Category Storage

The latest update to this is included here in the Final Reprise! EMC 20% Unified Storage Guarantee: Final Reprise

After all of the brouhaha and discussion from a recent post EMC 20% Unified Storage Guarantee !EXPOSED! I thought it valuable to dive a little deeper into our own calculator.

I’m sure like me, some of you may have tried to use the calculator and found it to be really cool, but you also may have experienced a few bouts of frustration.   It’s okay, I completely get it.  I get it so much that I’m writing this article to help reveal some of the challenges and how to overcome them.

For starters, one of the coolest bits about the EMC Unified Storage Capacity Calculator… is the fact it has a –help- option right there on screen.  I totally get it if you didn’t notice it, or feel you’re above ‘help’, I’m with you wholly! But I decided ‘Why not.. what does the “?” unveil? Wait for it… it unveils secrets to your success! And a breakdown of the ‘sauce’ so to speak!

When you first launch the Capacity Calculator for the first time, you should see a screen which looks like this – It defaults to a NX4 with nothing configured or set up.

Configuration and Templates

Regardless of which System Model you choose, NX4, NS-120, NS-480 or NS-960, the “?” help text for the NAS/SAN/Breakdown will be the same across the board.  Exceptions being that the help file will specifically declare whether you’re looking at a specific/respective model.   

As you start to fill the system with disks you may at some point come across an error such as ‘not enough space’, this will usually come up when you’re playing around with SAN configurations, or NAS (Custom) configs.    There is no need to be worried or alarmed when this happens.   All this is saying is that based upon the configuration you have ‘defaulted’ in the column/tab you’re working in, there is not enough “space” in that particular tray to add the disks.  

There are two ways to resolve this.    Either change to a disk format you can work with (Such as HS (Hot Spare)) as seen above, or using the arrows in the System Model diagram, you can move to another tray entirely!

System Models

What I find to be particularly useful and cool is the fact that when you select a particular system, hover over the “?” in the System Model section is that it will give you a breakdown of details about the system. (No more needing to go search the internet or call your TC asking “How many drives will my system take!?”  Not only that, but it also provides you with details of how you’d go about building this configuration – both in this simulator so to speak, and respectively when you go live with this as a real configuration.   Sweet if you ask me!

Total Usable Capacity

One particularly useful and cool bit about this is it not only tells you specifically what kinds of disks are required of the system, one particular complaint I’ve heard from some folks was about not knowing how many Spares were recommended in their configuration.  Well, check out the ‘caution’ symbol!

I built the following un-realistic configuration so we could drill down in to the system to see what it will report for ‘spares’ required.  Based upon this example, it looks like I need spares of every type, EFC, FC and ATA!    (I populated a tray of each type of disk to make this as unrealistic as possible :))  Pretty cool if you ask me!

But for the most part, this accounts for all of the ‘errors’, common or otherwise which I am noticing are encountered using this calculator.

Feel free to give it a good run through, but I’m so glad to see that a majority (read:all) of our concerns of how it operates and functions are actually solved right here in the help file! And in the case of SAN Custom Configuration (read:lack of templates) the little workaround for ‘lack of space’ above seems to address that in whole!

I hope you find the EMC Unified Storage Capacity Calculator to be as cool as I do, and that you get the best out of it!

Thanks and for those of you who haven’t played with the Celerra Virtual Appliance yet – Go download the Uber version here! Besser UBER : Celerra VSA UBER v2 (That’ll give you the ability to play around with the Celerra today without having to buy the hardware… nothing spells getting familiar than actually playing with a fully functioning system!)

Thanks, and good luck!

The latest update to this is included here in the Final Reprise! EMC 20% Unified Storage Guarantee: Final Reprise

The latest update to this is included here in the Final Reprise! EMC 20% Unified Storage Guarantee: Final Reprise

For those of you who know me (and those who don’t, hi! Pleased to meet you!) I spent a lot of time at NetApp battling the storage efficiency game, always trying to justify where all of the storage space went in a capacity bound situation.   However since joining EMC, all I would ever hear from the competition is how ‘space inefficient’ we were and frankly, I’m glad to see the release of the EMC Capacity Calculator to let you decide for yourself where your efficiency goes.   Recently we announced this whole "Unified Storage Guarantee" and to be honest with you, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. So I decided to take the marketing hype, set it on fire and start drilling down into the details, because that’s the way I roll. :)

I decided to generate two workload sets side by side to compare what you get when you use the Calculators

I have a set of requirements – ~131TB of File/Services data, and 4TB of Highly performing random IO SAN storage

There is an ‘advisory’ on the EMC guarantee that you have at least 20% SAN and 20% NAS in order to guarantee a 20% space efficiency over others – So I modified my configuration to include at least 20% of both SAN and NAS (But let me tell you, when I had it as just NAS.. It was just as pretty :))

Using NetApp’s Storage Efficiency Calculator I assigned the following data:

That seems pretty normal, nothing too out of the ordinary – I left all of the defaults otherwise as we all know that ‘cost per TB’ is relative depending upon any number of circumstances!

