server storage
    EMCworld 2015 How Do You Want Your Storage Wrapped?
    EMCworld 2015 How Do You Want Your Storage Wrapped?

    What This All Means

    For those that think (or wish) that now that EMC has gone private (e.g. granted under Dell ownership) that they have gone away and no longer relevant, time will tell what happens long term. However while they (EMC, now Dell EMC) are no longer a publicly held company, they are still very much in the public spotlight addressing legacy, current as well as emerging IT data infrastructure and software-defined data center, software defined storage and related topics spanning cloud, virtual, container among others.

    What this all means is that Dell EMC is following through with providing different types of data infrastructure along with associated server, storage and I/O solutions as well as associated software defined storage management and data protection tools to meet various needs. How do you want your storage wrapped? Do you want it software defined such as a ScaleIO, ECS (object), DataDomain (data protection), VIPR, or Unity among other virtual storage appliances (VSAs), or tin-wrapped as a physical storage system or appliance?

    With the VMAX 200F, Dell EMC is showing that they can scale-down the VMAX. Dell EMC is also showing they can scale VMAX up and out while making it affordable and physically practical for smaller environments who want, need or are required to have traditional enterprise class storage in a small footprint (price, physical space) with enterprise resiliency.

    Dell EMC Storage Portfolio
    Dell EMC Storage Portfolio – Via emc.com

    A question that comes up is what happens with the various competing Dell and EMC (pre-merger) storage product lines. If you look closely at the storage line up photo above, you will notice the Dell SC (e.g. Compellent) is shown along with all of the EMC solutions. This should or could prompt the question of what about the PS series (e.g. EqualLogic) or some MD. So far the answer I have received is that they remain available for sale which you can confirm via the Dell website. However, what will the future bring to those or others is still TBD.

    Needless to say there is more to see and hear coming out of Dell EMC in the weeks and months ahead, that is unless as some predict (or wishful thinking) they go away which I don’t see happening anytime soon. Oh, FWIW, Dell and EMC have been Server StorageIO clients direct and indirect via 3rd parties in the past (that’s a disclosure btw).

    Ok, nuff said, for now…

    Cheers
    Gs

    Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP and VMware vSAN vExpert, Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2023 Server StorageIO(R) and UnlimitedIO All Rights Reserved

    Posted on

    Server StorageIO August 2016 Update Newsletter

    Volume 16, Issue VIII

    Hello and welcome to this August 2016 Server StorageIO update newsletter.

    In This Issue

  • Commentary in the news
  • Tips and Articles
  • StorageIOblog posts
  • Events and Webinars
  • Industry Activity Trends
  • Resources and Links

    • Enjoy this shortened summer edition of the Server StorageIO update newsletter.

    Cheers GS

    Industry Activity Trends

    With VMworld coming up this week, rest assured, there will be plenty to talk about and discuss in the following weeks. However for now, here are a few things from this past month.

    At Flash Memory Summit (FMS) which is more of a component, vendor to vendor industry type event, there was buzz about analytics, however what was shown as analytics tended to be Iometer. Hmmm, more on that in a future post. However something else at FMS besides variations of Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) including SSD, NAND, Flash, Storage Class Memory (SCM) such as 3D XPoint (among its new marketing names) along with NVM Expres (NVMe) was NVMe over Fabric.

    This includes NVMe over RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) which can be implemented on some 10 Gb (and faster) Ethernet adapters as well as some InfiniBand adapters from Mellanox among others. Another variation is Fibre Channel NVMe (FC-NVMe) where the NVMe protocol command set is transported as a Upper Level Protocol (ULP) over FC. This is similar to how the SCSI command set is implemented on FC (e.g. SCSI_FCP or FCP) which means NVMe can be seen as a competing protocol to FCP (which it will or could be). Naturally not to be left out, some of the marketers have already started with Persistent Memory over Fabric among other variations of Non- Ephemeral Memory over Fabrics. More on NVM, NVMe and fabrics in future posts, commentary and newsletter.

    Some other buzzword topics regaining mention (or perhaps for the first time for some) includes
    FedRAMP, Authority To Operate (ATO) clouds for Government entities, and FISMA among others. Many service providers, cloud and hosting providers from large AWS and Azure to smaller Blackmesh have added FedRAMP and other options in addition to traditional, DevOps.

    Some of you may recall me mentioning ScaleMP in the past which is a technology for aggregating multiple compute servers including processors and memory into a converged resource pool. Think the opposite of a hypervisor that divides up resources to support consolidation. In other words, where you need to scale up without complexity of clustering or to avoid having to change and partition your software applications. In addition to ScaleMP, a newer hardware agnostic startup to check out is Tidal Scale.

    On the merger and acquisition front, the Dell / EMC deal is moving forward expected to close soon, perhaps by time or before you read this. In other news, HPE announced that it is buying SGI to gain access to a larger part of the traditional legacy big data Super Compute and High Performance Compute (HPC) market. One of the SGI diamonds in the rough that if you are not aware, is DMF for data management. HPE and Dropbox also announced a partnership deal earlier this summer.

    That’s all for now, time to pack my bags and off to Las Vegas for VMworld 2016.

    Ok, nuff said, for now…

     

    StorageIOblog Posts

    Recent and popular Server StorageIOblog posts include:

    View other recent as well as past StorageIOblog posts here

     

    StorageIO Commentary in the news

    Recent Server StorageIO industry trends perspectives commentary in the news.

