OMG! It is THAT time of year again! Are you going to EMC World?  This is definitely the MUST attend event of the year!  (Seriously, you have no idea :))

However, my first call to action for you guys.. is to try to make sure you’re getting hooked up with the FREEBIES if you know you’re going to be going anyway!

A basic chart breaking down what you’re looking at when it comes time to register:

Conference Registration Rates and Breakdowns:

So I decided to take as best of a dive as I could into what these “Special Gifts” are, just to get an idea of what incentive you have to book early (and often?!)

Early Bird Registration Gifts:

Booking your hotel:

Within the Venetian Resort you have the option to select your room to be within the Venetian Tower or the Palazzo Tower. Both towers are equal distance to the conference center. To secure a special conference rate be sure to reference EMC World if you chose to make a phone reservation. All room blocks expire on April 14, 2011.

I cannot emphasize enough because I know a lot of you guys… wait until the day OF the show to book your hotel rooms :)   All Room blocks (at these two hotels) will expire on April 14th, 2011 for this rate.   So just take that to heart when it comes time to book and buy your tickets :)

This is going to be quite the OMG WTF AMAZING EMC World on record, far greater than you can imagine.  And it will ALSO be in Vegas, so if that means a lot to you, further mad crazy times – But in all seriousness, the type of content, the audience, the community, EVERY instance of the value which will come from this event.. this is a MUST attend EMC World.  You think records were broken at our Launch Event on January 18th?  Well, you haven’t seen nothing yet? (Is that grammatically correct?!? :))

What, who, why, Justify to my boss! –

What – (2011 Conference Topics and beyond!)

• Backup, Recovery and Archiving
  Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
  Cloud Computing
  Content Management and Archiving
  Enterprise Applications and Databases
  Mainframe Platforms
  Partner Solutions
  Security and Compliance
  Storage and IT Management
  Technology Directions and Innovation
  Tiered Storage and Automation
  Virtual Infrastructure

Who – (Meet, Greet, Network, Learn)

• Learn directly from EMC engineers, customers, and partners at 500+ breakout sessions. EMC World’s comprehensive agenda includes keynotes, lectures, live demonstrations, hands-on workshops, and birds-of-a-feather sessions.

Did I mention I’m going to be there?! :) And definitely seek me out and I can hook you up with other like-minded individuals, or others who are either doing what you WANT to do, or have already done it and you can share best practices (No, not marketing fluff, but actual real customers, engineers and beyond, networking seeds networking! :))

Why – (Content, Content, Content)

• Challenge your expertise with offerings including tutorials, business tracks, technical training, and developer sessions ranging from novice to expert.

Are you a novice looking to seed your knowledge? Excellent.  Are you an expert, guru, ninja, and you find that no one understands you? Go yell at engineers! (That’s what I do ;))   This is the perfect opportunity whether you’re at the top of your game or just getting involved in the industry.   No stone unturned, you will be able to enhance your knowledge, take things to a new level and become an even greater champion than you already are today! (Champions ARE made just by attending EMC World)  Literally, seek me out and I’ll make sure you’re getting the MOST out of your entire experience – I do it at every show I attend. ;)

Justify to my boss – (Whoa, this is in Vegas, my boss won’t approve that!)

I haven’t seen an official write up ‘slick’ on this yet, so I am writing this FOR you.  I’ve had to do this in the past for past events (VMworld, Microsoft TechEd, Past EMC Worlds, TEC, etc)   You go to your management and you scream “I want to learn, I want to educate myself in order to better drive value into the environment, I need to network with my peers, and see the up and coming and be PART of the future instead of waiting for us to eventually get there”.   Yea, but this is what your management sees. “Jim wants to go to Vegas for a week, blah blah blah conference”  

Do you find yourself in this situation?  If so, let me know (And let others know) I’ll try to make sure you have the right resources to help PROVE this out in your environment.  Whether you’re an EMC Customer today, or one in the future; this will be the value of a life time.   If you spent the entire time in sessions never meeting a single person you will gain benefit and an experience which will pay dividends in your home environment; step outside that shell a little bit and all of a sudden you will become a champion unlike that you’ll ever have seen!  

