Category Archives: Storage

The New England VTUG – A view from the other side

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For the past few years I have attended several New England VTUG/VMUG events as an independent blogger / technologist.  This year, I attended the 10th annual Summer Slam as a sponsor through my employer and it has given me a little bit different a perspective on things.  My goal this event was to promote awareness of the EMC Community Network and the EMC Elect programs and have a conversation about it.  I do believe that I achieved my goal, but I also came away with a few big takeaways for next time.

Know your environment

NE_VTUG 005For those of you who haven’t attended the New England VTUG, it is held in the high school of Brunswick, Maine.  The main vendor hall is in the gymnasium, a room with no wired internet and shared power cords.  One must be prepared because this remote location also does not lend itself very well to cellular signals (probably good for keeping the kids focused on schoolwork). The result of this is that both vendors and attendees would heavily rely on the wifi network, and after it hit full saturation, performance problems would occur.  This also meant that there was no fall back for hotspots and mifi units.  It became quite apparent that I had miscalculated when I was the only one trying to do live demos that required internet connectivity.

BRING A FAN!!!!!

NE_VTUG 018I cannot stress this enough.  It is very hot, and in the summer the AC is not on in the school (with the exception of the theater), so a fan will be your best friend.  Vendors can use this to their advantage too.  If you want to get everyone to come to your booth, give your patrons a way to cool off.  The two most popular booths were giving away smoothies for attendees (competitors too) to drink and it was much appreciated.

 

All these fans however caused another issue … with the power.  When you run several fans (and a blender) off the same circuit, you may overload it.  And we did … twice!  The NEVTUG staff was very attentive to get extra power cables run and reset the circuit breakers so that downtime was minimal.

Be Happy! Be Social!

NE_VTUG 021To be honest, the majority of the attendees I spoke with had never heard of ECN or the EMC Elect.  However when I spoke to them, many were very receptive and enthusiastic about the idea.  One of the moments that really stood out to me was when a customer indicated that he was the goto person in his organization for everything, and he often did not know the answer.  After I explained to him about the support forums on ECN, he lit up and responded “This is where I can get the answers!”  Its genuine engagement like this that makes these user group meetings worth while.

Lets do it again

I had a blast talking to customers, partners, and even a few competitors at the NEVTUG.  With news coming of a new VTUG chapter forming in Silicon Valley (and more in the works across the united states) I urge all my readers to attend one and have a great conversation.

A quick fix for the VNX

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If you are a customer, partner, or EMC employee and you are subscribed to the ETA notifications list, you probably got a heads up about potential incompatibility between the VNX, RecoverPoint, and VAAI under certain conditions.  For those of you who are not subscribed, fellow blogger Cormac Hogan wrote a quick little post about the issue.

 

I’m proud to announce that there is a fix available for this and it can be found in VNX Block OE 05.32.000.5.206 (released this week).  Simply apply this fix (you can do it yourself using USM).  For those of you with a FILE front end, make sure you update to 7.1.71.1 as well.

 

If you are an EMC Customer (with support zone credentials), you can read the full description of solution emc327099 (now stored on the new knowledgebase solution powered by Salesforce).  If the direct link is not working, simply login to http://support.emc.com and search for “emc327099” and your first result should be the solution.

EMC World 2013: Highlights and Photos

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EMC World 2013 - Day 1 449I meant to get this post out a loot sooner as EMC world ended over 2 weeks ago.  This year is my 3rd EMC World and it did not disappoint.  The overall show theme was a superhero theme.  From the Global League of Storage (pictured left) to Captain Scale-Out, every booth was very creative in their design and creativity.

 

EMC World 2013 - Day 2 095Outside of the solutions pavilion, the EMC Square was front and center when anyone entered there show floor.  This area was HUGE and twice the size than had been described to me.  Made up of the EMC TV booth, the back stage area, and the Blogger’s Space (which also contained the EMC Elect Space).  The EMC Elect Space was a huge hit with the members.  We were able to sit down and chat about all sorts of topics, including some special sessions on BRS as well as ViPR.

