The Virtual Storage Guy

Cisco Live Q&A – EMC vSpecialists Tee Glasgow, Scott Lowe, Rick Scherer & Nick Weaver

As Cisco Live comes to a close I was able to sit down with some good friends in the vSpecialist organization at EMC to share their perspectives on Cisco Live and the adoption of Cloud computing. Joining me this morning is (from left to right):

Rick Scherer - VCDX, Author of VMwareTips.com and vSpecialist at EMC.

Tee Glasgow - Former WAN Engineer, UNIX SysAdmin, Solaris bigot, VMware employee #700-ish, and current EMC vSpecialist. Husband to 1, father to 2, and homeslice to many.

Scott Lowe - An IT pro specializing in virtualization, VMware, storage, servers, and Macs; currently working for EMC Corporation

Nick Weaver – IT Architect & geek extraordinaire. VMware vExpert, EMC vSpecialist, Cisco junkie, Microsoft coder, Linux lover. I make things.

Note: This interviewed originally occurred on Thursday, July 14th; the last day of Cisco Live. I should also point out, that while these guys are employees of EMC, the views expressed in this interview are their own and are not official statements of EMC.

Vaughn: "Good morning guys, my sincerest thanks for making the time to get together to chat. It can be tough to find the motivation to make it to the show floor early on the last morning of a conference. With that said, let’s jump into the interview. I’m rather interested in your thoughts around the types of conversations you were having at with the Cisco Live attendees around the show and cloud computing."

Tee: "This week we’ve had a lot of discussions with attendees that are well beyond the scope of storage. Theses conversations may start with storage but quickly expand into areas like the network or virtualization layers. It’s apparent that Cisco Live has evolved from a network-centric tradeshow to one focusing on advancing the capabilities of the data center."

Cisco Live chat with Andy Sholomon of Cisco

Next week I’ll be supporting the NetApp team at Cisco Live. Worldwide conferences can be a somewhat of a challenge for me, as I’d like to share the buzz and news of the show in blog posts yet my schedule tends to be booked solid with customer and partners meetings. This type of scheduling makes it rather difficult to find time to author a post.

This situation may be leading some to ask, “Does that mean we’re not going to read about what’s going on at Cisco Live next week?”

That’s a fair question; to which I am excited to share that I think we have a come up with a creative way to address this challenge! Each day of next week we will share the thoughts and perspectives from some of the most brilliant minds at Cisco, VMware, and our partners via interviews that we will be conducting during the show!

We’re pretty excited about this format. We’re hoping it’ll prove to be a great way to share the excitement of the event, and with that said we’re going to kick-off our reporting in advance of the show…

Will Vivek Kundra’s Departure Impact Federal Cloud Computing Initiatives?

I recently had an impromptu run-in with Greg Gardner, our Chief Architect for Defense Solutions in NetApp U.S. Public Sector. One of the topics we discussed was the recent resignation of the Federal CIO Vivek Kundra and how his departure may impact the Federal Cloud Computing Strategy. I admit that I was somewhat surprised when Greg offered to author a post on the topic in order to share his perspective and insights with a broader audience. Thus, it is my privilege to share them with you here.

Greg's Perspective:

As most who watch the Federal IT market closely know, Federal CIO Vivek Kundra, architect of the Federal Cloud Computing Strategy and the 25 Point Implementation Plan to Reform Federal Information Technology Management, announced his resignation. What does this mean for the future of cloud computing in the Federal government and how will Vivek’s initiatives be executed going forward? Allow me to addresses these questions.

Microsoft Cloud Fast Track brings Hyper-V to the FlexPod Infrastructure

Today at Microsoft TechEd NetApp and Cisco announced their pre-validated configuration for Hyper-V as a part of the Microsoft’s Cloud Fast Track program. While technically this pre-validated shared infrastructure isn’t a FlexPod, it is built from the same components and process as a FlexPod with additional research and solution development provided by the Microsoft Technical Marketing team at NetApp.

While this solution is very similar in concept and architectural design to FlexPod, it is not part of the FlexPod program.

NetApp is the first storage vendor to be part of the Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track program and as a last Microsoft Storage Solutions Partner of the Year and a finalist for the Global ISV Infrastructure Partner and Virtualization Partner of the Year; NetApp is the storage platform of choice for Microsoft private cloud deployments.