So, I click ‘Calculate’ and it generates this (beautiful) web page, check it out! – There is other data at the bottom which is ‘cut off’ due to my resolution, but I guarantee it was nothing more than marketing jibber jabber and contained no technical details.

So, taking a look at that – this is pretty sweet, it gives me a cool little tubular breakdown, tells me that to meet my requirements of 135TB I’ll require 197TB in my NetApp Configuration – that’s really cool, it’s very forthright and forth coming.

What’s even cooler is there are checkboxes I can uncheck in order to ‘equalize’ things so to speak. And considering that the EMC Guarantee is based upon Useable up front without enabling any features! Let me take this moment to establish some equality for a second.

All I’ve done is uncheck Thin Provisioning (EMC can do that too, but doesn’t require you to do that as part of the Guarantee, because we all know… some times… customers WON’T thin provision certain workloads, so I get it!)   Also turning off deduplication, just so I get a good feel for how many spindles I’ll be eating up from a performance perspective – And turning off dev/test clone (which didn’t really make much difference since I had little DB in this configuration)

Now, through no effort of my own, the chart updated a little bit to report that NetApp now requires 387TB to manage the same workload a second ago required 197TB. That’s a little odd, but hey, what do I know.. This is just a calculator taking data and presenting it to me!

Now… with the very same details thrown into the EMC Capacity Calculator, lets take a look at how it looks.

According to this, I start with a Raw Capacity of ~207TB and through all of the ways as defined on screen, I end up with 135TB Total usable, with at least 20% SAN and about twice that in NAS – Looks fairly interesting, right?

But lets take things one step further. Let’s scrap Snapshots on both sides of the fence. Throw caution in to the wind.. No snapshots.. What does that do to my capacity requirements for the same ~135TB Usable I was looking for in the original configurations.

On the NetApp side I reclaim 27TB of Useable space (to make it 360TB Raw)- while on the EMC side I reclaim 15TB of useable space [150TB Useable now] while Still 207TB Raw.

But we both know the value of having snapshots in these file-type data scenarios, so we’ll leave the snapshots enabled – and now it’s time to do some math – Help me as I go through this, and pardon any errors.

However, just because I care (and I wanted to see what happened) I decided to say "Screw the EMC Guarantee" and threw all caution to the wind and decided to compare a pure-play SAN v SAN scenario, just to see how it’d look.

I swapped out the numbers to be Database Data, Email/Collaboration Data – The results don’t change (Eng Data seems to have a minor 7TB Difference.. Not sure why that is, – feel free to manipulate the numbers yourself though, it’s negligible)

And I got this rocking result! (Yay, right?!) 202TB seems to be my requirement with all the checkboxes checked! But this is Exchange and Sharepoint data (or notes.. I’m not judging what email/collab means ;))… I’m being honest and realistic with myself, so I’m not going to thin provision or Dedup it any way, so how does that change the picture?

It looks EXACTLY the same [as before]. Well, that’s cool, at least it is consistent, right?

However, doing the same thing on the EMC side of the house.

I want to note a few differences in this configuration – I upgraded to a 480 because I used exclusively 600GB FC drives as I’m not even going to lie to myself that I’m humoring my high IO workloads on 2TB SATA Disks – If you disagree you let me know, but I’m trying to keep it real :)

RAID5 is good enough with FC disks (If this was SATA I’d be doing best practice and assigning RAID6 as well, so keeping it true and honest) And it looks like this:

(Side Note: It looks like this SAN Calculation has only 1 hot spare declared instead of the 6 used above in the other configuration – I’m not sure why that is, but I’m not going to consider 5 disks as room for concern so far as my calculations go – it is not reflected in my % charts below – FYI!  I fixed the issue and introduced 6 Spare disks.  I also changed the system from 14+1 R5 sets to 4+1 and 8+1 R5 sets which seems to accurately reflect more production like workloads :))

Whoa, 200TB Raw Capacity to get me 135TB Usable? Whoa, now wait a second. (says the naysayers) You’re comparing RAID5 to RAID6 – that’s not a fair configuration because there is definitely going to be a discrepancy! And you have snapshots enabled too for this workload. (Side note: I do welcome you to compare RAID6 in this configuration, you’ll be surprised :))

I absolutely agree – so in the effort of equalization – I’m going to uncheck the Double Disk Failure Protection from the NetApp side (Against best practices, but effectively turning the NetApp configuration into a RAID4 config) and I’ll turn off Snapshot copies to be a fair sport.