    Via FutureReadyOEM Q&A: when to implement ultra-dense storage
    Via EnterpriseStorageForum Comments on Top 10 Enterprise SSD Market Trends
    Via SearchStorage Comments on NAS system buying decisions
    Via EnterpriseStorageForum Comments on Cloud Storage Pros and Cons
    EnterpriseStorageForum Comments on Top 10 Enterprise SSD Market Trends

    View more Server, Storage and I/O hardware as well as software trends comments here

     

    StorageIO Tips and Articles

    Recent and past Server StorageIO articles appearing in different venues include:

    Via Iron Mountain Preventing Unexpected Disasters: IT and Data Infrastructure
    Via FutureReadyOEM Q&A: When to implement ultra-dense storage servers
    Via Micron Blog Whats next for NVMe and your Data Center – Preparing for Tomorrow
    Redmond Magazine: Trends – Evolving from Data Protection to Data Resiliency
    IronMountain: 5 Noteworthy Data Privacy Trends From 2015
    InfoStor: Data Protection Gaps, Some Good, Some Not So Good
    Virtual Blocks (VMware Blogs): EVO:RAIL ? When And Where To Use It?

    Check out these resources techniques, trends as well as tools. View more tips and articles here

    StorageIO Webinars and Industry Events

    December 7: BrightTalk Webinar – Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) Webinar 11AM PT

    November 23: BrightTalk Webinar – BCDR and Cloud Backup – Software Defined Data Infrastructures (SDDI) and Data Protection – 10AM PT

    November 23: BrightTalk Webinar – Cloud Storage – Hybrid and Software Defined Data Infrastructures (SDDI) – 9AM PT

    November 22: BrightTalk Webinar – Cloud Infrastructure – Hybrid and Software Defined Data Infrastructures (SDDI) – 10AM PT

    October 20: BrightTalk Webinar – Next-Gen Data Centers – Software Defined Data Infrastructures (SDDI) including Servers, Storage and Virtualizations – 9AM PT

    September 29: TBA Webinar – 10AM PT

    September 27-28 – NetApp – Las Vegas

    September 20: BrightTalk Webinar – Software Defined Data Infrastructures (SDDI) Enabling Software Defined Data Centers – Part of Software-Defined Storage summit – 8AM PT

    September 13: Redmond Webinar – Windows Server 2016 and Active Directory What’s New and How to Plan for Migration – 11AM PT

    September 8: Redmond Webinar – Data Protection for Modern Microsoft Environments – 11AM PT

    August 29-31: VMworld Las Vegas

    August 25 – MSP CMG – The Answer is Software Defined – What was the question?

    August 16: BrightTalk Webinar Software Defined Data Centers (SDDC) are in your future (if not already) – Part of Enterprise Software and Infrastructure summit 8AM PT

    August 10-11 Flash Memory Summit (Panel discussion August 11th) – NVMe over Fabric

    See more webinars and other activities on the Server StorageIO Events page here.

     

    Server StorageIO Industry Resources and Links

    Check out these useful links and pages:

    storageio.com/links – Various industry links (over 1,000 with more to be added soon)
    objectstoragecenter.com – Cloud and object storage topics, tips and news items
    storageioblog.com/data-protection-diaries-main/ – Various data protection items and topics
    thenvmeplace.com – Focus on NVMe trends and technologies
    thessdplace.com – NVM and Solid State Disk topics, tips and techniques
    storageio.com/performance.com – Various server, storage and I/O performance and benchmarking

    Ok, nuff said

    Cheers
    Gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

    Posted on

    Server StorageIO May 2016 Update Newsletter

    Volume 16, Issue V

    Hello and welcome to this May 2016 Server StorageIO update newsletter.

    In This Issue

  • Commentary in the news
  • Tips and Articles
  • StorageIOblog posts
  • Events and Webinars
  • Industry Activity Trends
  • Resources and Links

    • Enjoy this shortened edition of the Server StorageIO update newsletter, watch for more tips, articles, lab report test drive reviews, blog posts, videos and podcast’s and in the news commentary appearing soon.

    Cheers GS

    StorageIOblog Posts

    Recent and popular Server StorageIOblog posts include:

    View other recent as well as past blog posts here

     

    StorageIO Commentary in the news

    Recent Server StorageIO industry trends perspectives commentary in the news.

    Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking: Various comments and discussions

    StorageIOblog: Additional comments and perspectives

    SearchCloudStorage: Comments on OpenIO joins object storage cloud scrum

    SearchCloudStorage: Comments on EMC VxRack Neutrino Nodes and OpenStack

    View more Server, Storage and I/O hardware as well as software trends comments here

     

    StorageIO Tips and Articles

    Recent Server StorageIO articles appearing in different venues include:

    Via Micron Blog (Guest Post): What’s next for NVMe and your Data Center – Preparing for Tomorrow Today

    Check out these resources techniques, trends as well as tools. View more tips and articles here

    StorageIO Webinars and Industry Events

    Brouwer Storage (Nijkerk Holland) June 10-15, 2016 – Various in person seminar workshops

    June 15: Software Defined Data center with Greg Schulz and Fujitsu International

    June 14: Round table with Greg Schulz and John Williams (General manager of Reduxio) and Gert Brouwer. Discussion about new technologies with Reduxio as an example.