Do not hesitate to educate! I’ll personally call your management if you’d like and help them understand the value (I’ll get whoever your local account team is involved just to make sure I’m not blindsiding them ;))   But seriously, now is the time to SAVE, as well as to LEARN!   Hop to it!

So, good luck, enjoy and lets all meet up in Vegas for what will be an experience of a life time, this is ground breaking in every possible fashion!  

Today I was cleaning up my mailbox when I came across some BLASPHEMY about Exchange! Okay, not blasphemy per se, but I continually hear from folks who are being incorrectly told “Exchange cannot be virtualized”.  I’m not exactly sure who started this ‘trend’ but that’s neither here nor there!   So I did a little digging [and you know, digging for me tends to turn into a blog post ;)]  And I came across not only some AMAZING Material! But I also want to make sure you’re following up on regularly posted updates from a Rockstar who’s clear focus is on Exchange!

These are two very SHORT and to the point, giving you the high-lights letting you know what is required to kick things off and something you can hand up to mgmt! So it’s great to not spend a lot of time trying to figure out what it’s saying!

One thing I’d like to bring particular attention on these papers is that these are not EMC Papers, but are in fact co-branded collaborations by Microsoft, EMC and others (the one below was Microsoft, Cisco and EMC, and some of the others involve Dell and Brocade) but either way, Microsoft was directly involved in their creation as opposed to ‘slap a tag on it’

STOP THE PRESS! (vicki vale!) – Check out this paper though!  It is definitely longer! 84 pages!  Filled with raw technical example, use cases, all that jazz! Great must read paper and not just words! Lots of pretty pictures!  Yes it is Hyper-V but that cmon, this was co-branded Microsoft.. :)  And note: Published October 2010! So Vicki Vale did get one thing right!

Okay fine! Here is another paper! This one is a little older but I know you wouldn’t let me get away without giving you some VMware love! So here is one, with less pretty pictures!

Alright, one more then! This one was from August – not a whitepaper only a basic Reference Architecture, but I found it to be pretty damn cool looking!

Okay, enough of these (albeit amazing papers!) With no further adieu I’d like to introduce you to Dustin Smith! I’d tell you all about him, but Brian interviewed him here so you can find out all about how he’s an MVP, MCM and so many other things!

So, Dustin has his own blog where he talks almost exclusively about Exchange (okay, I think it’s all about Exchange, but whatever! this is MY BLOG! ;))

Exchange In the Private Cloud is definitely a must check out blog if you care anything about Exchange, or have to deal with it!

I’d like to highlight a few of his blog posts here for you to check out:

• Yes, Exchange Server is being virtualized!
  • Within EMC, our entire 40,000+ user infrastructure is virtualized on Exchange Server and the organization as a whole is moving towards virtualization of most all applications. Most all of the infrastructures we design and showcase within our Proven Solutions are geared toward virtualization, either with VMWare vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V. See my previous blog post on what we recently did with the Tested Exchange Solutions Program case with Cisco and Microsoft where we showcased 34,000 users on Microsoft Hyper-V with Cisco UCS blade servers and EMC Unified Storage.
• EMC Whitepaper, Exchange Tested Solutions Program
  • What we are showcasing in this whitepaper is a result of our joint solution development with Microsoft and Cisco that was deployed and tested in Microsoft EEC labs in Redmond. In the whitepaper you will find the reference architecture for 32,400 users across a three site Exchange DAG scenario leveraging Microsoft Hyper-V, EMC NS480 Unified Storage, and Cisco UCS B-series blade servers along with analysis of testing results and key best practices on virtualizing Exchange Server 2010 on Hyper -V on EMC Unified storage and Cisco Unified Computing System.
• Exchange 2010 Backups? I don’t need any stinkin backups?!?
  • I think overall, the backupless/Exchange Native Data Protection option certainly brings a new element to the Exchange 2010 architecture discussions and different options for providing recovery when bad things happen. VSS based options (hardware and software based) are  still heavily used options to protect Exchange data that have been popular since the Exchange 2003 days and have increased with features and functionality into Exchange 2010.
• Getting Exchange Server 2010 into the Private Cloud
• Yes, EMC can do Exchange for SMB too

