EMC World 2014 is back in town, this time with the REDEFINE punchline. After some logistic challenges to get here the show is on the road; general sessions, break-out sessions, hands on labs (HOL). So what’s up with the REDEFINE punchline? What are we redefining in the IT / data infrastructure? And what are the EMC Elect doing at EMC World when not flooding your Twitter feed?
Getting at EMC World 2014
This is my third EMC World in Las Vegas. Each and every year, you see new things. Las Vegas gets constantly improved and rebuilt. The sessions at EMC World are better, flashier (pun intended). And you miss your first connecting flight…
My first plane out of AMS was delayed for 3 hours. Since I only had a 2 hour layover at JFK, that meant I missed my connecting flight. Delta/KLM fixed this by putting me in a hotel and rebooking the flight to 8:30 the following day. Everything was handled pretty well, but I had to idea what to expect so you can imagine the anxiety… And it did mean I missed out on the Dutch Delegation program… bummer!
EMC World 2014 Day 1
The punchline of this week is redefine. Redefine your storage architecture in the data center. Joe Tucci (EMC CEO) talked about this in the keynote session on Monday. EMC released ViPR last year, which is your stepping stone into the world of software defined storage. One year later, version 2.0 is released. ViPR 1.0 is free to download if you want to try it out in your data center. Version 2.0 is improved considerably and supports heterogeneous storage environments.
Apart from ViPR, flash drives are still taking over the market if you want high performance. XtremIO is the EMC all-flash array (AFA). Big selling point of the XtremIO array is that everything happens inline, all the time. The big advantage of this is that latency is consistently low and there are no IOps drops. If your all-flash array has a garbage collect cycle or can’t handle bursty throughput properly, it will enter a “pathological state” and your performance will suffer eventually. EMC puts its money where its mouth is with a $1,000,000 guarantee that you can’t get an XtremIO array out of inline mode. Happy testing! And if you’ve gotten cold feet with your VendorX AFA; EMC has an all-flash array rescue program to competitively trade in your under-performing array for an XtremIO box. Talk to your EMC rep to learn more about this program.
All flash arrays are fast. Latency is low: around 1ms all the time. If you need even more performance and lower latency, you’re moving into server flash solutions. Which is direct attached storage and thus has a lot of downsides apart from awesome performance. There’s a company called DSSD that solved this problem. Surprise surprise, EMC just acquired that company.
EMC Elect at EMC World 2014
The EMC Elect are well represented at EMC World this year. There’s an Elect lounge in the Social Area and most of us are wearing dark grey EMC Elect polo’s and white EMC Elect wristbands. Come find us, ask us questions or just follow us on Twitter.
This year the Elect went back to SuperNAP8, the awesome Switch datacenter located in Las Vegas. It’s the only multi-tennant Tier IV datacenter in North America and designed and built from the ground on up to make racks the limiting factor in the data center. All too often you can’t completely fill a rack due to power or cooling constraints. Not at SuperNAP: if you want >30kW in a rack they’ll deliver. And as a unique selling point: due to the combined purchasing power of all the SuperNAP customers, you’ll save so much money on ISP connections that these savings will pay for your housing.
Have fun at EMC World 2014. I’ll be in many of the VNX and Isilon sessions or in the EMC Elect lounge. If you have any questions or comments; as always you can leave them down below or just come and say hi in real life!