    June 10: Hyper converged, Converged , and related subjects presented Greg Schulz

    Simplify and Streamline Your Virtual Infrastructure – May 17 webinar

    Is Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Right for Your Business? May 11 webinar

    EMCworld (Las Vegas) May 2-4, 2016

    Interop (Las Vegas) May 4-6 2016

    Making the Cloud Work for You: Rapid Recovery April 27, 2016 webinar

    See more webinars and other activities on the Server StorageIO Events page here.

     

    Server StorageIO Industry Resources and Links

    Check out these useful links and pages:

    storageio.com/links – Various industry links (over 1,000 with more to be added soon)
    objectstoragecenter.com – Cloud and object storage topics, tips and news items
    storageioblog.com/data-protection-diaries-main/ – Various data protection items and topics
    thenvmeplace.com – Focus on NVMe trends and technologies
    thessdplace.com – NVM and Solid State Disk topics, tips and techniques
    storageio.com/performance.com – Various server, storage and I/O performance and benchmarking

    Ok, nuff said

    Cheers
    Gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

    Posted on

    Dell Updates Storage Center Operating System 7 (SCOS 7)

    Dell Updates Storage Center Operating System 7 (SCOS 7)

    server storage I/O trends

    In case you missed it, Dell recently announced Storage Center Operating System 7 (SCOS 7) with several enhancements for their SC series storage systems (e.g. Compellent). For those who are under maintenance agreements, the new features are no charge upgrades. Most of the SCOS 7 features should be generally available now (or soon) for the SC9000 series with other platform support phased in over time.

    Summary of Dell SC07 enhancements features

    • Block level dedupe in addition to previous file dedupe
    • Enhanced compression as a companion to dedupe of HDD and SSD data
    • Single volumes or LUN can span across HDD and SSD tiers
    • Live migration and volume management with load balancing
    • Ability to move volumes between arrays
    • Quality of Service (QoS) for performance across volumes and volume groups
    • QoS set by IOPs, bandwidth and latency of standard volumes and VMware VVOL
    • New Storage Manager replaces SC Enterprise Manager for unified management
    • Delivers on promise of a unified SC and FS NAS management
    • Ability to replicate data between PS (EqualLogic) and SC (Compellent)
    • HTML 5 interface and non-disruptive implementation

    Where To Learn More

    Learn more about Dell SC Series enhancements here and here.

    What This All Means

    Dell is following through on its previous commitments to both PS (e.g. EqualLogic) and SC (e.g. Compellent) customers with enhancements to increase functionality along with simplify management. These features will become more important to add continued to value to the SC and PS platforms independently of the impending Dell acquisition of EMC (e.g. Dell EMC). The elephant in the room discussion is with the impending Dell acquisition of EMC, and the new Dell EMC division (e.g. essentially the existing EMC plus the Dell Server group) what happens with the midrange storage products from both parties.

    Dell has the SC and PS as well as lower end direct attached storage (DAS) based Powervault series as well as the Exanet based Fluid file System among other technologies including Ocarina based data footprint reduction (DFR). If you recall, the Ocarina technology acquired by Dell enables not only dedupe, also compression and other DFR (here and here) capabilities. Meanwhile EMC has the VNX and Unity (announced in May 2016) among other offerings.

    Both Dell and EMC will need to continue to articulate the value of their midrange solutions prior to the acquisition closing. Likewise once the deal closes, the joint entities need to be crystal clear on where the different technologies fit for various markets or customer segments, as well as their future.

    Overall a good set of enhancements for the Dell SC (and PS) series.

    Ok, nuff said, for now…

    Cheers
    Gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2023 Server StorageIO(R) and UnlimitedIO All Rights Reserved

    Posted on

    EMCworld 2016 Getting Started on Dell EMC announcements

    EMCworld 2016 Getting Started on Dell EMC announcements

    server storage I/O trends

    It’s the first morning of EMCworld 2016 here in Las Vegas with some items already announced today, and more in the wings. One of the underlying themes and discussions besides what’s new or who’s doing what, is that this is for all practical purpose the last EMCworld with the upcoming Dell acquisition. What’s not clear is will there be a renamed and repackaged Dell/EMCworld?

    With current EMC President Jeremy Burton who used to be the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) at EMC slated to become the CMO across all of Dell, my bet is that there will be some type of new event picking up and moving to a new level of where EMCworld and Dellworld have been. More on the future of EMC and Dell in future posts, however for now, lets see what has unfolded so far today.

    Today’s EMCworld theme is modernize the data center which means a mix of hardware, software and services announcements spanning physical, virtual, cloud among others (e.g. how do you want your servers, storage and data infrastructure wrapped). While the themes are still EMC as the Dell acquisition has yet to be completed, however there is a Dell presence, including Michael Dell here in person (more on Dell later).

    The first wave of announcements include:

    • Unity All Flash Array (AFA) for small, entry-level environments
    • EMC Enterprise Copy Data Management software tools portfolio
    • ViPR Version 3.0 Controller
    • Virtustream global hyper-scale Storage Cloud for data protection and cloud native object
    • MyService360

    • Datadomain virtual edition and long-term archive

    What About The Dell Deal

    Michael Dell who is here at EMCworld announced on the main stage that Dell Technologies will be the name of the families of business.