Fast Track for Cisco & NetApp delivers a robust, innovative set of integrations in Micrososft’s System Center Opalis which provide faster solution delivery and consistency for private clouds.

• System Center Opalis integration to enable workflow reuse and composition
• Industry leading rapid provisioning performance of Virtual Machines for Cluster Shared Volumes
• Maximum PowerShell support for flexibility and customization
• PowerShell support for UCS

Hyper-V Integration Demos

The Power of Innovative Datacenter Stacks

Joe Onisick at Define the Cloud posted a thought provoking article titled, “The Power of Innovative Datacenter Stacks” where he shares his views regarding the value and abilities delivered with 'single-vendor' and 'multi-vendor' integrated solution stacks such as FlexPod.

This post touches on a number of topics including the ability of a solution stack to deliver value, packaging best of breed technologies, and collaborative multi-vendor support models. As an architect for a leading systems integrator, Joe is as knowledgeable as one can be with leading data center technologies. You can be sure, Joe understands where 'the rubber meets the road' as he is responsible for delivering the capabilities available from today’s pre-packaged cloud architectures.

I’ve avoided mining Joe’s post for quotes. At just over 500 words, it’s straightforward and candid and I encourage you to read.

If you enjoy Joe's thoughts and would like to hear more, than I'd invite you to join Joe as he shares more of his thoughts and experiences live on the Innovative Versus Integration Cloud Infrastructure Stacks Webcast. This event is scheduled for May 26th and begins at 1:00 PM ET / 10:00 AM PT.

Welcome Scott Baker and Virtualutopia

Ever feel like you're on a roll where everything is going your way, like the gods are looking down on you favorably? Well, that's how I've been feeling while we've been growing the virtualization solutions business unit and it is my pleasure to introduce you to one of our latest additions, Scott Baker!

Scott has over 20 years of IT industry experience, including 6 years at EMC and a leader in the vSpecialist team. He provides a wealth of knowledge ranging from developing code to helping customers understand and consume technology.

I'd like to share with you a compliment a current (and unnamed) vSpecialist shared he once paid to Scott. He said, "Scott's so talented that rumor has it that Peyton Manning is often referred to as the Scott Baker of the NFL." While it may read as hyperbole, in my opinion that comment is spot on!

I've known Scott for a while now and I suspect you will share the same opinion should you begin following Virtualutopia. Heck, his first post includes Star Wars, NetApp, and EMC! What more could you want?

Welcome Nick Howell and the Virtual Arcade

Our Cloud and Virtualization Technical Marketing Engineering Team recently added the well-know and highly respected industry expert Nick Howell (aka That1GuyNick). I get jazzed every time I’m in the room Nick. He has this energy he brings in the combination of lethal technical chops and unbridled passion to share with others.

Nick’s opened the Virtual Arcade which promises to focus on ‘all things VMware vCloud’ including Director, Connector, Hybrid Cloud, Backup and Business Continuity etc. Knowing Nick's work in area such as virtualizing Oracle, the vArcade looks like it might be one well worth subscribing to.

Talking Orchestration with DynamicOps

NetApp brings together industry-leading IT infrastructure providers who specialize in commercial software and hardware technologies and whose benefits are optimized by NetApp storage innovations and OpenAPI ecosystem.

One of these leaders is DynamicOps, who provides one of the most flexible platform for orchestrating and automating the delivery and management of private cloud services. Recently I sat down with Leslie Muller, Founder & CTO of DynamicOps, to discuss unified cloud management, service level assurance, IT automation, and rapid ecosystem integration.

I'd invite you to listen to the podcast and learn more about the joint solutions from DynamicOps and NetApp.

Is NetApp Missing from your Datacenter?

On behalf of NetApp, I’m writing to you with a simple proposition:

For your next storage purchase, you should consider NetApp.

Things move at a fast, if not exponential pace in the data center. The advent of virtual infrastructures and cloud computing has introduced a new set of requirements that redefined the value proposition of storage arrays within a cloud infrastructure stack.

The storage array that you ultimately select is responsible for maintaining most (if not all) of your organization’s intellectual property. This means that the success of your organization is dependent on the infrastructure that supports it and is tied to you ability to affect change in the quality of the storage you introduce.

