Disclaimer: I recently attended the EMC Forum 2013 – Sydney.  My flights and accommodation were paid for by myself, however EMC provided meals and some swag. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event.  Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

Part 3

In this post I’d like to touch briefly on a few more of the sessions I went to and point you in the direction of some further reading. I’m working on some more detailed content for the near future.

ViPR Software Defined Storage: Evolving to Software-Defined Data Centre

Danny Elmarji is NSW SE Manager for EMC ANZ, while David Lloyd is Advisory SE, Application Virtualisation Solutions for EMC ANZ. This was the first session after lunch and hence a likely candidate for well-fed, snoring IT guy. Fortunately, Danny and David are both quite adept at keeping the audience engaged and awake during their presentations. Danny started the session off by using a music listening analogy, demonstrating how his own expectations for music listening had changed over time (moving from LP to Walkman to iPod to Spotify). This was a neat way to lead into a discussion on how our expectations as consumers of IT had changed via evolved technology.

Virtualisation showed us the way to increased agility and reduced operating costs from an infrastructure perspective. The real value came with the ability to provision a server in minutes, not weeks. The evolution has now moved us to cloud. Danny then asks how many people feel that their company has delivered on ITaaS. Not many hands go up, despite research showing that ANZ is big on utility, virtualisation and cloud. I think the difference here is that he asked whether we felt we’ve really delivered, rather than just adopted the technology. They think that compute has got it right, but the rest of the data centre (network and storage) aren’t really there yet.

So what do we do? We’ve created an abstraction layer but it needs to be for the entire data centre, not just compute. We take the smarts from these devices and use that to create better automation and orchestration processes for those resources to use them more efficiently (lowering costs and increasing agility). Enter the idea of the software-defined data centre (SDDC). Abstract all of the resources, pool them, and then automate and orchestrate them.

Software-defined storage needs to be simple – easy to manage, easy to provision, centralised, and well-integrated / extensible. We don’t want to invest in new frames / platforms to leverage SDS. It needs to be open as well. Danny then introduces Dave to talk more about ViPR (aka that product with the really cool logo).

ViPR has two functions within it; one being the data service and the other being the control service. The control service is about centralised, simplified management. Data services is about enabling capabilities and technologies on existing storage platforms.

It needs to be simple – you don’t want to introduce a new capability and then have to invest twice the resources to keep it running. To get ViPR ready for operation, it discovers the “storage ecosystem”, and then you create the “virtual array” – the collection of connectivity attributes. You then create virtual storage pools or classes of storage service. These storage pools are designed to leverage the capabilities of the existing storage assets, not diminish or mask them. Then we can look at how it’s consumed – via a service catalogue. ViPR can leverage your enterprise service catalogue and vice versa.

David then runs through a demonstration on how the consumption of ViPR storage looks to the business user. The point here is that automation and orchestration can reduce the risk of something blowing up because of miscommunication or misunderstandings between teams. EMC’s storage best practices are also built into these controls.

It’s not just another automation and provisioning tool though. You look at everything in a centralised fashion from the perspective of logical capability, rather than discrete units of capacity and performance.

It’s also open, with the goal being that the extensibility will provide the opportunity to incorporate third-party arrays as well. Think of it in the same way as you might a driver system for third-party peripherals on Windows. Out of the box it will support all EMC hardware, including XtremIO, as well as NetApp vFilers, for example. It’s also not necessarily about changing everything to run the EMC way – you probably already have your own service catalogue and enterprise portal. EMC claim that there are integration points with these (VMware vCAC for example could use ViPR to deliver storage services). Out of the box there’ll be support for VMware, Microsoft and openstack.

David provides and example to Danny of the lifecycle of a video file, and how ViPR, by being in the data path, allows you to switch the context of the file, say from file to object, depending on the requirement you have at the time, rather than having to copy and convert the file each time. You can also do this through a number of standards – eg S3, Atmos, Centera, etc – you’re not locked in.

Danny then steps in to summarise ViPR from a business point of view. Abstract resources in the storage ecosystem, reduce management costs, pool them and orchestrate them in order to create increased flexibility within the business. The mantra is keep it simple, extensible and open.

Next Generation Unified Storage: VNX Re-defines Midrange Price and Performance

Martin Milthorpe is Director for Mid-Tier Storage, EMC ANZ and clearly a switched on fellow. While The Register was talking about a potential “VNX2” launch next month, and John Roese let slip during the keynote about a mid-range refresh coming in the next few weeks, Martin was left with the somewhat dubious distinction of having to present about a platform that pretty much everyone knows about and no one was particularly interested in. I had no problem with Martin’s skills as a presenter, nor do I have a problem with what he presented. I do, however, have a problem with the naming of the session – which can more likely be attributed to over-enthusiastic marketing folks than Martin. There was one or two slides devoted to MCx and that was it for “next-generation”. I know that EMC have had issues with timing, and it would be weird to do a Forum without really talking about the VNX. I also know there were quite a few people in the audience who were unfamiliar with the VNX, so this was a good presentation for them. I sometimes forget that this was Forum, and not a technical deep-dive or roadmap session with my local SE. So there you go. Not quite the session I expected. Should have gone to the second ViPR session.