    This family of business includes the joint Dell, EMC, VMware, Pivotal, Secureworks, RSA and Virtustream. The Dell client focused business will be called Dell leveraging

    that Brand, while the new joint Dell and EMC enterprise business will be called Dell EMC leveraging both of those brands. As a reminder, the Dell servers business unit will be moving into the existing EMC business as part of the enterprise business unit.

    Lets move onto the technology announcements from today.

    Unity AFA (and Hybrid)

    The new Unity all flash array (AFA) is a dual controller storage system optimized for Nonvolatile Memory (NVM) flash SSD, with unified (block and file) access. EMC is positioning Unity as an entry-level AFA starting around $18K USD for a 2U solutions (much capacity that includes is not yet known, more on that in a future post). As well as having a low entry cost, EMC is positioning Unity for a broad, mass market, volume distribution that can be leveraged by their partners, including Dell. More on Unity in future posts. While Unity is new and modern, it comes from the same group who has created the VNXe leveraging that knowledge and skills base.

    Note that Unity is positioned for small, mid-sized, remote office branch office (ROBO), departmental and specialized AFA situations, where EMC NVMe based DSSD D5 is positioned for higher-end shared direct attached server flash, while XtremIO and VMAX also positioned for higher-end, higher performance and workload consolidation scenarios.

    • Simple, flexible, easy to use in a 2U packaging that scale up to 80TB of NVM flash SSD storage
    • Scalable up to 3PB of storage for larger expanded configurations
    • Affordable ($18K USD starting price, $10K entry-level hybrid)
    • Modern AFA storage for entry, small, mid-sized, workgroup, departments and specialized environments
    • Unified file, block, and VMware VVOL support for storage access
    • Also available in hybrid, as well as software defined virtual and converged configurations
    • Higher performance (EMC indicates 300,000 IOPs) for given entry-level systems
    • Available in all-flash array, hybrid array, software-defined and converged configurations
    • Native controller based encryption with synchronous and asynchronous replication
    • VMware VASA 2.0, VAAI, VVols and VMware integration
    • Tight integration with EMC Data Protection portfolio tools

    Read more about Unity here.

    Copy Data Management

    Enterprise Copy Data Management (eCDM) spans data copies from data protection including backup, BC, DR as well as for operational, analytics, test, dev, devops among other uses. Another term is Enterprise Copy Data Analytics (eCDA) which includes monitoring and management along with insight, awareness and of course analytics. These new offerings and initiatives tie together various capabilities across storage platforms and software defined storage management. Watch for more activity in and around eCDM and general copy data management. Read more here.

    ViPR Controller 3.0

    ViPR controller enhancements build on previous announcements, include automation as well as fail over with native replication to a standby ViPR controller. Note that there can actually be two standby controllers that are synchronized asynchronous with software built-in to ViPR. This means that there is no need for RecoverPoint or other products to do the replication of the ViPR controllers. To be clear, this is for high availability of the ViPR controllers themselves and not a replacement for HA or replication of upper layer applications, storage servers or underlying storage services. Also note that ViPR is available via open source (CoprHD via Github here). Read more here.

    MyService360

    MyService360 is a cloud based dashboard and data infrastructure monitoring management platform. Read more here.

    Virtustream Storage Cloud

    Viutustream cloud services and software tools compliments EMC (and others) storage systems as back-end for cool, cold or other bulk data storage needs. Focus is to sell primary storage to customers, then leverage back-end public cloud services for backup, archive, copy data management and other applications. This also means that the Virtustream storage cloud is not just for data protection such as archiving, backup, BC, DR it’s also for other big fast data including cloud and object native applications. Does this mean Virtustream is an alternative to other cloud and object storage services such as AWS S3, Google GCS among others? Yup. Read more here.

    Where To Learn More

    • Session Streaming For video of keynotes, general sessions, backstage sessions, and EMC TV coverage, click here
    • Social: Follow @EMCWorld,  @EMCCorp, @EMC_News and @EMCStorage, and join conversations with  #EMCWORLD, and like EMC on Facebook
    • Photos: Access event photos via  Flickr and EMC Pulse Blog or visit the special EMC World News microsite here
    • Reflections: Read Core Technologies President, Guy Churchward’s Reflections post on today’s announcements here
    • Visit the EMC Store, the EMC Community Network Site and The Core Blog

    What This All Means

    With the announcement of Unity and impending Dell deal, some of you might (or should) have a Dejavu moment of over a decade or so ago when Dell and EMC entered into OEM agreement around the then Clariion mid range storage arrays (e.g. predecessors of VNX and VNXe). Unity is being designed as a high performance, easy to use, flexible, scalable, cost-effective storage solutions for a broad high-volume sales and distribution channel market.

    What does Unity mean for EMC VNX and VNXe as well as XtremIO? Unity will position near where the VNXe has been positioned, along with some of the competing solutions from Dell among others. There might be some overlap with other EMC solutions, however if executed properly, Unity should open up some new markets, perhaps at the hands of some of the newer popular startups that only offer AFA vs. hybrids. Likewise I would expect Unity to appear in future converged solutions such as those via the EMC Converged business unit (e.g. VCE).

    Even with the upcoming Dell acquisition and integration, EMC continues to evolve and innovate in many areas.