Gone are the days when a shared storage platform simply provided high performance and data availability for a select set of business critical applications. Today, arrays MUST serve all of the data in the data center with greater than five (5) 9’s of availability while bringing to bear key enabling technologies such as: storage efficiency, data mobility, disaster resilience, continuous data protection, security and many, many more. Oh, did I mention that all this is predicated on a solution that must be repeatable, operationally consistent, non-disruptive, easy to manage, and able to grow with you and your business without adding unnecessary burdens to the adoption process?

What I have just articulated are array-specific requirements I have seen across the board – whether you are a small to medium business, a medium to lower-end enterprise, or a full on enterprise class customer. In every customer engagement that I have, these are always topics of conversation, and to you my fellow reader, I can only hope that many of these requirements are ringing true in your mind.

Now, if you do have a traditional storage array, then your existing vendor is likely a large and successful company with a long history of delivering big-iron solutions. Ideally, they have been there for you through the time of mainframes and open system through today’s emerging virtualization technologies, but you should ask yourself: “are they still offering a multitude of platforms under one banner, each offering a unique a specially tailored feature-set to address some portion of you virtual datacenter needs and ultimately your organization’s requirements?”

If you answered “no”, then let me thank you for being a NetApp customer ☺, otherwise, I encourage you to read on.

If you are open to new possibilities to extend your datacenter capabilities, especially for virtualization initiatives, or haven’t taken a closer look at NetApp’s technologies recently, then I’d like to offer you some compelling reasons as to why you should.

Why Partners Love FlexPod

I’ve caught a little break in my schedule here at VMware Partner Exchange, and thought I’d take a moment to share with you some of the 'keys to success' NetApp partners are having with FlexPod for VMware.

1. Flexibility of the Size of the Platform

The ability to be able to scale a solution, from diminutive to colossal, FlexPod provides a means to deliver custom-tailored solutions designed to fit a project’s requirements versus attempting to fit a project to a fixed architecture.

2. Enhanced Service Offerings

FlexPod allows partners to lead the delivery of the platform and it’s associated services. Customers win as they receive turnkey solutions with high-touch service from a trusted advisor. This delivery model allows partners to deepen their relationship with their customers.

Partners are providing a wide spectrum of services for FlexPod in areas such as:

• Business Justification
• Assessment
• Architectural Planning
• Implementation
• Providing level 1 & level 2 Support

3. Integration with Systems Management Platforms

The FlexPod architecture provides a set of open APIs that enable IT service management with third-party infrastructure and systems management solutions. This capability provides partners with an advantage when positioning FlexPod in their customer’s environments. The decision to offer FlexPod complete with systems management and orchestration capabilities can be determined on a customer-by-customer basis.

4. Density Wins Deals

It’s fairly well understood that the ability to increase the density of one’s infrastructure can provide a significant benefit in lowering operational expenses of a data center. FlexPod is unique as it is the only validated stack architecture which extends the increase in density provided by vSphere, UCS, and Nexus by providing unmatched storage efficiency via data deduplication for production applications.

What is interesting is partners are leveraging the costs savings provided by dedupe in a number of creative ways including:

• Passing the cost savings on to the customer
• Ensuring their margins
• Financing an increase in solution capabilities without increasing the customer’s original budget

Partners stated a number of examples ranging from an increase in UCS nodes to adding in business continuance components with VMware Site Recovery Manager.

I commend the ability of our partners to turn a technical capability of a NetApp array into a means where they demonstrate their expertise in designing cloud based architectures that increases their value in the eyes of the customer.

Wrapping Up

I feel very fortunate to work with such a great group of partners; you guys (and gals) truly rock! Thank you for being a partner and sharing your success stories with me. I need to run, but hope to find time to share more thoughts before Partner Exchange wraps up.

Leading Change in the Storage Industry

One of the things I love about my current role at NetApp (beyond the great culture, people, and technologies) is the amount of time I spend meeting with customers, prospects, partners, analysts, and the online community to discuss the topic of virtualization and how it has changed everything from IT architectures to corporate business models.

Over the past four to five years we have witnessed data centers change at a break-neck pace. During this evolution the level of exposure around storage technologies has risen from gregarious, black boxes once relegated to a small set of applications to a shared global component of the cloud; crucial to the success of the virtual infrastructure.

