Storage

Today, VMware announced its new vSphere 4 platform at an event in Palo Alto. Michael Dell joined VMware CEO Paul Maritz on stage, along with other industry luminaries including EMC’s Joe Tucci, Cisco’s John Chambers and Intel’s Pat Gelsinger, to participate in the announcement of the industry’s first cloud operating system.

With vSphere, VMware aims to simplify cloud infrastructure with IT services for both internal and external clouds. What made this an interesting announcement was the recognition for the hard work of their own engineering community (who sat all in blue t-shirts on the lawn) and the collaboration they have had with others in the industry.

For our part, Dell worked extensively with VMware throughout the development of vSphere with comprehensive testing and compatibility processes. Dell customers were also part of the vSphere Beta Customer Program, and we received rave reviews from the pre-release vSphere code testing. Together with VMware, Dell is making virtualized infrastructures faster to implement and manage.

Our new EqualLogic PS6000 series SAN is vSphere- and vStorage-ready out of the box. Our new 11^th generation of PowerEdge servers with vSphere 4.0 deliver up to 168 percent faster performance and are up to 135 percent more energy efficient. Not only does Dell partner with VMware to solve customer problems – we are the number one reseller of VMware—but we are also a customer with one of the largest VMware installations in the world.

During the event, Michael brought to sharp focus the issue of enterprise IT waste. For every $1 spent on acquiring new technology, customers typically spend $8 managing it. This waste is magnified by poor server utilization, power consumption and ever-increasing consulting dollars to manage the infrastructure. According to Michael, virtualization will not only drive the next wave of innovation but new efficiencies as well, from the desktop to the data center, and into the cloud.

Michael went on to discuss how customers are looking for a cloud platform or deployment environment that is open, is interoperable, runs on industry standards and is virtualized. Dell works with the largest cloud providers in the world and has built more than 19 cloud-optimized platforms. If there’s one thing we learned by working with these leading cloud providers, it’s that variation kills. vSphere provides a common, homogenized environment that enables cloud providers to utilize economies of scale, accelerating the delivery of business services.

He also discussed how the future of cloud computing will be both on- and off-premise. This is where VMware’s vSphere comes in as a key enabler. VMware’s vision is to create a homogenous environment where customer workloads can be hosted behind their own firewall or with a service provider, all managed under a single context. In this way, these customers can achieve new levels of operational efficiencies. Enterprise computing is at a tipping point driven by cloud computing and virtualization and Dell is committed to shifting customers into the new era of IT efficiency. Together with VMware we will make virtualized infrastructures faster to implement and to manage. We are laying the foundation for a more efficient enterprise running from the desktop to the cloud.

The big takeaway is that today marks a new landmark in Dell’s partnership with VMware as we will expand our vision to embrace the cloud computing, and fully address one of the most pressing issues facing companies and organizations of all kinds and sizes – the efficiency of enterprise IT. I’d love to hear from any of you who were also in the audience on your take on the launch today.

After spending last week at SNW to present on 6Gbps SAS and virtualization, I left with a lot on mind. First, it was a great show and SNIA and Computerworld are to thank for that. Their professionalism in running an event are second to none.

Everyone has asked me two things. First, I get asked, “How was attendance?” Frankly, it was light. However, it seemed that there was a significant presence of smaller organizations from the region attending. It was refreshing to discuss their strategies as we often get consumed by thoughts of mega data centers and can easily forget about issues that impact smaller organizations.

For instance, one small IT shop was trying to develop a disaster recovery program for their one and only server farm. While we might envision a world in which that DR site would be hundred, if not thousands, of miles away, they simply wanted to replicate their server environment four miles away. Why? Because someone might steal their servers and walk away with the company’s entire database! Talk about needing some insight on the best buy to replicate data! SNW provided that type of information and made this end-user's time at the event purposeful.

The second question I get is “What was everyone talking about?” It seemed that the usual hot topics received the most attention: SSDs, virtualization, dedup, tiering and green. A few thoughts on each…

SSDs – the Lamborghini of storage. My colleague at Microsoft, Chris Lionetti, offered up this nugget…”if you’re not already short stroking your drives, why would you use SSDs to improve your performance?” Good point on performance. However, I would offer that many are concerned with power savings, but at the current price points that may require a long payback period.

Virtualization – the catch-all phrase for everything cool in high-tech. Many end users are confused by the term "virtualization." Why? Because every supplier in the world is using the term in different ways. For environments in which you've deployed typical virtual OS (VMware, Hyper-V or Zen), I recommend that you choose storage solutions that allow you to aggregate your storage into a common pool, is built upon a Unified Fabric of Ethernet and is highly optimized. Might I suggest EqualLogic? Sorry, couldn't help myself.

Dedup – a classic duh. Who wouldn’t want to dedup data whenever possible? Backup data is a great place to start.

Tiering – a great architecture allowing you to deliver high-performance SAS drives for applications and lower-cost, lower-performance SATA drives for less frequently accessed data.

Green – we’re all getting greener…more efficient power supplies, lower power SSD drives, deduping data, tiering to put less used data on lower power drives, virtualized environments that more fully utilize the hardware we deploy, energy efficient Ethernet. This is not only great for the environment, but it also reduces your power expenses, which aligns your goals more completely with your organization’s needs even if you don’t directly own the budget for that expense.

With President Obama’s cap-and-trade proposals it may have material impact to your organization’s bottom line in the years to come.

Next up…Interop. Hope to see you there!

With declining memory prices and increasing application performance requirements, Solid State Drive technology has re-emerged as a topic of great interest in the IT industry.  Most recently, enterprise-class versions of the technology have been appearing in midrange storage arrays, including the Dell|EMC Clariion CX series and Dell's EqualLogic PS Series. 

