Last week I’ve attended Dell Technologies World 2018 in Las Vegas. I was invited by Dell Technologies via the influencer program, which basically means we get access to the same content as the press or analysts. I’ve spent the weeks alternating between general keynotes, briefings, interviews and catching up with friends and colleagues. In this post I’ll try and summarize some of the main topics of the Dell Technologies World 2018, focusing on what appealed most to me.
VMAX
5 posts
Back in October we visited Dell EMC for a few Storage Field Day 14 presentations. Walking into the new EBC building we bumped into two racks. One with a VMAX all flash system and another with a XtremIO X2. Let’s kick off the Storage Field Day 14 report with VMAX All Flash. There’s still a lot of thought going into this enterprise class storage array…
Recently I’ve ran a project for a new EMC Symmetrix VMAX 10k installation. The install was a breeze and the migration of data to the system fairly straightforward. The customer saw some good performance improvements on the storage front and there is plenty of capacity in the system to cater for immediate growth. Yet when I opened the Unisphere for VMAX interface and browsed to the performance tab, my heart skipped a beat. What are those red queue depth utilization bars? We were seeing good response times, weren’t we? Were we at risk? How about scalability? Lets dig deeper and find out.
Several weeks ago we performed a resiliency test on a VMAX10k that was about to be put into production. The customer wanted confirmation that the array was wired up properly and would respond correctly in case there were any issues like a power or disk failure. This is fairly standard testing and makes sense: better to pull a power plug and see the array go down while there is no production running against it, right?
We pulled one power feed from each system bay and storage bay. Obviously: no problem for the VMAX, it dialed out, notified EMC it lost power on a couple of feeds and that’s it. Next up we yanked out a drive: I/O continued, the array dialed out to EMC that something was wrong with a drive, but… we didn’t see anything in Unisphere for VMAX!
“Check your email ;)”. That was the first Twitter DM I read one sleepy morning in June. It’ll suffice to say, a minute later I was wide awake: I was chosen to represent the EMC Elect at the EMC “Redefine Possible” MegaLaunch event in London (UK)! I knew about these launch events because my colleague Rob attended one last year in Milan. Excitement started building and a couple of hours later I figured out I wasn’t going alone…