There, it’s been done. The difference is.. That EMC RAW Capacity has stayed the same(200TB) while NetApp raw capacity has dropped considerably by 30TB from 387TB to 357TB. (I do like how it reports "Total Storage Savings – 0%" :))

So, what does all of this mean? Why do you keep taking screen caps, ahh!!

This gives you the opportunity to sit down, configure what it is YOU want, get a good feel for what configuration feels right to you and be open and honest with yourself and said configuration.

No matter how I try to swizzle it, I end up with EMC coming front and center on capacity utilization from RAW to Usable – Which down right devastates anything in comparison. I do want to qualify this though.

The ‘guarantee’ is that you’ll get 20% savings with both SAN and NAS. Apparently if I LIE to my configuration and say ‘Eh, I don’t care about that’ I still get OMG devastatingly positive results of capacity utilization. – So taking the two scenarios I tested in here and reviewing the math..

When we’re discussing apples for apples – We seem to be meeting the guarantee whether NAS, SAN or Unified.

If we were to take things to another boundary, out the gate I get the capacity I require – If I slap Virtual Provisioning, Compression, FAST Cache, Auto-Tiering, Snapshots and a host of other benefits that the EMC Unified line brings to solve your business challenges… well, to be honest it looks like you’re coming out on top no matter what way you look at it!

I welcome you to ‘prove me wrong’ based upon my calculations here (I’m not sure how that’s possible because I simply entered data which you can clearly see, and pressed little calculate buttons… so if I’m doing some voodoo, I’d really love to know)

I also like to try to keep this as realistic as possible and we all know some people like their NAS only or SAN only configurations. The fact that the numbers in the calculations are hitting it out of the ballpark so to speak is absolutely astonishing to me! (Considering where I worked before I joined EMC… well, I’m as surprised as you are!) But I do know the results to be true.

If you want to discuss these details further, reach out to me directly (christopher.kusek@emc.com) – or talk to your local TC (Or your TC, TC Manager and me in a nicely threaded email ;)) – They understand this rather implicitly.. I’m just a conduit to ensure you folks in the community are aware of what is available to you today!

Good luck, and if you can find a way to make the calculations look terrible – Let me know… I’m failing to do that so far :)

!UPDATE! !UPDATE! !UPDATE! :)  I was informed apparently every thing is not as it seems? (Which frankly is a breath of relief, whew!)

Latest news on the street is, apparently there is a bug in the NetApp Efficiency Capacity Calculator – So after that gets corrected, things should start to look a little more accurate, let me breathe a sigh of relief around that, because apparently (after being heavily slandered for ‘cooking the numbers’) the only inaccuracy going on there [as clearly documented] was in the source of my data.

However, being that I’m not going to go through and re-write everything I have above again, I wanted to take things down to their roots, lets get down into the dirt, the details, the raw specifics so to speak.  (If any thing in this chart below is somehow misrepresented, inaccurate or incorrect, please advise – This is based upon data I’ve collected over time, so hash it out as you feel :))

What I’ve done here is take the information and tried to ensure each one of these apples are as SIMILAR as possible.

So you don’t have to read between the lines either, let me break down this configuration – This assumes 28 SATA 1TB Disks, with 4 PARITY drives and 1 SPARE – in both configurations.

If you feel that I somehow magically made numbers appear to be or do something that they shouldn’t – Say so.   Use THIS chart here, don’t create your own build-a-config workshop table unless you feel this is absolutely worthless and that you truly need that to be done.   

You’ll notice that things like Parity Drives and Hot Spares are identical (As they should be) Where we start to enter into discrepancy is around things like WAFL Reserve, Core Dump Reserve and Aggr Snap Reserve – Certainly there are areas of overlap as shown above and equally the same can be said of areas of difference, which is why in those areas on the EMC side I use that space to define the CLARiiON OS and the Celerra OS.    I did have the EMC Match the default NetApp Configuration of a 20% vol snap reserve (on the EMC side I call it Check/Snap Reserve) [Defaults to 10% on EMC, but for the sake of solidarity, what’s 20% amongst friends, right?]    (On a side note, I notice that my WAFL Reserve figures might actually be considerably conservative as a good friend gave me a dump of his WAFL Reserve and the result of his WAFL Reserve was 1% of total v raw compared to my 0.07% calculation I have above, maybe it’s a new thing?)