The architectures and the bread and butter capabilities of a traditional storage arrays have changed significantly since virtualization became mainstream (which is I’d suggest occurred in June of 2006 with the release of VI3 from VMware).

Back then traditional storage arrays looked like:

• Various Distinct Storage Platforms were available for hi-end SAN, mid-tier SAN, NAS gateways, and backup-only arrays each delivering a unique set of capabilities
• Fibre Channel networks were considered by many as enterprise class connectivity
• RAID 10 was the norm for highly available, high performance applications
• RAID 5 was everywhere as it provided cost effective data protection for application with moderate performance requirements
• Storage integration was commonly defined as completing a validation test for a particular application
• Copies of Data Sets, whether used for disk to disk backup or application test & development, were whole 100% duplicates

It wasn't too long ago when some of the traditional storage array vendors disagreed with, and dismissed NetApp’s architectural design along with our vision that storage arrays should provide their feature set and capabilities across every platform.

NetApp dared to pose the question, 'Why should customers have to choose between a full-featured yet expensive high end array and a mid-tier array be with crippled set of capabilities?'

ITaaS with NewScale & NetApp

Cloud computing means that users have easy, yet controlled, access to shared storage, compute, and networking infrastructure with on-demand provisioning – aka 'IT as a Service'.

If you're interested in learning more about how NetApp and NewScale make ITaaS a reality then I'd like to invite you to join Jason Schroedl (VP of marketing at NewScale) and I as we discuss how self-service from a tiered catalog of storage options can deliver greater flexibility, agility, and cost savings.

Topics we plan to discuss include:

• Provide IT consumers with choices and tiered offers
• Enable self-service from a menu of standard options
• Accelerate the speed of IT through automated provisioning
• Secured shared multi-tenant architectures
• Driving down costs with greater visibility into resources
• Leverage the efficiencies of shared IT infrastructure
• Deliver on the vision of a dynamic data center

Webinar Details:

Date: Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Time: 9:00 am PT / 12:00 pm ET / 5:00 pm
Duration: 1 hour

Click here to register for the webinar

Thoughts on 2011 - Technical Trends for Clouds

Recently, a number of us at NetApp were asked to share our thoughts around our expectations for 2011. The topics shared by thought leaders at NetApp from the likes of Val Bercovici to Jay Kidd ran the gamut from global economic conditions to ITaaS offerings to object-oriented storage architectures. As one might expect, the thoughts I shared were a bit more technical in nature and focused on the integration of storage technologies with virtualization and cloud-based constructs.

Over the past several years, I’ve been providing this type of guidance regarding product requirements, technical advancements, partner solutions, and the like relating to the product managers and technical Directors responsible for developing our virtualization related solutions. After sharing my thoughts within NetApp, I thought you might be interested in some of the guidance I provided for 2011.

I will admit as I write this post that I am thrilled by the concept of sharing, receiving feedback, and eventually reviewing the accuracy of my ”predictions.” Before I do, I would like to stress that the views I share are my own. They are not to be considered official NetApp statements.

So with that disclaimer out of the way, here are my predictions for 2011 pertaining to how storage will advance within cloud & virtual infrastructures…

BMC is Leading Cloud Infrastructure Management

Today BMC Software and Cisco announced a strategic alliance to develop and market new solutions for large-scale multi-tenant cloud computing infrastructures. This is phenomenal news as last year NetApp and BMC formed our strategic alliance to provide joint customers with the solutions and infrastructure to accelerate the adoption of cloud infrastructures.

Today's announcement will result in end-to-end solutions with the ability to provision and manager servers, networking, storage arrays and virtual machines. The combination of these mutual alliances provide joint BMC, Cisco, and NetApp customers the benefit of a fully automated end-to-end cloud infrastructure beginning with the initial service request to “one click” provisioning, deployment, management and decommissioning, which extends to address the most complex & demanding deployments like our joint Secure Multi-Tenancy solution or FlexPOD architectures.

So What’s Available Today?

Today customers who deploy cloud services via BMC Business Service Management platform can have the NetApp storage catalog as an integrated component via BMC’s Atrium Orchestrator. This means a storage administrator can define the policies for NetApp efficiency, availability, provisioning and protection, and have storage provisioned automatically as part of an enterprise service catalog. This integration includes NetApp Provisioning Manager and the VSC 2.0 via the BMC Cloud Extension Pack for Cloud Lifecycle Management.