Today was a good day at EMCWorld - started off great with a presentation by Brian Gallagher, President EMC Symmetrix and Virtualization Product Group, with substantial technical information on how the latest buzz from EMC, VPLEX, is going to work in the real world. I don't think Brian tried to sugar coat the product, he showed us how the technology works, how it can be helpful, and how it can grow in the future.
Personally, I like the idea of storage "Federation" or creating larger virtual storage pools that are greater than the physical hardware in any one location, and the idea of making that accessible to multiple sites over the WAN. This is the centerpiece of VPLEX, and really of the whole EMCWorld show this year, and it could be impressive if it really delivers. Right now though, the "Federation" is limited to sites within 100km of each other, which isn't very practical in the real world. Another nice feature is that the storage behind the VPLEX federation does not need to be consistent, and in some cases, does not need to be EMC hardware. Of course, pricing for VPLEX will be storage based, so even if you're not using EMC hardware, you'll still end up paying EMC for the technology.
My breakout sessions today were all based around VPLEX, with a 30 minute intro covering the basics in the morning, and then a deep technological dive after lunch, interspersed with a trip to the exhibit floor and lunch. I visited the CommVault booth in the Atmos area, and chatted with the 2 Daves there, and looked at the new IONIX version 7 that's due out eventually.
CommVault is starting to market to service providers, and their technology is comprehensive, intuitive and proven - they have a lot to offer in the Online Backup space, so the other vendors will have to take notice. A few of the nice features I noticed were Outlook integration and stubbing paired with Exchange DR and Message Level backups, and policy driven retention and scheduling rules. Pretty powerful stuff from a proven industry leader, and then add that to their ability to write the backed up data to the "Cloud", its quite a combination.
IONIX is also offering some interesting technology coming out soon with their version 7 of Storage Resource Manager. I wasn't able to see the reporting capabilities of the software, but the architecture seems neat. Virtual Appliance data collectors run at each site and somehow feed data to a (I'm guessing) distributed database so that data from all locations is available at any location. I'm hoping to get on the early release list and get this up and running in our ESX lab.
I'm looking forward to Day 3 @ EMCWorld, look for another report tomorrow....
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
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