So, this is a whole bunch of math.. a whole bunch of jibber jabber even so to speak.   But this is what I get when I look at RAW numbers.   If I am missing some apparent other form of numbers, let it be known, but let’s discuss this holistically.     Both NetApp and EMC offer storage solutions.    NetApp has some –really- cool technology.  I know, I worked there.   EMC ALSO has some really cool technology, some of which NetApp is unable to even replicate or repeat.   But before we get in to cool tech battles, as we sit in a cage match watching PAM duel it out with FAST-Cache, or ‘my thin provisioning is better than yours’ grudge matches.    We have two needs we need to account for.

Customers have data that they need to protect.   Period.

Customers have requirements of a certain amount of capacity they expect to get from a certain amount of disks.

If you look at the chart closely, there are some OMFG ICANTBELIEVEITSNOTWAFL features which NetApp brings to bear, however they come at a cost.   That cost seems to exist in the form of WAFL Reserve, and Right sizing (I’m not sure why the Right Sizing is coming in a considerably fat consideration when contrasted with how EMC does it, but it apparently is?)  So while I can talk all day long about each individual specific feature NetApp has, and equivalent parity which EMC has in that same arena; I need to start somewhere.  And strangely going back to basics, seems to come to a 23% realized space savings in this scenario (Which seems inline with the EMC Unified Storage Guarantee) Which frankly, I find to be really cool.  Because like has been resonated by others commenting on this ‘guarantee’, what the figures appear to be showing is that the EMC Capacity utilization is more efficient even before it starts to get efficient (through enabling technologies).

Obviously though, for the record I’m apparently riddled with Vendor Bias and have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about! [disclaimer: I have no idea what I’m talking about when I define and disclose I am in this post and others ;)]   However, I’d like to go on record based upon these mathematical calculations, were I not an employee of EMC, and whether I did or did not work for NetApp in the past, I would have come to these same conclusions independently when presented with these same raw figures and numerical metrics.   I continue to welcome your comments, thoughts and considerations when it comes to a Capacity bound debate [Save performance for another day, we can have that battle out right ;)]  Since this IS a Pureplay CAPACITY conversation.

I hope you found this as informative as I did taking the time to create, generate, and learn from the experience of producing it.  Oh, and I hope you find the (unmoderated) comments enjoyable. :)   I’d love to moderate your comments, but frankly… I’d rather let you and the community handle that on my behalf.   I love you guys, and you too Mike Richardson even if you were being a bit snarky to me. {Hmm, a bit snarky or a byte snarky… Damn binary!}  Take care – And Thank you for making this my most popular blog-post since Mafia Wars and Twitter content! :)

The latest update to this is included here in the Final Reprise! EMC 20% Unified Storage Guarantee: Final Reprise

I got asked a –great- question the other day by my boss (Props to my boss for giving me some great blogging material!)

“What are the Top 5 things you learned or thought valuable at EMC World 2010”

I cannot guarantee I’ll give you 5 top things… or that I won’t even exceed 5 things, but at the very least I’ll outline what I found as the most valuable things, as well as discussions I had with various others as to what was the most valuable to be had/found!   If there are things you found particularly useful – Please do share it here so we can all benefit as well! :0

Yes, this was a big one for me, top of mind! So many useful things to talk solely about VPLEX alone! To share all of it would be a challenge! So let me break down some of the value points!

EMC has a great portal page around VPLEX which shares lots of useful information, collateral, white papers and more! (I’ll publish a nice one later with PowerLink things soon)

My good friend Bas Raayman collated all of the blog posts covering VPLEX from the general purpose Blogosphere and Media analysts too!  EMC VPLEX – Introduction and link overview

So to wrap up my own personal experience around the VPLEX from the sessions, prior knowledge and playing with the live VPLEX LAB – This is really cool – Live data access on both sides of a metro link = rockstar event! Check it out! Check it out! :)

After you pick yourself up after drooling all over VPLEX, it’s time to sign up for the Unisphere train, the Highlander of getting you to the Private Cloud “There can only be one… Private Cloud” and apparently, you’ll manage that with Unisphere!

You can listen to and watch Chad present a video on using Unisphere to get you kicked off on things! Certainly, if you’re at some of those non-youtube type locations, ask your local EMC to get you a demo :)      Though once you get yourself settled on a single interface for fun and managing off this rocking system, well.. you likely want it to do a little more!

This video actually takes you through some of the new features discussed at EMC World – Sub-Lun FAST, FAST Cache, and Primary block storage compression!

1) Sub-LUN FAST = automated tiering of storage (think "VMware DRS for Storage") – lowers cost of storage by between 30-50% on average.
2) FAST Cache = up to 2TB of low cost read/write cache – get more performance for the same $. In some cases, like VMware View – it can deliver same performance at 10x lower cost.
3) Primary block storage compression = save between 30- 50% on average on your storage consumption.

