What would VMAXHumpday be during EMCworld without finding a really cool presentation and talking about it? First of all, I am not at EMCWorld this year do to me slinging data around datacenters using the power of the force…wait, Open Replicator and some other stuff but I’m sure there is a ton going out there this week. What is cool is that if you are not at the conference, you can watch a few good sessions online at www.emcworld.com. This version of VMAXHumpday I’ll step a little bit away from tech tips and talk about an awesome presentation I watched online.
So the session I watched was Technology Preview – Hybrid Cloud by Barry Burke. (@StorageAnarchy from EMC CTO and SVP of Enterprise/Midrange) talking about the Hybrid Cloud and solve a Rubik’s cube puzzle, and basically answer what do users want? The answer is “Simple” and “Simple” ain’t easy. He basically talks about how it takes 23 steps to provision storage today on a VMAX and how we need to move towards automation in the future to meet and define application objectives.
Here is an awesome slide of what I’ll show you next week on the VMAX that I’m working on now. What does it really take to create a lun and present it to a host? (Credit: EMCWorld 2014 – Barry Burke)
So here is what he is talking about when it comes to automation. Analyze/Optimize/Enforce/Remediate. He says that Self Remediation, is probably the hardest thing to do. Not for the systems but for the people to trust the system is making the correct decisions.
Which is really really cool. Best part of the presentation though is when they Demo’d Easy Provisioning based off of application need. This Demo was done by @JohnMaddenENG who is a Symmetrix Uber Engineer and has been at EMC for a long time! Here are a couple slides:
Got to love the Twitter Shout outs during the presentation to John Madden. Here is another one once provisioning SLO’s are met and creation can begin.
Simple eh? If you’ve followed me for any length of time, you know I don’t advocate that EMC VMAX is a simple product by any means. I like how this is headed and I absolutely agree that if EMC can make VMAX this simple, well…It’s kinda nice eh? John goes onto schooling Barry on how to create gold, meet application SLO’s, etc.
Barry goes onto talking about Seamless migrations, Storage as Fruit and coming up with a way to standardize a way to present storage and federate across many arrays to include 3rd party arrays, etc.
So later on he explains that the way he is presenting storage is actually through the ViPR 2.0 interface that is plugged into the VMAX in the back end…basically…paraphrasing here. Which in turn turns the above slide into a more manageable mixed fruit salad!!!
Removing platform specific layers, etc Susan Sharpe, (also from North Carolina!) talks about “FAST Sideways” which basically talks about federation of moving storage from VMAX to VNX, etc. Currently their mantra is “VMAX to VNX Better Together”.
Susan then goes on to demo a storage migration using ViPR which calls on the storage API’s and I assume uses a combination of Open Replicator / SANCopy in the background (even though they didn’t talk about the specifics).
After that Demo, Sadhir Srinivasan from EMC’s mid-range division talks about File based migrations as well which was pretty neat. Sadhir talks about VDM’s which have existed for a LONG time on VNX File / VNX Gateway systems. A little re-marketing here of what VNX Replicator does, but the cool thing is that they have built VNX Replicator plugin’s for ViPR and VDM migrations look a bit more smooth than how they are currently doing. He then mentions using SRDF getting data from VMAX to VMAX and if they were to loose a datacenter, they could bring VDMs back online really quick.
Side Note: I am currently doing a VG8 (on VMAX) to VNX using VNX Replicator 🙂
After that, the VMAX stuff kinda ended and they went onto talking about HADOOP, big data analytics, etc.
Great presentation on futures of storage provisioning and automation here.
Big shoutouts to @StorageAnarchy, @JohnMaddenENG, and @sharpestore (who hasn’t used Twitter in a while but she should!
This is the way the future of storage is heading. I welcome my new automation overlords. Giddy Up!
-sangeek
Edit: to view the presentation, check it out here: http://bcove.me/oy51k93v