 

EMC World 2013 - Day 1 118EMC World 2013 - Day 2 379Speaking about ViPR, it was defiantly the big announcement at EMC World this year.  If you are not familiar with ViPR, EMC’s Chuck Hollis has a great write up on the product announcement and where it fits in the industry.  We also got a closer looked at Pivotal presented by Paul Maritz.  Overall, things are looking very good for EMC and I’m excited to see what the coming year brings for these announcements.

 

EMC World 2013 - Day 2 620What you might not of noticed during the general sessions and the keynotes was a new initiative we were trying this year called “Blueprints”.  This idea was the brain child of fellow teammate Kari D’Elia and winner of an internal pitch contest called Shark Tank.  Off in the corner, during each of the presentations, was a person transcribing what they see and here into a full page info graphic.  These were defiantly a huge hit, and every time I walked by the finished product I would see people standing and taking pictures of them.

 

EMC World 2013 - Day 2 530The other big winner of EMC World was the Hands-on Labs.  This 200 person demo center was powered by EMC vLab (expect to hear more about this team in the coming months) and allowed attendees to try all the various products that EMC has to offer without the need for physical hardware.  This place was always packed and seemed to be a huge hit with everyone who sat down for a lab.

 

EMC World 2013 - Day 3 675What show would be complete without a customer appreciation event?  This year’s headliner was non other than music sensation Bruno Mars.  Now I will be the first to admit, I’m not a huge fan of his music (probably because I’m not his target demographic), but he and the rest of the band put on a great show with several cover songs including some Nirvana and some Michael Jackson.

 

EMC World 2013 - Day 3 075My role during the majority of the show was to take photos for the social media team.  By the numbers, I snapped off more than 1200 photos over the course of 4 days for a grand total of more than 30GB of images.  I whittled that number down to 190 images that I have published to google here.  I hope you enjoy them.

https://picasaweb.google.com/103806208080531222274/EMCWorld2013

Are you going to the EMC Global Partner Summit? You should!

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GPS2013Calling all EMC Partners, are you attending EMC World this year? Make sure you start off by attending the Global Partner Summit going on concurrently with the show.

 

It all starts Monday morning with a special general session just for GPS attendees.  Here you will find out about all that EMC is offering to enable partners in 2013 and beyond with presentations by EMC’s executives.  The general session is then followed by 3 keynotes for resellers, service providers, and IIG specialists.  After lunch, partners will be offered a multitude of breakout sessions including regional solution provider sessions as well as informative deep dives on security, big data, and XaaS.

 

After the EMC World general session and grand opening reception, there will be a partner appreciation party from 9pm – 11pm at the TAO Nightclub in the Venetian.  Be sure to pick up your wrist band in the EMC Business Partner Lounge located on the show floor.

FINAL GPS_Page_1

Speaking of the Partner Lounge, they will be open the entire EMC World show hours on Monday – Thursday.  I encourage you to stop by as they will have staff on site showing you how to register for and leverage the EMC Community Network.  While you are there, be sure to enter their contest to win one of 3 $200 gift cards.

 

Tuesday will be another filled day.  After the EMC World General Session, there will be additional product specific break out sessions.  In the morning, you can sit in on presentations from USD, ESD, ASD, Isilon, and Flash while the afternoon will have presentations from BRS and Global Services (my former organization at EMC).  Capping off day 2 is a final presentation by VSPEX and VCE.

FINAL GPS_Page_2
Be sure to follow @EMCchannel on twitter for updates throughout the show!  If you are attending GPS2013, let me know what you think in the comments below.

EMC World 2013 – What you should see and where I will be

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EMC World 2In just one weeks time, 15,000+ people will descend on Las Vegas and the Sands Convention Center for EMC World 2013.  While I can’t wait for the show to start, I wanted to highlight a few things that you may not know about, but will definitely make your show experience so much better.

EMC Square

Front and center during this year’s show is the EMC Square.  This mecca to all things social (and it may or may not be a perfect square) will house EMC TV, Silicon Angle, the EMC Backstage (more on this later) and the all new Blogger’s Space.  The Blogger’s Space (formally the Blogger’s Lounge) will be where bloggers such as myself can meet to talk, share ideas on the white boards, relay screens to watch keynotes, and of course  internet access to blog.  Inside the Blogger’s Space is a special area for EMC Elect members.  Elect members will have their own area to converse and I’m also told there will be special Elect ONLY blogger briefings during the show.  If you are a blogger and you are attending EMC World, make sure you register here.  I will be spending most of my time here and at the ECN booth, so be sure to stop by and say hello.