Wrap-up

Unfortunately I then had to head to the airport to catch my flight back to Brisbane and wasn’t able to stay for the last sessions or the cocktail party. Nonetheless, I was very happy with what I’d picked up during the day, and immensely enjoyed catching up with some old friends from EMC and other companies.

Swag

As an attendee at the event I was given a shopping bag, iQ3 water bottle, some pens, tecala flip-flops and a Logicalis bottle-opener and squishy dice. Here’s a picture.

I also entered the twitter competition and picked up 2 $20 Pre-paid Visa cards. Wheee!

Disclaimer: I recently attended the EMC Forum 2013 – Sydney.  My flights and accommodation were paid for by myself, however EMC provided meals and some swag. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event.  Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

Part 2

In this post I’d like to touch briefly on a few of the sessions I went to and point you in the direction of some further reading. I’m working on some more detailed content for the near future.

Backup and Recovery – a Peak under the Hood of a Service Provider: Telstra

Kevin Kennedy is Director of Cloud Engineering at Telstra, and spent some time setting the scene as to why cloud is a good option and how cloud could be used as both a DR and backup / recovery solution. He suggested that we, in the IT industry, should be asking ourselves whether we’re more about the technology or the information. It’s a problem that exists in a number of IT departments, and one that needs to be revisited regularly to ensure that IT is really adding value to the business. As this session was a little more business-focused than technical, a fair bit of time was spent on ideas like agility and why cloud is good. Nonetheless, brief mention was made of VMware SRM and EMC RecoverPoint. It was nice to see that, at least on the surface, Telstra aren’t doing anything too earth-shatteringly different to most Iaas / BaaS providers.

How Cisco IT Delivers Next Generation Cloud Services

Mike Paranihi is Director of IT and Service Owner of DC Facilities and DCaaS at Cisco. Mike’s was one of the more entertaining presentations of the day (possibly because I’m nuts deep in cloud transformation projects at the moment), and I suggest if you have a chance to listen to him or meet with him that you take the opportunity. Mike is responsible for 34 facilities across the globe. By the numbers, Cisco IT supports over 300 locations in over 165 countries with over 65000 employees. 80% of their compute is virtualised and they’re aiming to get that to 95%. Use VMAX and VNX for T1 and T3 storage, Atmos for cloud storage, Vblocks and, overall, they use 96 EMC arrays with 21PB of raw storage (13PB allocatable).

Challenges? They’re always getting asked to cut the budget, do more with less and continue to maintain or improve service levels. The also need to be able to service internal clients who have evolving and rapidly changing resource requirements. So they created CITEIS (Cisco IT Elastic Infrastructure Service) about 4 years ago. Mike then went on to clarify the taxonomy he was using (DCaaS – facilities; IaaS – compute / storage / network; PaaS – the platform sitting on top; and SaaS – software, eg salesforce.com). CITEIS is predominantly an IaaS and PaaS play for Cisco IT.

You need unified fabric, which enables unified compute (use VMware internally) – this is Generation 1. They implemented process automation and self-service opportunities. Starting to investigate how they can cloud-burst, and begin to leverage capacity from other cloud providers. The portal is key to the success of this with the end-user (without the end-user there is no point – something we forget from time to time). Process automation (in CITEIS v5) now works at the hypervisor layer with both VMware and openstack.

The right security models are key to good multi-tenant deployments. Cisco heavily leverages the Nexus 7k VRFs, trusted zones and large subnets for this. Provide granular L2 security with VSGs. Primarily using EMC NAS for CITEIS storage.

Interestingly, they offer internal clients an “Express” option, that comprises 2 VMs for 90 days for use in PoCs and so forth. They can then choose to move those VMs into a larger vDC (virtual data centre) if required (minimum of 3 months consumption, guaranteed resources). vDCs are elastic and built via catalogue. Managed and self-managed options are also available. The big benefit of this approach for Cisco has been a reduction in provisioning time from 6 – 8 weeks down to about 3 – 5 days. They would like to get this down to 15 minutes but, ironically, are still working through issues with network management controls and some security procedures.

If you want to do PaaS well, you really need to understand exactly what services you want to offer via the service catalogue. You also need to understand which ones are high-frequency, and what are the foundational elements of these offerings in order to properly provision the underlying infrastructure. Cisco created IT organisations that revolved around service delivery, not function delivery. They’ve been benchmarking the TCO of their PaaS offering internally and are seeing real cost savings. Working towards having everything as a service available.

Also investing heavily in programmable infrastructure. Also now looking at how to leverage private / public / hybrid cloud while considering multi-tenancy and security requirements. The next step is application driven, where applications give instructions, based on SLAs and business rules, to the PaaS and IaaS layers to provision suitable bandwidth / compute / IOPS (eg an app getting smashed at end of quarter).

In Part 3 I’ll be looking at the ViPR and VNX sessions I attended.