    Watch for more announcements later today and throughout the week

    Ok, nuff said

    Cheers
    Gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2023 Server StorageIO(R) and UnlimitedIO All Rights Reserved

    Posted on

    Server StorageIO October 2015 Update Newsletter


    Server and StorageIO Update Newsletter

    Volume 15, Issue X – Industry Trends, M&A, PTSA

    Hello and welcome to this October 2015 Server StorageIO update newsletter. Fall has arrived here in the northern hemisphere which means its spring in the southern hemisphere, and getting colder here. While fall means cooler out-door temperature with winter just around the corner, in the IT/ITC industry, particular the data infrastructure sector (server, storage, I/O networking, hardware, software, cloud, physical, software defined virtual) things are very hot. Sure the various industry and vendor focused conferences, road shows and mini-events with associated new product, technology or services announcements (PTSA. There are also the various merger and acquisitions (M&A) that have occurred throughout the year including the recent Dell buying EMC, and Western Digital (WD) buying SANdisk among others.

    This edition of the Server StorageIO update newsletter has a focus on industry trends perspectives including recent M&A and PTSA activity. In addition to industry fall industry M&A and PTSA activity, there also plenty of conference, seminars, workshops, webinars and other events some of which you can see here on the Server StorageIO events page.

    On a slightly different note, for those interested and not aware of the European Union (EU) ruling earlier this month on data privacy (e.g. Safe Harbor), here and here are a couple of links to stories discussing the new ruling changes between the EU and US (among other countries). The EU data privacy rulings involve personal data being moved out of EU countries to US data centers such as cloud and application services firms.

    Enjoy this edition of the Server StorageIO update newsletter and watch for new tips, articles, StorageIO lab report reviews, blog posts, videos and podcast’s along with in the news commentary appearing soon.

    Cheers GS

    In This Issue

  • Feature Topic
  • Industry Trends News
  • Commentary in the news
  • Tips and Articles
  • StorageIOblog posts
  • Videos and Podcasts
  • Events and Webinars
  • Recommended Reading List
  • Industry Activity Trends
  • Server StorageIO Lab reports
  • New and Old Vendor Update
  • Resources and Links

    • Feature Topic – TBD

    This months feature topic theme is industry trends perspectives including M&A activity.

    Some M&A, IPO and divestiture activity includes:

    Continue reading more about NVM, NVMe, NAND flash, SSD Server and storage I/O related topics at www.thessdplace.com as well as about I/O performance, monitoring and benchmarking tools at www.storageperformance.us.

     

    StorageIOblog Posts

    Recent and popular Server StorageIOblog posts include:

    View other recent as well as past blog posts here

    Server Storage I/O Industry Activity Trends (Cloud, Virtual, Physical)

    StorageIO news (image licensed for use from Shutterstock by StorageIO)

    Some new Products Technology Services Announcements (PTSA) include:

    • Amazon Web Service (AWS) Simple Storage Service (S3) Infrequent Access (IA) storage class for inactive data with immediate access vs. Glacier cold or frozen (dormant) data with slow or time delayed access. AWS also announced Snowball bulk data import/export 50TB appliance service in addition to their earlier offered capabilities.
    • EMC Rexray (part of EMCcode) and Mesosphere (for Mesos data center operating system) have joined to enable persistent Docker volumes for Mesos (e.g. data center operating system platform).
    • Microsoft Azure recent enhancements include file access of cloud storage (on-premises and within Azure cloud) leveraging SMB interfaces. Here is a primer on Azure cloud storage service offerings. View other recent Azure Cloud Storage, Compute, Database and Data Analytics service offerings here. In addition to Microsoft Azure cloud offerings or Windows 10 desktop operating system, you can also download WIndows Server 2016 Technical Preview 3 (TP3) and see what’s new here. Some of the features include Storage Spaces Direct (e.g. DAS storage) and replication among other features.

    View other recent news and industry trends here

    StorageIO Commentary in the news

    StorageIO news (image licensed for use from Shutterstock by StorageIO)
    Recent Server StorageIO commentary and industry trends perspectives about news, activities tips, and announcements.

    • NetworkComputing: Dell buying EMC: The Storage Ramifications
    • EnterpriseTech: VMware Targets Synergies in Dell EMC Deal 
    • HPCwire: Dell to Buy EMC for $67B
    • EnterpriseStorageForum: Data Storage: Do We Really Need to Store Everything?
    • EnterpriseStorageForum: Why Hard Drives Are Here to Stay (For Now)
    • EnterpriseStorageForum: Top Ten Ways to Use OpenStack for Storage
    • EnterpriseStorageForum: Are We Heading for Storage Armageddon?

    View more Server, Storage and I/O hardware as well as software trends comments here

    Vendors you may not have heard of

    Various vendors (and service providers) you may not know or heard about recently.

    • Hedvig – Converged server storage software management tools
    • Infinidat – Another Moshe Yanai Storage System Startup
    • Mesosphere – Mesos Data Center Operating System management tools
    • Plexxi – Networking startup with former EMC executive Rich Napolitano as CEO
    • ScaleMP – Scale-out server aggregation management tools

    Check out more vendors you may know, have heard of, or that are perhaps new on the Server StorageIO Industry Links page here (over 1,000 entries and growing).