 

This year the social media team will unveil an all new Buzz Board.  This new interactive display will pull in tweets, Facebook posts, pictures, videos, and more about EMC World.  Simply tag things with #EMCWorld and watch them populate in near real time.

Social display

Last year we had Buzz Sessions, Quick 10 – 15 minutes sessions highlighting a multitude of topics (including one staring yours truly).  This year we decided to slow things down a bit and introduce EMC Backstage.  After every keynote, we’ve invited the speakers to come sit and answer questions.  If there was something you wanted to know more about during the keynote, now is your chance.  Simply tweet your question with the #EMCBackStage hashtag and the moderator may ask it during the session.

Hands-on Labs

The Hands-on Labs are always a highlight of the show.  It’s the best place to try out all sorts of product demos and get a real feel for things without having to play with your production system.  It’s also rumored that this year you will get a chance to try out some unreleased products through the hands on labs

Untitled_Panorama3

I know my friend Craig “Chappy” Chapman was looking for good music this year, so I can’t wait to hear the final playlist.  The Hands-on Labs tend to fill up fast, so your best time to participate is first thing in the morning.  There should be little to no wait then.

Nightlife

With everything that goes on during the day at EMC World, what are you going to do at night?  Well on Wednesday is the customer appreciation event.  Just like last year, there will be another big name performer.  Guest passes are already sold out, so I hope you got one if you were going to bring a friend.

 

But what are you going to do the other few nights?  That is where we have you covered.  On ECN you can find a list of all the official and unofficial meetups going on during the week.  There will be a party on Tuesday night in the Zebra Lounge for ECN Members.  This party requires a wrist band, so be sure to see me to get one.  I haven’t figure out how I’m going to award them, but I’m always wanting to meet readers of my blog.

 

Where you’ll find me

My time at EMC world will be split between taking photos (be sure to follow me on twitter as well as @EMCCorp to see them) and booth duty.  On Monday you’ll find me at the ECN Station for most of the evening.  Tuesday and Wednesday mornings will be spent at the Elect Lounge.  I will be taking photos of all the keynotes (I believe another team mate will be taking photos of the general sessions).  Outside of that I’ll be at various meetups and events.  If you want to meet up, just tweet me and I’ll tell you where I’m at!

Twitter, Tragedy, and our Finest Hour

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By now I’m sure most (if not all) of you have heard about the tragic events that occurred during yesterday’s running of the Boston Marathon.  Like most of the world, I learned of the news through social media.  My twitter timeline was flooding so fast I could not keep up.  Within seconds, the world was updated with news of the explosion, 140 characters at a time.  And as the news spread, others began to chime in.

While some were quick to point fingers and call it a “terrorist attack”, the most impactful messages were those of prayer, hope, and help and they seemed to outnumber the calls for hate and retaliation by 1000:1.

One of the biggest advantages of living in this digital age was how quickly we were able to check on those we love and care about.  My employer (EMC) was a large sponsor of the race.  Not only did we have people covering the race, but we also had coworkers running in it.  It was the power of twitter and my network of friends that let me know that everyone was safe and accounted for.

For those who were running in the race who we could not reach, technology provided us with a glimmer of hope in the form of tracking the racers bibs.  My friend Matt Brender put out a message of hope directing people to check on racers they know and see where they last checked in.

The link and message he shared was picked up by many and is a perfect example of how the online community can come together to help one and other.

With facts, rumors, and educated guesses flying around, all the news agencies were quick to get the story out, and not all of them got it right.  What surprised me the most was that the most credible news updates came from the hacker collective Anonymous.  They were quick to put out the message of ongoing activity, numbers to call, and facts (instead of conjecture) as they unfolded.

As the sun started to set and the dust began to settle, the messages switched to that of hope.  A Google doc was created full of people around the area willing to help shelter anyone that had been displaced by the days events.  People were willing to open up their homes in a showing of solidarity.  If anything, yesterday made the city of Boston and the nation stronger and why I believe this was our finest hour.