So, there are some teasers there of just some of the content that Dustin is putting out (There is obviously more.. but I’ll let you do the reading up on it! It’s definitely worth reading! – How so though, I just discovered Dustin TODAY and I’m sharing him with you a few hours after that point, So, yea I consider that to be pretty compelling :))

I want to leave you with links to all of the resources I mentioned above, so you can forth to gain access to the WP’s I mentioned and others I didn’t include pictures for!

• Virtualizing Microsoft Exchange 2010 with Confidence
• Business Continuity for Microsoft Exchange 2010 Enabled by EMC Unified Storage, Cisco Unified Computing System, and Microsoft Hyper-V
• Microsoft Exchange 2010: Zero-Data Loss Virtualization and Replication
• Microsoft Exchange 2010 Efficiency, Flexibility, Performance, and Availability at Scale Enabled by EMC Symmetrix VMAX, Virtual Provisioning and VMware vSphere
• EMC Virtual Infrastructure for Microsoft Exchange 2010 Enabled by EMC Symmetrix VMAX, VMware vsphere 4, and Replication Manager
• 15-Minute Guide – Extending the Capabilities of Microsoft Exchange Server

There are so many more than just these links alone – I actually was surprised on how much content there was at www.emc.com/exchange ! – So check it out, and as always let me know if I can help you in a particular way :)

So, I promised you guys in Iomega ix4-200d data reconstruction, ssh and more! that I would expose the password to login to the ix2 and ix4 as soon as I could.    Well, your wait is finally over!

Let’s start as you normally would, by logging into the support console!

http://192.168.1.1/support.html

Whoa, what’s that I highlighted there and even tossed in an arrow?! Can I MAKE it any more straight forward? Psst.. Click on Support Files :)

Ooh, what’s that little guy down there? Dump? Yea, I didn’t even notice this before (because I had shell access myself ;)) but this is for your benefit!

The system will go through "Gathering system state…"

Why yes, I did go mad with clicking colors and arrows in the win7 version of MSPaint.. Okay, but I digress. :)

Click that bad boy, which will include dump data about your system! Download it, and open it!

Drill down into the dump –> config –> etc –> and open up the file named “shadow”   (dump-20100107225620.tar.gz\dump-20100107225620\config\etc)

Find your shadow File in there, and lo and behold, you will have your Iomega root users hash!    Now it’s just a matter of cracking it!

It is beyond the scope of this article to tell you how to actually crack the pwd.. (giggle) go here, download john the ripper and you’ll do just fine :)

Taking my seed from my system and running it through a simple alphanumeric search, I come up with username root, password soho! That was easy! That works if you have NO Password set!

Through a collaborative effort with @randyjcress @Kiwi_Si @VirtualisedReal and @gabvirtualworld we were able to determine that by using soho and whatever password you use on the system, that should do it! And really, the credit does primarily go to @randyjcress for leading us in that specific direction so props randy! :)

ie: admin pwd is apples, so login using sohoapples – This is still undergoing verification, but I thought I’d share it out there, while we sort it out!

Disclaimer: The means to perform all of these tasks has been replicated and verified in the wild without requiring any intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the system. 

So for those of you who know me, you know I initially complained about a data reconstruction problem with my ix4-200d! I accidently pulled the power cable out (doh!) and then my system came up JUST fine, and said “Data reconstruction, 2%” Yea, it said that FOREVER – And it did nothing and got nowhere! Regardless of how many reboots I made! (Though my data access was fine!)

And even going to the “Update Device Software” tab, it always reported “The device software is up to date” Which I now know is a LIE! LIES I SAY! :)

I did a little searching and came across an updated firmware! (oh my!) however it didn’t say it’d do anything about data reconstruction problems! But hey, I always like to be running the latest/greatest, so I downloaded and installed the latest firmware! StorCenter ix4-200d Firmware Version 2.1.25.229: Read First (You’ll find this to be quick and painless!)

