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 : Blogger Techminute with NetApp on Flexpod Solutions

Check out the great conversation I had with Abhinav Joshi of Cisco and Joe Onisick of WWT around our partnership, FlexPod, SMT, Automation, CVDs, and enabling partners. Thanks to Didier Rombaut of Cisco and Friea Berg of NetApp for bringing us together for this conversation.

 

Cisco Live Q&A – Natalie Lambert of Citrix on Desktop Virtualization Trends, Obstacles, and Opportunities

Last September Cisco and Citrix announced the first desktop virtualization Cisco Validated Design (CVD) to help customers implement standard, repeatable architectures for XenDesktop with NetApp storage. Many saw this as an indicator that desktop virtualization was (finally!) reaching a tipping point, a perception strengthened with Cisco’s November launch of its Virtualization Experience Infrastructure (VXI) vision and our joint release of FlexPod. Cisco and NetApp now offer Citrix XenDesktop on FlexPod and joint customers worldwide are deploying and benefiting from our 3-way solutions.

I finally had the opportunity to meet Citrix director of product marketing Natalie Lambert in person here at Cisco Live shortly before we jointly recorded a Cisco Live TechMinute with Cisco’s Doug Dooley. We talked about this being the first year that Citrix has a presence at Cisco Live and the impact of Cisco’s emphasis on desktop virtualization. As Natalie put it, “When Cisco talks about desktop virtualization, people really listen.”

Natalie absolutely gets the criticality of storage to a successful desktop virtualization project:

Cisco Live chat with J Metz of Cisco on FCoE & Putting the Cart Behind the Horse

My Cisco Live misadventures continued with Cisco FCoE product manager J Metz. This was my first time meeting J, a former university professor who these days promotes, evangelizes, and drives the development of FCoE products and technology. I've followed him online for sometime and was pretty jazzed once learning he agreed to our interview. I hope you enjoy...

Vaughn: "What do you think the most difficult questions you’ll be asked here at the show will involve?"

J: "Attendees here are wicked smart. They know their networks better than anyone else on the planet. Very humbling. I’m expecting to get some very specific questions about their environments, and some of those will probably be pretty darn tough."

Note: We quickly ditched the interview script and in favor of last week’s interview with Andy Sholomon where we discussed Ron Fuller’s Virtual Device Context session, was rumored to have attracted 1800 registrants.

Vaughn: "What do you feel is driving interest in Virtual Device Contexts (VDC)?"

J: "You know, Cisco creates wonderful pieces of equipment but there are some many cases where what a customer truly wants is for these technologies to work with in their existing environment, be it technically and operationally."

"Let’s change the approach on this topic shall we? We’ll put the cart back behind the horse… Typically, one of the things storage people are concerned about is that if they hand everything over to the Ethernet admins they will lose control but will be held accountable. For some crazy reason they don’t like that."

Cisco Live chat with Abhinav Joshi of Cisco & Wade Holmes of VMware

My week here in Vegas started with breakfast with Cisco’s Abhinav Joshi, VMware’s Wade Holmes, and NetApp’s Friea Berg. You probably already know this bunch from Twitter or their blogs, but for those who may not know them allow me to share a quick intro:

Abhinav is a Sr. Cloud Solutions Architect at Cisco. He was recognized as a VMware vExpert in 2011 & 2010, and has many technical certifications from VMware, NetApp, Cisco, EMC, & Citrix. His blog can be found at http://blogs.cisco.com/author/abhinavjoshi.

Wade is a Technical Solution Architect at VMware focusing on cloud solutions. He is VCDX#15, and holds a number of industry certifications including VCAP-DCD, VCP4, VCP3, VCP2, CISSP, CCSK, and ABCP. His blog posts can be found at: http://vWade.com.

Friea works in NetApp's alliance organization and is passionate about 'all things' involving Cisco & NetApp like FlexPod.

Here's our conversation from Monday morning...

Real-World Clouds Built on Cisco and NetApp

Feeling inspired by a conversation over lunch on day 1 of Cisco Live with Walz Group Chief Information Security Officer Bart Falzarano. In just 20 minutes Bart outlined not just his company’s architecture today but their decision process for and logic behind evolution to cloud. Our conversation started with a discussion about how a couple years ago exponential growth - combined with consistent failures on key platforms running on bare metal – started having a significant impact this was having on his data center operations. Although he’d started virtualization, there was a clear need to standardize, drive down costs, and fix platforms supporting apps on bare metal.

The solution: FlexPod based on Cisco UCS, Cisco Nexus and NetApp storage.

Bart introduced a great new term that I immediately decided to adopt: technology debt. Once Walz moved from the older, legacy server and storage technology that was failing to deliver to the current needs of his business he found that the benefits weren’t just incremental gains. Instead, the company achieved a complete paradigm shift with failures dropping from once every few months to 1x per year, and from an RTO of <12 hrs to <10 minutes for bare metal recoveries.

There are 7 key building blocks to achieving a real world cloud environment.