    StorageIO Tips and Articles

    Recent Server StorageIO articles appearing in different venues include:

    • Virtual Blocks (VMware Blogs):  EVO:RAIL – What Is It And Why Does It Matter?
      This is the first of a multi-part series looking at Converged Infrastructures (CI), Hyper-Converged Infrastructures (HCI), Cluster in Box (CiB) and other unified solution bundles. There is a trend of industry adoption talking about CI, HCI, CiB and other bundled solutions, along with growing IT customer adoption and deployment. Different sized organizations are looking at various types of CI solutions to meet various application and workloads needs. Read more here.
    • WServerNews.com:  Cloud (Microsoft Azure) storage considerations
      Let’s say that you have been tasked with, or decided that it is time to use (or try) public cloud storage such as Microsoft Azure. Ok, now what do you do and what decisions need to be made? Keep in mind that Microsoft Azure like many other popular public clouds provides many difference services available for fee (subscription) along with free trials. These services include applications, compute, networking, storage along with development and management platform tools. Read more here.
    • NetworkComputing:  Selecting Storage: Buzzword Bingo
      The storage industry is rife with buzzwords. Here are some of the popular ones storage buyers need to navigate carefully to find storage products that truly meet their needs. Read more here.

    • InfoStor:  What’s The Best Storage Benchmark? It Depends…

    • EnterpriseStorageForum:  NAND, DRAM, SAS/SCSI & SATA/AHCI: Not Dead, Yet!

    Check out these resources and links technology, techniques, trends as well as tools. View more tips and articles here

    StorageIO Videos and Podcasts

    StorageIO podcasts are also available via and at StorageIO.tv

    StorageIO Webinars and Industry Events

    Deltaware Emerging Technology Summit November 10, 2015

    Dell Data Protection Summit Nov 4, 2015 7AM PT

    Microsoft MVP Summit Nov 2-5, 2015

    Server Storage I/O Dutch Workshop Seminar Series
    Nijkerk Netherlands October 13-16 2015

    October 13 – Symposium: Software Defined Storage Management
    October 14 – Server Storage I/O Fundamental Trends
    October 15 – Symposium – Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM)
    October 16 – “Converged Day” Server and Storage Decision making

    Learn more and register at the Brouwer Consultancy website here.

    September 23 – Webinar Redmond Magazine & Dell Data Protection
    The New World Order of Data Protection – Focus on Recovery
    Learn more about the 9Rs of data protection and recovery

    See more webinars and other activities on the Server StorageIO Events page here.

    From StorageIO Labs

    Research, Reviews and Reports

    Quick Look: SATA and NVMe Flash SSD Performance
    SATA and NVMe flash SSD performance

    Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) Express (NVMe) continues to evolve as a technology for enabling and improving server storage I/O for NVM including nand flash SSD storage. NVMe streamlines performance enabling more work to be done (e.g. IOPs), data to be moved (bandwidth) at a lower response time using less CPU. The above figure is a quick look comparing nand flash SSD being accessed via SATA III (6Gbps) on the left and NVMe (x4) on the right. As with any server storage I/O performance comparisons there are many variables and take them with a grain of salt. While IOPs and bandwidth are often discussed, keep in mind that with the new protocol, drivers and device controllers with NVMe that streamline I/O less CPU is needed. Learn more about NVM, NVMe, flash, SSD and related topics at www.thessdplace.com.

    View other StorageIO lab review reports here

    Server StorageIO Recommended Reading List

    The following are various recommended reading including books, blogs and videos. If you have not done so recently, also check out the Intel Recommended Reading List (here) where you will also find a couple of my books.

    Seven Databases in Seven Weeks guide to no SQL via Amazon.com

    The Human Face of Big Data book review. To say this is a big book would be an understatement, then again, big data is a big topic with a lot of diversity if you open your eyes and think in a pragmatic way, which once you open and see the pages you will see. This is physically a big book (11x 14 inches) with lots of pictures, texts, stories, factoids and thought stimulating information of the many facets and dimensions of big data across 224 pages. The Human Face of Big Data is more than a coffee table or picture book as it is full of with information, factoids and perspectives how information and data surround us every day. Open up a copy of The Human Face of Big Data and you will see examples of how data and information are all around us, and our dependence upon it. Read more here.

    Server StorageIO Industry Resources and Links

    Check out these useful links and pages:

    storageio.com/links
    objectstoragecenter.com
    storageioblog.com/data-protection-diaries-main/
    storageperformance.us
    thenvmeplace
    thessdplace.com
    storageio.com/raid
    storageio.com/ssd

    Ok, nuff said

    Cheers
    Gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

    Posted on

    Dude, Dell is Getting (Buying) an EMC and VMware Deal

    Storage I/O trends

    Dude, Dell is Getting (Buying) an EMC and VMware Deal

    Some of you might remember the marketing campaign "Dude you’re getting a Dell" to show somebody buying a Dell computer.

    Today, Dell as in Michael Dell and his corporation Dell along with partner Silver Lake investment announced a $67B USD deal that they are acquiring EMC along with their stake in VMware which will stay an independently public traded company. Dell brings strength in small and medium-mid market strength and supplier to cloud and other managed service providers, Dell financing combines with EMC strength and enterprise portfolio. This deal also reunites the two parties who before had a strong storage joint venture with Dell OEMing EMC storage for about a decade before going their separate ways in the late 2000s.