We had Travis Vigil in Dell’s Enterprise Product Group spend a little time to explain the basics around Solid State Drives and how they are being used in the new EqualLogic PS6000S array. 

In the video, Travis references some tests the Dell Storage and Oracle Solutions teams did to show how the addition of a PS6000S array could improve transactional throughput or response time. 

More details on those tests can be found in this white paper entitled "Benefits and Best Practices for Deploying SSDs in an OLTP Environment Using Dell EqualLogic PS Series."

Enjoy.

Last week, Marc Staimer of storage firm Dragon Slayer Consulting published a good article on SearchStorage.com called “The value of easy-to-use SAN storage.”

I, along with a number of colleagues on Dell’s EqualLogic line, have had the pleasure of talking with Marc from time to time at industry events. It has been a pleasure in part because Marc always ‘got it’ when EqualLogic experts were explaining the point of having a virtualized storage architecture or talking about a recent automated feature.

While an unsolicited plug is always nice, Marc’s analysis of the benefits of storage automation in terms of the evolution of IT human resources – i.e. skilled and new labor -- is insightful. Common misperceptions and skepticism about “ease-of-use” as a benefit in enterprise storage systems should fade, Marc points out, because “storage administrators managed far more storage and spent less time managing it with this type of simple-to-use SAN storage vs. traditional SAN storage” in a user polls Dragon Slayer did with analyst firm ESG.

A related point: enterprise storage managers shouldn’t worry that ease-of-use will threaten their jobs. Skilled storage engineers and managers will always have a depth of experience that new blood to the IT world will lack until they’ve spent time hip-deep in the technology. You can’t replace decades of experience with a slick GUI and a new college grad.

What smart IT departments CAN do with skilled managers and administrators with decades of storage experience is apply their knowledge to larger issues of prioritizing DR/BC activities according to business value of the data, archiving and considerations of next-generation flexible virtualized datacenter architectures. Such an orientation of storage skills towards the application and services that matter to the business will benefit storage personnel.

One example of what a slick GUI on top of a virtualized storage architecture CAN do, though, is eliminate the need for professional services for basic tuning/re-tuning, configuration and expansion of storage that eat up IT budgets. There’s still a place for professional services from channel partners or vendors in the IT world, particularly for customers, large or small that prefer the assistance. But if IT organizations that can select an storage platform that requires less tuning, they can hopefully apply some of those saved configuration services dollars to rewarding SAN managers who are keeping tabs on even larger and larger volumes of data.

Dell actually introduced some new services built around the EqualLogic line, but notably none of these new services tackle ‘old-school’ problems of re-balancing RAID sets to eliminate hot spots or doing an install of an incremental PS Series array. What the Dell ProConsult services do address is taking some of the EqualLogic line’s built-in features and helping IT department extend replication, snapshots, application integration, etc. to meet business goals.

My one critique of Marc’s piece: I’d like to think the revolt that Dell is fomenting with easy-to-use storage hasn’t been so quiet…

Last week we announced our Efficient Enterprise portfolio of integrated products and services. This week we are revealing the details of our five new blade, rack and tower 11^th generation Dell PowerEdge servers that are now available. These new servers were officially debuted at the Intel Xeon 5500 series processor launch event this afternoon in Santa Clara, California, and Intel’s Boyd Davis wrote about it earlier today on Direct2Dell.

Despite economic challenges, many companies and organizations want to take advantage of the significant performance increases paired with the cost savings from energy efficient technologies and virtualization. The majority of data centers were built during the dot-com boom and are reaching their 10-year lifespan, so it’s no surprise that many companies are in need of a refresh. Dell designed its new servers with input from hundreds of IT pros worldwide with a theme in mind: do more with less. The new server portfolio does that by simplifying data center operations, improving performance and energy efficiency, and lowering total cost of ownership.

Before we take a look under the hood, let’s check out the sleek design. Not only do these new servers look cool enough to be in Bruce Wayne’s lair in Batman “The Dark Knight,” but they have also won 2009 iF Germany Product Design Awards. It’s not just about good looks. The new servers have system and image commonality across platforms with logical layout of components and power supply placement allows for straight forward installation and redeployment.

What’s New Inside?

• Simplify with the Industry’s First Embedded Systems Management: Dell put a lot of the systems management media you need for deployment, diagnostics, update, and configuration right on the motherboard. Unified Server Configurator powered by LifeCycle Controller radically simplifies IT processes so you can deploy operating systems 43 percent faster.
• Save with Industry Leading Energy Efficiency: Energy Smart technologies in the new servers cut power usage while cranking up performance capacity. We expect Dell PowerEdge 11^th generation servers to have the industry’s highest performance per watt, according to SPECpower_ssj2008 results to be published later today.
• Do More with Leading Virtualization Performance: In addition to the new Intel Xeon 5500 series processors, the PowerEdge servers have embedded hypervisors from VMware, Citrix and Microsoft, up to 125 percent increased memory footprint and more integrated I/O. All of that emphasis on virtualization paid off. Dell PowerEdge R710 achieved the industry’s highest VMmark score for 2U servers, topping all 2- and 4-socket platforms in virtualization performance.
• More Horsepower to Do More: the new servers provide up to 50 percent more performance over previous generation servers to run those massive databases and applications more efficiently. According to SPECjbb2005 Dell PowerEdge servers lead the industry in performance.

We’re excited by this major refresh of our server portfolio and by what it can do to advance IT for our customers. If you want the details on how you can do more with less in your data center with the new 11^th Generation Dell PowerEdge servers, check out our benchmarks.