All sweet features which are pretty damn cool if you ask me! (Feel free to ask me.. we could discuss for hours on end ;))

Another cool feature which was announced at EMC World which most people don’t usually think about, but I’m gonna get you to start thinking about it now!

It’s easy to be efficient with EMC.

EMC® unified storage brings efficiency to a whole new level. We’ve even created a capacity calculator so you can configure efficiency results for yourself. You’ll discover that EMC requires 20% less raw capacity to achieve your unified storage needs. This translates to superior storage efficiency when compared to other unified storage arrays—even those utilizing their own documented best practices.

If we’re not more efficient, we’ll match the shortfall

If for some unlikely reason the capacity calculator does not demonstrate that EMC is 20% more efficient, we’ll match the shortfall with additional storage. That’s how confident we are.

The guarantee to end all guarantees

Storage efficiency is one of EMC’s fundamental strengths. Even though our competitors try to match it by altering their systems, turning off options, changing defaults or tweaking configurations—no amount of adjustments can counter the EMC unified storage advantage.

Here’s the nitty-gritty, for you nitty-gritty types

• The 20% guarantee is for EMC unified storage (file and block—at least 20% of each)
• It’s based on out-of-the-box best practices
• There’s no need to compromise availability to achieve efficiency
• There are no caveats on types of data you must use
• There’s no need to auto-delete snapshots to get results

This guarantee is based on standard out-of-the-box configurations. Let us show you how to configure your unified storage to get even more efficiency. Try our capacity calculator today.

So, hmm.. What does this mean exactly?! Well, if you read above, that gives you a break down of what the deal offers.  But like you, I want specific use-cases which I can relate to!  

This basically says, by using the EMC Unified Storage Calculator – Without enabling features (like thin provisioning, etc) you know.. ‘magic’ features, out-right the system will save you 20%, and once you start to enable other features you’ll see it grow above and beyond that – Sounds pretty compelling when it comes to the value of your solutions right?!

This is actually pretty damn sweet because it lets you use YOUR figures to determine what your space and layout concerns are, instead of generating off some spreadsheet with a bunch of jibber jabber and you go ‘eh, I still don’t believe it’  – But hey, don’t let me be the judge, load up the EMC Unified Storage Calculator and give it a try your self :)

Oh, did someone say “Hey, Wasn’t there some cool Ionix UIM 2.0 and Vblock things going on?!”

But we cannot discuss the rocking unified world of Vblock’s and vSphere without at the very least mentioning the Next Generation vCenter Plugins!

So, while there were a REAL LOT OF COOL THINGS both Announced and able to be seen at this years EMC World 2010 – You’re going to come away from it, whether you attended or missed the opportunity with some questions! So let me help you address these questions in tangible ways you can take it to your TC/SE and Sales Guy so you can make them work for YOU and your Organization.

Pick up the phone/email – Reach out to your EMC Guys and tell them you want to hear about:

• EMC VPLEX – And how it’s ease of use and whether the various use cases, Local, Metro and beyond will be a fit for your organization
• EMC Unisphere – Taking next generation unified up a notch and enabling your datacenter to grow and scale with the Cloud
• But seriously, the last one is really cool (Check it out, get a briefing with your Unified Storage guys as soon as you can because…)
• Oh, and don’t forget to ask about FAST Cache! I’ll be covering this fairly deeply soon in some blog posts, including direct use cases, and my deep technical considerations and assaults on engineering I already have in the works to make sure that it works as I architect and not as marketing tells me to :)
• EMC Unified Storage 20% Guarantee – This isn’t 90 pages of caveats, this is heads up, you will save period.  Ask your TC to help you save! ;)
• EMC Ionix UIM 2.0 – If you remember all of my coverage on UIM 1.0, 2.0 is actually gonna be the cats meow!
• EMC vCenter Plugins! – These are pretty sweet, and will help manage your experience!

I’m sure there are numerous other things I did not cover (You be the one to tell me!) but the ones above I found particularly cool – So go check them out, ask your TC or Sales Rep (Let me know if you do… I’m pushy… :) But I particularly want to hear your experiences and impressions!)

Enjoy the new world, and share share share! :)

Wow… Oh and Wow… Look at me publishing this DAYS Later.  The first reasoning behind that is frankly.. I WAS and still sort of AM Exhausted! OMFG it was quite a tiring yet amazing experience! I believe the best follow-up quote I had (which I tweeted and just noticed it didn’t send) on my way home from the airport in the cab was… “I’m so tired I was wondering why it all of a sudden got dark and realized my eyes had closed!”  So, quite the great and amazing set of experiences.. oh, but don’t take my pre-fix word for it… get ready for the final coverage of the event!