Well, some minutes passed and all of a sudden the system was all “DATA RECONSTRUCTION IS HAPPENING IN THE HIZZY!” Okay, not in those exact words.. but I don’t feel like pulling my power to try to reproduce the problem – needless to say, my data reconstruction resumed and finished in short order! Score one for the bucko! (dated reference much?!)

So I deep dove into the system to see what else had changed! (nothing consequential that I could find) but my journey to find a way to ssh this box had not ended! I was determined! I must.. I must.. I must increase my SSH ability! And while searching I came across not only this webpage SSH/Shell access to iomega StorCenter ix2 but that little gem of a webpage included this little link at the bottom! http://ip-of-nas/support.html – Which when you browse to it on your ix4, you end up seeing a page which looks like… this!

This has a few little gems, only two of which will I look at in any detail – Support Access and Recover Disks

Well, Support Access looks pretty damn straight forward! Check the box, reboot, and SSH will be enabled (permanently!)

The Storage Recovery Verification is a bit more interesting – my “guess” is that it allows you the ability to force the data reconstruction many of us complain of! Again, I have no intention of forcing the deal to try to see what happens if I fail my system – You simply let me know if this works for you – with data reconstruction woes :)

Sweet, eh! So, I feel comfortable sharing the process on how to do this.. because frankly, I had to find it from the outside looking in! So I definitely grant you good luck on solving your data reconstruction, firmware updating, and enabling SSH on your NAS!   Until I find an externally cited source though.. I cannot share with you my passwd I used to log in to my ix4 ;)

As promised!  Shell access to your ix2/ix4 exposed! “Get yer red hot ssh here!”

If you come across a site referencing it though, I’d be glad to add it to the mix!  Thanks for your patience.. and look forward to a future post around getting my ‘gigabit runs at 100mb’ problem :)

Welcome to the ix4-200d! This single device is a life changer for both the active home user as well as the SOHO business user who wants to take things to the NEXT Level!

If you’re not familiar with this little beast in a box, here are some of the high-lights which this brings to bear!   NFS, CIFS, iSCSI, AFP Support, BitTorrent client, Xbox Media Services, Printer, USB, Rsync, Celerra integration, dual gigabit Ethernet?!   Oh, and did I mention it’s –VMware- Certified out of the box?!?

Now, seriously! Let’s take a tour of this little system which has taken quite a step or integration in my household!

When I first powered this system up, it sat there for awhile without me doing anything to it.  Why? This thing is SILENT! I forgot I had powered it up, and as a result didn’t even bother to check what the IP address was that it assigned itself!   Well, out of the box, it came with a RAID protection I was fine with! I had options to change it, but I’m comfortable with it!

Frankly, this covers most of what you need to do with the device and you’re set! –Done!- But that doesn’t mean you need to stop there!

Most of the features in this unit can be configured by simply checking a box and poof! You’re done!

I have mine configured in the following fashion: AFP for my Macbook to backup, NFS and iSCSI for my ESX Servers, CIFS for local network file access, Media Services to interface with my Xbox360 to stream content and pictures, rsync Server to strangely replicate the box between this ix4 and an ix2 as well as to replicate over to the Celerra VSA :)   (Oh, and the Avamar Virtual Edition running in a VM backing up all of my home machines while taking up far less space with inline deduplication :))

I don’t have Video Surveillance enabled yet, but it’s nice to know the integration is built in there! (Printers also nice, but this lives in a closet, so I’m not sure I want to do that :))

So, hopefully you get the opportunity to play around with this power house in a box, and with the ix2-200d offering the same services (but with less disks and less IOPS) Oh, and if you’re interested in buying one, it’d help if you knew the “retail” costs!

So, that gives you an idea of “retail” cost, now I’d say, go to Fry’s and try not to pay more than $599.99 for the 4TB model (Fry’s is your friend! ;))

For another great review of this, check out Stephen Foskett’s review!