My VCP5 experience and a Workstation 9 giveaway!

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VMW_10Q3_LGO_CERTIFIED_PRO_4For those of you who follow me on Twitter or Google+, you may have noticed that I recently passed my VCP5.  This exam was a long time in the making, but every time I would go to take it, something would come up.  Originally, I was scheduled to start the new year with my VCP5 exam, but a last minute trip to Seattle forced me to reschedule my exam for February.  When I rescheduled my exam for February, I had no idea I would be starting my new job, but as luck would have it, I scheduled it for the same week.  So once again, I rescheduled for March.  Hopefully this explains why I had been so quiet with my blog lately as I had spent a lot of my available time leading up to the exam studying.  Even though I switched into a marketing role, I’m still keeping my technical side.  I committed to passing this exam and even made it part of my goals with EMC.

 

The good news is that my studying paid off.  I passed my VCP5 with a better score than I got on the VCP4!  A few of my biggest takeaways from the exam were as follows:

  • Gone are the majority of the questions about minimums and maximums (I think I had only 1)
  • Even more questions were about real world examples
  • There was a heavy focus on performance troubleshooting and identification
  • Several questions focused on HA, DRS, and FT
  • Only a handful had images, so be sure to paint a mental picture from the descriptions

 

My exam prep consisted of many different resources.  I started off by reviewing the material found in 3 books:

I also reviewed the study guide and exam prep questions put together by Mike Preston.  This guide is very comprehensive and full of great information.  Simon Long also has practice exam questions on the VCP5 as well and was one of my primary resources when studying for my VCP4.

 

The final resource I used in my preparation was the recordings of the vBrownBag.  They went through every section of the VCP5 exam blueprint and is great to listen to.  I only wish that they did it again so that I could have asked my questions live.

 

So on to the giveaway.  One of the rewards for passing the VCP5 is a free VMware Workstation 9 license.  I want to give back to the community that has helped me so much, so I’m giving this key away to someone who needs it.  Wining this license key is simple:

  • Make sure you are following me on twitter
  • Leave a comment here telling me something about your VCP5 exam experience (or study plans if you haven’t taken the exam).  A helpful tip, a gotcha, anything will do and there is no wrong answer here!
  • Make sure that you also put your twitter handle in your comment (I will need this to DM you if you win)

The winner will be selected at random and you will earn an extra entry if you tweet about this blog post and mention my twitter handle in the tweet.  I’m going to to do this quick, so the contest will close at 12:01 AM Eastern on April 1st, 2013 and I will contact the winner shortly after that.

VNX INYO MR1–The Future is Now

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EMC World 2012 - Day 1 150With a new year, comes a HUGE update to the VNX family.  As Chad Sakac reveled earlier in the year, INYO was the code name for the VNX FILE OE 7.1 and BLOCK OE 05.32 code release that surfaced last year.  Now, the time has come for a major update to the code, and with it some exciting new features.

 

VNX OE for FILE

On the FILE side, the biggest (and what I think is the most exciting) feature coming is support for SMB 3.0 and the VNX is the first array to support this.  Back in October of 2012, Microsoft released it’s latest versions of the Windows Operating system (Windows 8 and Server 2012).  With that came the latest enhancements to the SMB protocol (for more information, click here to read a great blog post by Microsoft).  With this upgrade (and the use of the SMB 3.0 protocol) you get a much less disruptive failover which includes keeping the open state of a file and file lock.  You will also notice enhanced throughput by being able to take advantage of the Multi Path IO over SMB 3.0 without the need to configure LACP or EtherChannel.

 

VNX OE for BLOCK

On the BLOCK side, the VNX gains support for ODX support and the ability to Offloaded copies to the array.  This cuts down on host CPU as well as SAN bandwidth as the transfers don’t leave the array.  This is done by breaking down the copy into a series of tokens and passing them between the hosts while the data is passed between luns (as demonstrated in the chart below)

image

A couple of things to note.  This does require an enabler, but you do not need to reboot the SP for that.  You will have to reboot the host for that (it’s a limitation of Microsoft, not EMC).  You will have to use Microsoft MPIO or the latest versions of PowerPath as well as an NTFS file system (with an allocation size of 8k or larger for better performance).