Day three of the EMC World Conference also happened to be Day 1 of the TC (That’s Technology Consultant if you’re asking) conference.  This is a great event where our finest TC’s, TC Managers and some various other ninjas get together and well.. Learn stuffs together!   In the picture above you see a small sampling of ~1700 of EMC’s finest, all collapsed into a single room to learn together as one!   I wish I would have gotten more photos on the whole of day three (or four, or five) but my coverage was limited and I was focused on the events at hand.. so you’ll need to take my word for it!    This particular session/meeting above is what kept me.. well, for quite some time, so long that I missed the “Bloggers Lounge” group photo.  So don’t take the word of some of the bloggers that I apparently don’t exist because I wasn’t in the photo! It’s not true! :)

We had the great pleasure of having a birthday here at the EMC World this year – the birthday of the wonderful @c_weil – As you can see by this beautiful Symmetrix cake above, there was definitely some planning which went in to it :) (I was so disconnected from things going on… I didn’t find out until I saw the cake! shame on me I say!)  It was great to finally meet her in person in this event of events where Christina was receiving an award as part of the Women’s Leadership Foundation (Please let me know if I’m bastardizing the name/etc :))

But that’s not all, right? I mean, seriously… how can that be all?!   I didn’t get many good photos to speak of later until we had our team dinner (but who wants to see photos of my entire team.. I’m not sure if they want that out there, so I won’t share :))   But I did get to have a great interview with a great organization!

I’d like you to meet StudioE! They’re the folks who the customer/community of EMC’ers are able to leverage and other magical mysterious stuff.. I’d say watch the video to find out more, as well as visiting their website.. I’ve talked with some others who are in StudioE and from what I hear, it’s a great program to be a part of, makes me wish I were a customer!

Being that they have Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and the new ECN… well, to tell you the truth, I dragged/stole the icons off of their site! Makes my work easier! :)

And on the final-final day I got the opportunity to attend what was a HIGHLY and HEAVILY attended session of the VPLEX Labs! (What does highly attended mean? After each lab session.. there were HUNDREDS waiting outside of the room ready to pile in to play with VPLEX.. I consider that to be fairly heavily attended :)) I heard there were similar things happening for the Unisphere demo labs as well, but hey… I like new juice and VPLEX is new! :)

What did I learn from the VPLEX session, well.. I learned… I’ll find out soon if (via access to the lab) whether I can expose some of the internals and share with you far more than you’d normally typically see! Oh, and be excited about some other things to come.. I talked with some groups and there will be some amazing things coming on the horizon over the next several months, which will equal a win for people all around!

So, in wrap-up, let me break down the high-lights of this past week and over the events of everything encountered!

• Counting Crows put on a rocking concert, and apparently I do not remember nearly as many songs of theirs as I thought! (++)
• I believe someone in my hotel at Colonnade stole my Counting Crows Concert glow cup, WTF?! Yea, no idea there, but it WAS in the room! (-)
• EMC definitely knows how to put on a Bloggers Lounge! OMFG that was amazing and really a shining beacon for the community as a whole! (+++++)
• EMC really has no idea how to coordinate the unique requirements of Vegans and Gluten Free folk, I wonder how Halal and Kosher is handled (—)
• The Partner Pavilion was populated by the best of breed in industry who really knew how to engage and take care of the customers in attendance! (++)
• VMware is a real stickler with their SWAG, making me ‘listen’ to their presentation and answer a question to win a T-Shirt #advertisingfail ;) (null)
• (Disclaimer… I merely hovered nearby at the end and knew all of the answers they were positing, I told them I could run the preso if they wanted)
• Labs, Labs, Labs – Wow, people could not get enough of these! Every one in attendance was a clear winner who got time with those (+++++)
• I lost my voice by the third day.   Imagine me barely able to speak, well, an extremely distorted version of my voice total suck (null)
• Boston as a city took care of us, with numerous highlights and an accommodating Public Transportation (T-Line) (+++)
• The Red Sox put on a great game which we had the opportunity to be a part of an amazing ecosystem of characters, they’re real family the fans. (+++++)
• Brocade put on an OMFG great event the likes of which were unparalleled the whole week, well done!  Yes they were strict on attendance but they made sure me and my people (you people :)) were taken care of, so I commend them for that, and a special shout out to @charleshood of charleshood.net! (+++++)
• Emulex put on a good event too, but I didn’t show up until the end, so I cannot really speak to the full character of the event but I heard good things from other attendees, so champion for Emulex (I do like Emulex, and they’re not paying me to say this – and I don’t drink nor eat food at events, so it’s not like they’re convincing me somehow :)) (+++)
• Beantown Bash was pretty good, I did spend a fair amount of time trying to get my customers who forgot their badges into the event, so… that should have been communicated to them a little better of the importance of the badge (That, and find better ways for me to circumvent your security to get them in, and yes Security does not stop me from getting what I want) (null)
• The TC Conference was by far the most amazing employee focused event I’d ever been to.  The care and attention and access we were given, both to our needs, driving us technically and enabling us as individual leaders, and not to mention the sheer number of our leaders who turned out to talk with us (not to us) including Joe Tucci, it’s no wonder this is one of the best places to work for (often not recognized outside of our walls).   If you were ever looking for a good reason to work with these rock stars, this event certainly shines as an example – Just let me know and I can get you in touch with hundreds of others who will tell you their take!

