iSCSI

You might think that after two full days of keynotes, breakout sessions, events and meetings at Oracle OpenWorld it would be hard to excite a convention hall full of business and IT leaders, but Michael Dell had just the right formula with:

• A compelling vision - Redirect IT dollars from management and maintenance to innovation and improving the business by building an Efficient Enterprise;
• Big commitments for quantifiable results like working to take $200 billion of inefficiency out of the $1.2 trillion IT infrastructure industry spend and driving $200 million in savings for Dell's own IT;
• Impressive statistics, something almost all of us in the IT industry get into, of the power of the Dell and Oracle partnership and Dell's leadership and track record in providing solutions;
• Cool products, including:
  • Dell's 11th generation of PowerEdge servers were onstage and Michael highlighted the enhancements in these new servers to simplify deployment, enhance performance, reduce complexity and lower power and cooling requirements;
  • He also discussed more innovation to come next year with new PowerEdge servers based on Intel Nehalem EX architecture; and,
  • Talked about continued enhancements to the EqualLogic storage products, like SSD (launched this year) and 10Gbps Ethernet (coming soon) that will drive efficiency and performance for storage.
• A blueprint to make this vision a reality including:
  • Standardization on open standard solutions built on x86-based servers;
  • Simplification by starting with the applications and taking the complexity out of the way they are supported and managed, and by using Virtualization and Storage Consolidation;
  • Automation by streamlining Services delivery and enabling self-service IT models where critical business services can be deployed through the cloud.
• Dell's own plan - Robin Johnson, CIO of Dell, shared how he is driving inefficiency out of the Dell IT machine
• Having fun - Everyone was excited by Larry Ellison's surprise appearance and from the return of the Tech Force alliance!

Hopefully you are as excited as we are about building the Efficient Enterprise, and if you’re here this week, be sure to come see us in the booth. 

You can follow us on Twitter @dellatORACLEwld and check out my earlier post on Direct2Dell with details of all our activities.

I won't cover it all here but be sure to click over to our blogging mothership, Direct2Dell, to read about Dell's Fast Track to Efficiency, the theme for Dell's announcement of a slew of new servers, a cool new EqualLogic array for small business and remote offices, and quite a few different services.

We'll also be hosting a webcast today with a number of Dell executives outlining the importance of these announcements and the impact to our customers. Following that webcast, my colleagues at Dell TechCenter will be hosting a live technical chat.

Take a look.

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.

Have you seen the latest?  Storage Magazine ranked Dell the #1 midrange array provider in service and reliability.  With our acquisition of EqualLogic, we turned last-year’s 9^th place ranking into a #1 ranking in product reliability and initial product quality.  Hopefully, you didn’t miss Dell’s other recent achievement where Gartner recognized Dell as a leader in Midrange Disk Arrays for their Magic Quadrant 2008.

Dell has made a tradition out of listening to you, our customers.  In turn, you’ve rewarded us with your support.  We’re excited to be plugged in, so we can keep building storage solutions you want.

Thanks for all of your feedback.

(editor's note - this comes to us from Tim Sherbak - one of our EqualLogic virtualization masters)

As you may have heard VMware recently introduced a new initiative they call vStorage.  In a nutshell, it’s all about making VMware work better with storage. Many of our readers are moving to virtual environments using VMware – and this has important storage implications. vStorage helps you integrate and automate solutions to manage and protect your data more efficiently. 

So, what are some examples?

Previously, we’ve talked about Auto-Snapshot Manager/VMware Edition (ASM/VE) and Site Recovery Manager for EqualLogic iSCSI arrays. One of our customers, Donald Wilkins from Navicure presented at VMworld breakout discussion highlighting SRM. Here is a webcast replay of similar material that we presented together just before the show.

Let’s talk about what’s coming.

At the show, we also demonstrated some additional vStorage-enabled features that we’re cooperatively developing with VMware but are not yet shipping to customers..things like the ability to offload the ESX server from data copy operations like Storage VMotion, creating a virtual machine from a template, or creating a clone of a virtual machine. Instead of copying data from the SAN to the ESX server and back to the SAN, the VMware Virtual Center sends instructions to the EqualLogic array as to what needs to be moved, and the arrays offload the data copying from the ESX servers to the arrays. The operation is faster and more efficient.  Here’s a quick demo that you can watch.

vStorage is also coming to the provisioning realm.  In the future you’ll see the coordination of thin provisioning management between the ESX servers and the EqualLogic arrays for protection of the workload in the case that the virtual machine were to run out of space. Here’s a quick demo.

And lastly, here’s a demo of linked clone technology hosted on a prototype EqualLogic 10GbE solid state disk (SSD) disk array.  Linked clones technology optimizes storage utilization by eliminating the duplicate storage inherent to multiple virtual machines. With the 10GbE SSD disk array, it means that we’re not only optimizing storage utilization but also insuring highest possible performance given the large number of virtual machines accessing the underlying shared virtual machine data.  Here’s another demo.