    Dell buying EMC

    Key points

    • Privately held Dell is acquiring EMC and its various business units
    • VMware will stay independent public company with Dell as major owner
    • EMC based in Hopkinton Massachusetts will be headquarters for new Dell Systems Business Unit
    • Dell Systems Business Unit will also be headquarters for Dell servers
    • New Dell Systems Business Unit joint with EMC is expected to be a $30B USD plus sized entity
    • Dell see’s revenue synergies of about 3x over 1x cost of the combined entities
    • Dell see’s ability to generate cash to service debt coming from increased revenue growth
    • EMC global support, professional services, consulting to complement Dell capabilities
    • Ability for both partners to leverage their best of strengths from SMB to enterprise to cloud

    What this means big picture

    Basically EMC has gone private under the Dell umbrella while VMware remains an independent publicly traded company, granted with EMC and now Dell being the primary shareholder of that entity. Dell went private back in 2013 with its founder Michael Dell along with Silver Lake Partners as key investors. EMC has been under pressure from activist investors to sell off its investment in VMware to increase shareholder and was rumored to have been in acquisition discussions with other organizations such as HP. Now EMC (e.g. the non-VMware part) is effectively a private held company as the Dell Systems Business Unit to be initially headquartered in Hopkinton Massachusetts (EMC Headquarters) while Dell Corporation headquarters will remain in Austin Texas.

    The server business will be based in Hopkinton, which will be targeted at around a $30B USD business. Ironic that Massachusetts used to be a focus for server vendors from Dell (acquired by Compaq and then HP), Wang, DG (acquired by EMC) among others. This transaction puts Massachusetts back on the map as the Dell System Business Unit will also now be home to Dell servers. As of the announcement, there is an expectation that the Hopkinton headquarters will grow vs. shrink. Granted., some consolidation can be expected.

    Some questions that exist (among many others)

    What about Pivotal?

    One of the questions I have is that during the announcement discussions, not much if anything has been said about Pivotal and its future role or how it will be folded in, or set up as a tracking stock or similar activity. Also something to keep in mind as food for thought, or speculation, is that GE is an investor in Pivotal and GE has made noise about becoming more prominent player in software, just saying. In the meantime, let’s wait and see what happens with Pivotal.

    What about Lenovo relationship?

    After the last Dell breakup, EMC established a partnership and initiative with Lenovo to jointly produce servers that had been being sourced from Dell or others, as well as EMC moving its Iomega SMB storage business into the Lenovo initiative. Note that about a year ago Lenovo bought the former IBM x86 server business. What will become of that partnership for servers, as well as for Iomega moving forward?

    How will product rationalization occur?

    There is some product overlap in the storage business, as well as backup/data protection among some other areas. However looking at the bigger picture, there is not much if any overlap. Where there is overlap, one near-term approach that might (this is speculation) occur is to segment potential competing products into Enterprise and Systems business vs. SMB or entry-level. This could occur for storage products such as Dell Compellent, Exanet based Fluid NAS, EqualLogic and MD (OEM from NetApp) vs. those from EMC such as VMAX, VNX, Isilon, XtremIO, Datadomain among others. Likewise, there will need to be some rationalization for backup and data protection products such as EMC Networker, Avamar vs. Dell AppAssure, vRanger, NetVault as well as their OEM partners Commvault and Symantec among others.

    VCE gets leveraged as part of go to market?

    EMC took over ownership of VCE in 2014 with Cisco still involved, in fact if a product has Vblock in its name, it will be a Cisco server and network. However look for other VCE solutions to appear as well as the VxRACK announced earlier this year. I would expect new converge infrastructure (CI), hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) and Cluster-in-Box (CiB) solutions from VCE that would include Dell servers in the future leveraging different software (VMware among others).

    How will Dell OEM business drive things?

    Dell has had a server OEM business that has supplied technology to others, including in the past EMC. This business moves in under the new System Business Unit as part of what is or was EMC. Beyond servers, it will be interesting to see how that business unit can also move other technologies into the OEM or high volume market including to cloud and managed service providers who buy in bulk.

    Will this cause Cisco an EMC partner to buy another storage vendor?

    Maybe, that depends on what Cisco wants to do moving forward in addition to remaining a partner with EMC. Of course, if Cisco were to go storage shopping, who would that be? Perhaps DDN, Nimble or NetApp?

    With Michael Dell now having done one of, if not the largest tech deals in history, how will Larry Ellison of Oracle react?

    It has been said that the difference between God and Larry Ellison is that God was not interested in becoming Larry Ellison, however, is Larry Ellison still interested in industry bragging rights meaning will he want to do a big block buster deal involving Oracle to get some headlines, or enjoy his semi-retirement, perhaps buying a bankrupt country or something?

    Where to read, watch and learn more

    Storage I/O trends

    What this all means and wrap up

    Certainly there are many more questions about server, storage, I/O networking, cloud, virtual, software, hardware, security and management tools along with service and support that will get addressed in follow-up discussions.

    Near term, the combined entity needs to get out front and sell to customers, partners and prospects that EMC is not going away, or that Dell is going to get in the way of existing business. The two need to run as is pursuing and closing each others respective business making sure that competitors do not create barriers to deals closing and disrupting revenue. In other words, neither Dell nor EMC can afford to foster a revenue prevention department now, nor can either afford to allow any other competitor to become a revenue prevention department as a service (e.g. costing either EMC or Dell revenue).

    Overall this deal has some interesting upside synergies and potential, granted, we will need to see how things unfold.

    Disclosure: Dell and EMC have been Server StorageIO clients, and StorageIO uses Dell as well as Lenovo servers among others technologies including VMware.