So in final… I’d like to thank EMC, the Partners and other Vendors, but most importantly the Customers which made all of this possible.   If not for you, well, there’d be no cool technology to be solving problems… and I’d have no reason to go out to Boston! :)

I hope you find these summaries and break downs useful, I know I will go back and reference it and probably end up getting yelled at about the SWAG (Hey, it’s for my customer! And it’s true, it is!   Don’t you dare tell me I can’t get my customer the little trinket you have, or you’ll find yourself staring down the gaze of an upset @cxi and I don’t get upset ;))

I hope you all had a great time, and I’d love to hear your take, experiences and more, and how to make the next one just as successful! (Anything you share I’ll be sure to communicate it upstream to people who will not only listen, but even take action!)

EMCWorld 2011 will be in Las Vegas, so that’ll be quite a unique experience… :)

In closing.. it’s good to be home with my family, and my dogs! I wish you all well and get ready for the onslaught… the technology is only getting better! :)

By now, I’m sure you’re noticing a trend in the titles of my blog posts (Yes, I’m sure the core semblance you’re able to surmise is that I start it “EMCWorld Day x” and then a bunch of jibber jabber which you really have to stretch to understand, and even then you ought to be committed if you truly understand…:)) But I’m sure this will all come to fruition and understanding as you read through this particular break down! :)

Welcome to Day 2! Woohoo! I don’t know about you, but every single day is LONG, not in a bad way.. and getting back to the hotel late after being out with peers, colleagues, customers, partners and beyond until the late hours… writing these blog posts and waking up early in the morning certainly doesn’t help.  But it is all good – And I apologize for the lack of tweets… the ATT network just cannot sustain thousands of people DDoS’ing the 3G and Edge networks by simply trying to use their devices in a very small area :) [re:keynote, session, anything ;)]

I’m sure the first words out of your mouth when you see my blog posts is WTF IS UP WITH ALL OF THE RED PHOTOS! Yea, I know, I get it. No seriously, You’re preaching to the choir, or more specifically to roxanne – I wish she didn’t have to turn on the red light.. or atleast if the iPhone would have the ability to not take the powers of Suck and combine them with red lights to produce photos which look like this.. but we’re going to walk past that.. and we’ll start by quoting my good friend Charles Hood (@charleshood) to do that!   The masterful blogger Charles Hood said it right and properly in a recent Flickr photo he appeared in, where he said “When it comes to Social Media, EMC *gets it*.”  And let me tell you just how true that is.

So, our journey into Social Media at EMC and EMCWorld begins… at the Bloggers lounge!

The cast of characters in the photos above.. the sheer mindshare is enough to take on the world, twice and come out prosperous multi-fold!

Starting in order of sequence, It is paramount that I bring to you, the amazing, hyper-intelligent, cat loving and beautiful Jamie Pappas! (@jamiepappas)   If it weren’t for her, everything that Charles Hood and so many others have had to say would not be true as it is today, and we have her to thank for this!   Infact, if you have the opportunity to meet and talk with her, you will be better for it :)    I guess I cannot leave Stu-master @stu “Stuart Miniman” out since he is after all in the photo.  Stu is great too, and helps make the EMC Social Media experience what it is today as well, not to mention if you want to know about Fa-ko-ee, he’s definitely your man there too. ;)

I’m sure everyone has met, read and knows Barry Burke (@storageanarchy), I mean how could we not know the man who gave me the Symmetrix sticker which sits on my laptop.. ;)

Challenge me to say otherwise.. but I have to say.. the smile on Steve Todd’s (@stevetodd) face… if that doesn’t bring a smile to your face, I think you need to re-evaluate your priorities!