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…

Voting for VMworld 2011 Sessions Ends Today

Just a gentle reminder that today is the last day to cast your votes for the break out sessions presented at VMworld 2011.

The list of NetApp-related sessions is here.

My comments on some of the multi-storage vendor panel sessions is here.

Why are you reading this line, Go Vote!

VMworld 2011: Offering More G14 Classified Information from Storage Experts

Two of the mostly highly rated sessions presented at VMworld 2010 were TA8133: Best Practices to Increase Availability and Throughput for VMware & TA8623: Storage Super-Heavyweight Challenge. I believe part of the reason these two sessions were so highly rated was that they both presented the role and future direction of storage in a shared cloud infrastructure from multiple storage industry experts including NetApp, EMC, HP, and Dell.

Topics discussed by multiple storage vendors tend to be very popular with the public. Their appeal has also resonated in the blogosphere where joint efforts like the iSCSI & NFS posts are some of the most read on my blog.

Well some of us are back at it again, submitting a number of sessions for your consideration as sessions presented at VMworld 2011. If you’d like to get the inside scoop, literally G14 classified information on storage integration, performance, and capabilities, then please consider voting for the following sessions.

1623
Storage Super heavyweight Smackdown 2011
(NetApp, EMC, HP, Dell, VMware Professional.com)

VMworld 2011 Session Voting is Open – Viva la community!

As a means to ensure the content presented in the breakout sessions at VMworld & VMworld Europe are cutting edge, real world, and appealing VMware allows customers, partners, industry analysts and VMware employees to participate in the content creation process. Frankly, I’m not sure any worldwide conference can compare to VMworld in terms of the amount of the influence their community directly has on determining the content presented at the shows.

“Viva la Community!”

Many in VMware responded to the April 12th call for papers. To those who submitted a session abstract, thank you! There are some truly great ones in consideration. The call for papers was only the start for the selection process.

If you plan to attend either the US or Europe event or have attended in previous years, it is time for you to cast your votes for the submissions that will comprise the breakout session catalog this fall. We need help whittling 1,1664 submissions down to approximately 170 unique sessions for the US and roughly 130 for Europe.

Don’t Dawdle. Don’t Hesitate. Don’t wait, procrastinate, stall or delay…
cast your votes today!

Note: If you don't have a VMworld account, it appears you can create a one and complete the process at a later time in order to cast your votes today.


The Submissions from NetApp

Videos from the Charlotte VMUG Annual Conference

As I shared in a previous posts, the 2010 Charlotte VMUG Annual Conference was hosting a vExpert panel. This session was hosted by Rich Brambley of VMetc.com, Veeam & the Virtumania podcast (seriously rich - do you sleep?) The panel consisted of Mike Laverick of RTFM-Ed.co.uk and SearchServerVirtualization.com, Chad Sakac & Scott Lowe of EMC, and yours truly. Honestly, how often do you find 5 vExperts on stage simultaneously?

Here's the video of the panel session.

Charlotte VMUG Annual Conference - a mini VMworld?

All – please join Chad Sakac, Mike Laverick, Scott Lowe, Charles Gautreaux and I at the Charlotte VMware Users Group Annual Conference on June 11th. this event is shaping up to almost be a “mini-VMworld”

In addition to the original crew we are confirming the addition of additional VMware experts such as Rich Brambley and there's a high probability of others (waiting for confirmation)!

(thanks to Chad for the text in this post – hope you don’t mind my recycling)

• While there are loads of storage folks on that vExpert panel, none of us are “storage centric”, any and all discussion topics will be welcome.
• We’re discussing topics people might want – thinking what we’re seeing impeded ongoing adoption of virtualization, what we’re seeing in the vCloud space
• There will be more details on what’s going on with vStorage APIs for Array Integration

There are a ton of other great topics, and great sessions – including hands on labs with View, discussions around Springsource, customers, and other great VMware partners.

What topics would you like to have us discuss?

For those interested I've posted the agenda below.

Charlotte VMUG Regional User Conference

If you are going to be in the Charlotte, NC area on June 11th please join Charles Gautreaux, Mike Laverick of RTFM.co.uk, Chad Sakac and Scott Lowe of EMC, and yours truly for the Charlotte VMUG Regional User Conference!

There will be tons of information being shared on VMware solutions from NetApp, EMC, HP, 3Par, Isilon, Riverbed, Trend Micro, Viziocore, Wyse, and many more! I'm confident that this year's event will exceed 1,000 attendees, so don't delay and register now!

The VMware Express and View on NetApp

PEX 2010 has wrapped up, and as usual there's way too many things going on each day which prevent me from sharing my thoughts in real time. So here's a few post show...

On Wednesday, I got a chance to take a break from the partner showcase and breakout sessions to take peak at the View Express. Let me say that impressive, is an understatement. The VMware Express is a mobile datacenter and demo environment and this year it will be traveling across the U.S. and Canada, making three coast-to-coast trips, bringing customers hands on experiences right in their own backyard.