 

Also included with this release was several enhancements revolving around VAAI support on the VNX.  Most this included the XCOPY fix as described in solution emc313487 as well as a big performance improvement to VAAI Fastclones.  Chad has more on that subject here.

 

Unisphere Service Manager

Finally, there was also another enhancement that I wish I had when I was in tech support.  Starting with the new version of Unisphere Service Manager (1.2.26.1.0068) you will now find a 1-click health check available after the main login.  You may remember a previous blog post I did on how to run health checks on the VNX.  Now you can run a single check to verify the health of your array (BLOCK, FILE, or Unified).  Just click the health check link on the right hand side.  I have attached a screen shot below to show what the output of a healthy array looks like.

image

So what are you waiting for?  Get out there and enjoy these new enhancements.  Remember, you don’t have to wait for EMC to upgrade your array, you can do it yourself using USM.

Moving on towards the big picture

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thebigpictureRecently I celebrated my 3 year mark with working at EMC.  In that time I went through the GSAP program (more info on my blog post of my 2 year anniversary), assisted customers in USD tech support, and most recently helped cultivate a proactive social support model for our team.  Over that time, I’ve only had to change desks once but changed managers 9 times.

 

Well I am proud to announce that as of Monday, February 11th, 2013, I will be changing desks and managers again.  I have accepted an opportunity to join EMC’s Social Media Marketing team!  This is the same great team that my friend Matt Brender joined a year ago and I am extremely excited to be working together again at EMC.

 

I’m not exactly sure what the future will hold with this job, and that is what attracted me to it.  I have been working with the team ad-hoc style for the past year already participating in brainstorming sessions for R.A.M.P and EMC Elect.  I can only imagine what projects and ideas will come in 2013 as a good amount of this job will be brainstorming and creating them.

 

While I am moving away from being dedicated to VNX, I plan to still stay heavily involved with the storage and virtualization communities and blog about new and exciting technologies as well as things I interact with as part of my new role.

Please Welcome Isilon Remote Support to EMC

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416First, I want to apologize for only having 1 blog post in January.  In an earlier blog post, I stated that I was kicking off 2013 with a trip to Seattle, WA.  Seattle is home to the headquarters of Isilon, one of EMC’s more recent acquisitions.  While the initial purchase and sale went through a while ago, it was only recently that the installation, sales contracts, and support system was converted over to what EMC has been using for years.  For 2 and a half weeks, I went on site to help the Isilon Remote Support staff understand the inner workings of the new ticket system known as “Service Center” and how it related to their existing system based on SalesForce.

 

Decisions were made as to what would be converted over and what wouldn’t be.  The existing SalesForce database would still be available to support, but in a read only instance.  This would be because only cases that were still open on Saturday January 12th were going to be converted over.  Older closed cases would still remain in the old system for reference, and new cases would be created in EMC’s system only.

 

I’ve been in support long enough to know that not every migration goes according to plan.  As far as this one went, there weren’t too many major issues.  The minor ones were remedied quickly and it seems like everything is finished.  Existing EMC customers should be familiar with the online support interface.  Your Isilon arrays would show up under existing sites if the address on file matched, otherwise you may need to search for new site IDs to follow.

 

The culture over at Isilon is still very much like a startup and I loved it.  Moral is high and it seams people really enjoy their job and care about the customers they help.  It’s no surprise that it was voted one of the best places to work in Seattle.  With any major change to a business process, it is going to take some time for those involved to get used to it.  It seems like everyone was able to adjust quickly and by the end of my stay, the support engineers seemed well adjusted to the new system and processes.

 

All in all I think the conversion was a huge success and I hope you will join me in welcoming the Isilon Remote Support team to EMC.

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On a side note: I had some free time to see the sights of Seattle.  I posted a large collection of photos from my trip (broken down by day) and I hope you enjoy them.

https://picasaweb.google.com/103806208080531222274/SeattleWAJanuary112013

https://picasaweb.google.com/103806208080531222274/SeattleWAJanuary172013

https://picasaweb.google.com/103806208080531222274/SeattleWAJanuary192013

https://picasaweb.google.com/103806208080531222274/SeattleWAJanuary202013

https://picasaweb.google.com/103806208080531222274/SeattleWAJanuary262013