Bringing us on to Photo #4 which is the rare shot of the beautiful Mark Twomey (@storagezilla) deep in conversation with the mysterious non-blogging Gilda Farvid! (Hey! How did Gilda get into the bloggers lounge?!?! ;)) We’ll see about getting Gilda back on the blogging circuit since she joined our ranks of champions :)

HELP! HELP! HELP! There’s a Virtual Army at my door and I need some vSpecialists to extract my VM’s of Mass De…. eh, this example is going nowhere fast!  But people who are going up, up and up!, the motherload in this photo definitely calls for an “OMFG HOWZ CANS i MEETZ THEM!”  – Incase you cannot make out their names or faces… You’re looking at (from left to right) Simon Seagrave (@Kiwi_Si), Alan Renouf (@alanrenouf) and finally the champion master himself, the infamous Scott Lowe! (@scott_lowe)

Finally we have a group shot with the lot of us, you know of all of us, however on the far right the other hidden vSpecialist, Ed Saipetch (@edsai)

So what does this mean? Are you trying to say that everyone at EMC not only maintains a blog but a transparent relationship with the community, customers, partners and even competitors through mediums like Twitter and beyond?   No.. I’m not saying that, but you can.   This entire relationship around how EMC handles it’s social media is akin to that old adage, keep your friends close, and frankly we don’t have enemies.    For those of you who think we do… just remember how closely knit the entire tech community is – We’re not enemies, we’re all friends who at one point or another in the past (and in the future) will work together and collaborate on one thing or another – Welcome to EMC 3.0 – The future of not only doing things right, but doing it transparently.   (Disclaimer: Hopefully no one spanks me for in any way claiming what EMC’s social media strategy is, I’m just an observer, it’s pretty damn obvious ;))

But, that’s enough about the Bloggers lounge, social media strategy, ninjas and giant celerras! (err….)

I did attend a session! In between being unable to get a cell signal in order to make it onto conference calls, and meeting some absolutely great people at lunch.. no.. I did attend a session! Later in the week I’ll also have some mega-deep dives on sessions.. but being that I was only into one session today a little bit, I’ll give you a brief overview:  Architectural Deep Dive of the VPLEX! … Hmm, Yea I knew that, damnit, how dare I do my home work before these sessions…. Good session, absolutely informative for the FULL BALLROOM it was in (Can we say STANDING ROOM ONLY) around just the Architecture of the VPLEX alone? Yea.. Definitely good things coming from this bad boy.   So, sorry I won’t tell you much more than… you’ll see the deep dive later on the sessions I attend… (I hope I’m allowed to share what I learn from the sessions… because I will be anyway, grin)

Afterwards, with mega-sessions running continuously and constantly everywhere, I headed back down to the Bloggers Lounge where Steve Todd was interviewing people on the moment they realized their future was in technology (the watershed moment) [Oh, did I mention that the explanation of what the watershed moment involved Steve Todd serenading me with an indigo girls song? How can you not love this man?! :))   So, I did my interview (and separate other interviews which I’ll publish details on when I find out where it’s posted) And good thing… as my voice is dead from this point forward!   Dead how and why?!

I think that helps explain the first bit of it… My first Red Sox game, and they won! (Wow, the ENTIRE crowd really comes together as one large ecosystem, feeding upon each others emotions and the relationships and bonds from simply sitting near others.. this is definitely a reflection of social dynamics – It’s no wonder they do so well…! The cubs are similar.. except that’s purely alcohol driven. ;))   But after that involved spending an amazing time with my good friends at Emulex for a good bit before the night closed out and we headed off for some Karaoke!

Hopefully YouTube doesn’t block this wondrous short video I captured because it has ‘music’ included in it.. but I have a tendency to sing along… loudly… and lose my voice. #fail? ;)

I hope you other attendees have been taking advantage of everything the vendors, partners and beyond have had to offer because this is the time and place to enjoy yourself! :)

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

$Wait!%$! You can’t end your post there! What? Why?! You barely even mentioned Emulex! Sure, but who cares about them, even though I really like their CNA’s.   Hmm, didn’t you meet someone who is an absolute rock star over there? Think.. think back.. ringing any bells?! ;)

Yes, I think it is important that if you’re not aware of Thomas Jones (@niketown588), a rockstar over at Emulex now is the time for the introduction!   Thomas GETS it.  You know how we were talking about EMC “Get’s Social Media”, well Thomas Jones really GETS it. (It doesn’t hurt that he’s buddies with Louis Gray ;)) But his take on things, his character, demeanor, Emulex should be proud to have an (I’m refraining myself from using expletives because of how much Thomas rocks :)) … amazing guy like this to take the company forward into the future :) – Oh and be sure that you get to see his Shirt which is signed with everyone’s Twitter ID’s :)  Okay.. enough… Time to crash.. have a GREAT Day 3 and be sure to enjoy all of the rest of your time at EMCWorld! :)