    Ok, nuff said, for now…

    Cheers
    Gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2023 Server StorageIO(R) and UnlimitedIO All Rights Reserved

    Posted on

    VMware vCloud Air Server StorageIOlab Test Drive with videos

    Server Storage I/O trends

    VMware vCloud Air Server StorageIOlab Test Drive with videos

    Recently I was invited by VMware vCloud Air to do a free hands-on test drive of their actual production environment. Some of you may already being using VMware vSphere, vRealize and other software defined data center (SDDC) aka Virtual Server Infrastructure (VSI) or Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) tools among others. Likewise some of you may already be using one of the many cloud compute or Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2), Centurylink, Google Cloud, IBM Softlayer, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace or Virtustream (being bought by EMC) among many others.

    VMware vCloud Air provides a platform similar to those just mentioned among others for your applications and their underlying resource needs (compute, memory, storage, networking) to be fulfilled. In addition, it should not be a surprise that VMware vCloud Air shares many common themes, philosophies and user experiences with the traditional on-premises based VMware solutions you may be familiar with.

    VMware vCloud Air overview

    You can give VMware vCloud Air a trial for free while the offer lasts by clicking here (service details here). Basically if you click on the link and register a new account for using VMware vCloud Air they will give you up to $500 USD in service credits to use in the real production environment while the offer lasts which iirc is through end of June 2015.

    Server StorageIO test drive VMware vCloud Air video I
    Click on above image to view video part I

    Server StorageIO test drive VMware vCloud Air part II
    Click on above image to view video part II

    What this means is that you can go and setup some servers with as many CPUs or cores, memory, Hard Disk Drive (HDD) or flash Solid State Devices (SSD) storage, external IP networks using various operating systems (Centos, Ubuntu, Windows 2008, 20012, 20012 R2) for free, or until you use up the service credits.

    Speaking of which, let me give you a bit of a tip or hint, even though you can get free time, if you provision a fast server with lots of fast SSD storage and leave it sit idle over night or over a weekend, you will chew up your free credits rather fast. So the tip which should be common sense is if you are going to do some proof of concepts and then leave things alone for a while, power the virtual cloud servers off to stretch your credits further. On the other hand, if you have something that you want to run on a fast server with fast storage over a weekend or longer, give that a try, just pay attention to your resource usage and possible charges should you exhaust your service credits.

    My Server StorageIO test drive mission objective

    For my test drive, I created a new account by using the above link to get the service credits. Note that you can use your regular VMware account with vCloud Air, however you wont get the free service credits. So while it is a few minutes of extra work, the benefit was worth it vs. simply using my existing VMware account and racking up more cloud services charges on my credit card. As part of this Server StorageIOlab test drive, I created two companion videos part I here and part II here that you can view to follow along and get a better idea of how vCloud works.

    VMware vCloud Air overview
    Phase one, create the virtual data center, database server, client servers and first setup

    My goal was to set up a simple Virtual Data Center (VDC) that would consist of five Windows 2012 R2 servers, one would be a MySQL database server with the other four being client application servers. You can download MySQL from here at Oracle as well as via other sources. For applications to simplify things I used Hammerdb as well as Benchmark Factory that is part of the Quest Toad tool set for database admins. You can download a free trial copy of Benchmark Factory here, and HammerDB here. Another tool that I used for monitoring the servers is Spotlight on Windows (SoW) which is also free here. Speaking of tools, here is a link to various server and storage I/O performance as well as monitoring tools.

    Links to tools that I used for this test-drive included:

    Setting up a virtual data center vdc
    Phase one steps and activity summary

    Summary of phase one of vdc
    Recap of what was done in phase one, watch the associated video here.

    After the initial setup (e.g. part I video here), the next step was to add some more virtual machines and take a closer look at the environment. Note that most of the work in setting up this environment was Windows, MySQL, Hammerdb, Benchmark Factory, Spotlight on Windows along with other common tools so their installation is not a focus in these videos or this post, perhaps a future post will dig into those in more depth.

    Summary of phase two of the vdc
    What was done during phase II (view the video here)

    VMware vCloud Air vdc trest drive

    There is much more to VMware vCloud Air and on their main site there are many useful links including overviews, how-too tutorials, product and service offering details and much more here. Besides paying attention to your resource usage and avoid being surprised by service charges, two other tips I can pass along that are also mentioned in the videos (here and here) is to pay attention what region you setup your virtual data centers in, second is have your network thought out ahead of time to streamline setting up the NAT and firewall as well as gateway configurations.

    Where to learn more

    Learn more about data protection and related topics, themes, trends, tools and technologies via the following links:

    Server Storage I/O trends

    What this all means and wrap-up

    Overall I like the VMware vCloud Air service which if you are VMware centric focused will be a familiar cloud option including integration with vCloud Director and other tools you may already have in your environment. Even if you are not familiar with VMware vSphere and associated vRealize tools, the vCloud service is intuitive enough that you can be productive fairly quickly. On one hand vCloud Air does not have the extensive menu of service offerings to choose from such as with AWS, Google, Azure or others, however that also means a simpler menu of options to choose from and simplify things.

    I had wanted to spend some time actually using vCloud and the offer to use some free service credits in the production environment made it worth making the time to actually setup some workloads and do some testing. Even if you are not a VMware focused environment, I would recommend giving VMware vCloud Air a test drive to see what it can do for you, as opposed to what you can do for it…

    Ok, nuff said for now

    Cheers
    Gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved