EMC World 2015 – Day 3

Day 3. Again started with coffee, but this time together with EMC’s Educational Manager for our company (Thanks Sumi). We talked about a new Portal and the different options of education and certification. We will be planning some stuff in the future and hope we get that speed stuff going ;). The General session was pretty cool with some very interesting releases. ScaleIO will be free for non production and EMC will release ViPR to the opensource community. CoprHD (copperhead) will be the project name and a GitHub repository will be available from July 2015. Chad battles it out with Bill Moore of SDDS (new buy from EMC) and leaves the stage in a wheel chair (pretty funny). The Expo floor was mine again right after. I spoke to Dan Baskette (thanks Dan it was great to meet you) about Cloud Foundry and the integration with Pivotal HD. Right after I spoke to the guy behind Federated Business Data Lake, he explained me how the solution worked and what it was based on. Someone forgot to tell him Pivotal does not allow to use Pivotal Cloud Foundry to provision a Production Pivotal HD environment. Another nice example on how people don’t talk to each other in a large company. I made the introductions between him and the Pivotal team standing 30 feet away. Will this standpoint change on short term, Dan says no, and he should know. Let’s see how EMC solves that issue. Went on and spoke to some more people, discussed some issues but nothing really interesting. The day ended with the Customer Appreciation Event featuring two great bands Fall Out Boy and One Republic!

We left Thursday morning. Back home and back to work. All in all a great EMC World, met a lot of great people and learned some new stuff.

I would like to thank everyone who made this possible, and hopefully I will be back in the future.

 

EMC World 2015 – Day 2

Day 2, damn these are long days. My day started with a lot of coffee and a session about Cloud solutions. A session I almost walked out on as the amount of ‘Bla’ was enormous. The general session with Joe Tucci, Paul Maritz and Pat Gelsinger was interesting. Focus of EMC is really on all the Federation stuff. Paul talked about where they are going with Pivotal Labs, agile software development and Cloud Foundry. Pat spoke about software defined data center. In between Jonathan Martin brought the Morecambe Missile himself, John McGuiness, on to the stage. He made quite the entrance driving in on his motorcycle. They discussed EMC’s Math Behind the Morecambe Missile project to analyze what makes John so fast. After wrapping up, Jonathan decided to take a joy ride, exiting the stage in style! After the general session I decided to skip all other sessions for the day and go to the expo floor. Here I spoke to the Pivotal guys and Isilon in a quest to find out were they are both going with Pivotal on Isilon. To bad I had to here they do not speak to each other. Pivotal is innovating and Isilon is ‘well doing the Isilon way’ not. Support for Ambari (the manager most Big Data Lakes are currently using) is upgraded to 1.7 in version OneFS 7.2.0.2 which will be released on Wednesday. Upgrade to 2.0 (which is already available) is not in the planning. Issues with Hawq are still there and multiple authentication resources more than five will have to wait for OneFS 8.0 (Riptide), support for newer versions of HDFS will come in patches. I went on to the Federated Cloud Solutions booth to talk about EMC Hybrid Cloud (EHC). Spoke to Drew Dimmick about the work they did and the upcoming 3.0 release. They gave some demo’s of App service in EHC and found out this would be the way forward for us. Next I had some business meetings I can not talk about, but it was nice to to meet some of the guys in person. Steve, Paul, and Chris you know who you are, it was great seeing you. One other thing I need to mention is the Clean Water program EMC is running. Please have a look at their website https://www.charitywater.org/ . The rest of the day I walked around on the Expo floor, talking to the people on the floor and getting to grips with all the stuff going on.

EMC World 2015 – Day 1

EMC World 2015, Again a week full of new products, slogans and buzz words.

The day started with a complementary breakfast of my employer who is Platimum sponsor this year, thanks for that it was good to meet both colleges and EMC/VCE guys you normally only speak by mail or phone. Next up a session about devops, semingly something al lot of companies are considering but not implemented yet. Nothing new, short story about Pivotal CF and integration with dockers. The the big opening with everybody in the big hall. Some announcements are planned for later this week, coming back to that when it happends. What is new? VCE with vXRack, a vblock rack build with vSPEX Blue equipmet. Ultra scalable to multiple racks. So CPU RAM and disk in 2 U appliances working together as one. XtremeIO introduces 4.0 firmware and the 40TB brick. 320TB of flash in one rack. Damn that flash stuff is growing. Pat thought it was funny to rip it appart on stage and later they through a stack of dynamite in it. Was funny for a whole 30 seconds. Next up a presentation on adding new services in Enterprise Hybrid Cloud. Short introduction with an example of deploying WordPress as a service. And a guest presentation from Coca Cola (Big VCE customer). Good story, very interesting and nice to hear we are not the only people fighting this battle. Short story, using VRA as frontend portal to both Private and Public cloud to have a single entry to all services. Good point from my point of view. They build this environment without but found it was easier to migrate to EHC as this has NSX integrated. They found that automating traditional servcies like network and backup would lead to large issues and time lines. By implementing EHC this is forced as one platform and completly integrated. Next session is Data Protection on EHC. Presented by our friendly garden gnome (inside joke). ECS as software as additonal option to the Appliance. Cloudboost for Networker (moving data to cloud encrytped). Spanning backup for cloud providers (cloud providers do not deliver recovery!!!) Strangly nobody mentioned recovery is not included when you move to the cloud. Walked to “Madam Tussauds” for the VCE User Group meeting. Was a bit of a disapointment. Only a presentation in a back room. Information about the vXRack presented earlier today. It looks like a promising product. Easy to manage and to mention the best option; automated firmware upgrades. One page with RCM, download and upgrade. Looks cool and they are talking to extend this to vBlock. That would be a enormous improvement to the current system. Big data as explained by the founders of Hadoop and Cloudera was a nice session about how some of the names and products came to what they are today. There was a big interest and not enough seats. To finish this post, some stuff I heard but not witnessed:

DataDomain 9500 : the world’s fastest and most scalable protection storage

VNXe 3200 all flash : All Flash would be going on tour with U2 this summer!

VMAX3 : Major service release here