First of all, may the fourth be with you… #Starwarsday!

OK, now that we got that out of the way, EMCworld on Monday was a blast.  There were several Starwars themed things spread across the conference today, and even Mr. Spock was spotted.  The main take away from Monday’s events and also noticing as a theme across what EMC is messaging is that we are in a constant shift into information about everything we do.  Analytics, data, etc are becoming increasingly important to businesses and your IT department is going to have a larger roll of this in the future.  I see this as an opportunity for IT organizations to be involved and to talk to others in the business as storage and other aspects are being used to meet business objectives and goals.  I.E. the CTO probably will need to drive this throughout the organization has businesses shift.

First Keynote of the day had a ton of information, for a blow-by-blow of everything that happened, check out my Coworker Andrew Miller’s blog at: Thinkmeta.net Live EMCworld Keynote. He does a good job giving you all the stuff that happened during the keynote.  Here are some of the highlights:

89% of the fortune 500 companies in 1955 don’t exist today.  Key thing here is adapt or die.  EMC believes that the current shift in technology is more disruptive.  Things like Uber, WICK, Wearables, etc are changing the way we think and do things.  Very cool.

Hardware wise, EMC annouced the VXRack  this is an all-in-one box like a Vblock – designed and supported by EMC using EMC and VMware technologies.  The VXrack can be built in either a storage or compute intensive configurations.

EMC talks about enhancements around XtremIO 4.0.  Recoverpoint will be more integrated (more details on that later), EMC has 30% marketshare in the AFA space which is 10% more than anyone else.

EMC also has a ton of information about VMAX3 now.  They demoed a 5th grader provisioning a lun.  The theme of ‘not complex storage’ is echoed in the sessions I also attended today.

That’s about it for highlights on the Keynote.

Sessions attended:

I attended two formal sessions and also a private session in the EMCElect lounge.

VMAX3: Unleash the Power of Service Level Objectives with John Madden @ EMC.

This was a great session covering and confirming what we already knew in our lab.  The best part of the session was the interaction with the audience and John answering questions.  The theme of the session is that we need to shift our focus from a capacity based thinking into a service oriented thinking.  For large IT shops with a ton of Silos, I see this as a challenge for a lot of people.  Basically starting out you want to put everything in the default service level objective, and then move it over to appropriate workload-based tiers when you have the data to prove it out.

Key things to keep in mind:

• Target is defined as response time objective emulating a disk technology.
•  Amount of a particular SLO depends on the mix of those disk technologies.  Real time utilization of resources include in head room provisioning.

More VMAX stuff will be coming.  I also noticed a lack of VNX sessions at the conference this year…

VMAX3 Performance: Embedded NAS

The key to this session was that VNX File Gateway is now Software Defined into the VMAX3’s Hypermax hypervisor.  The session covered Embedded NAS performance monitoring and management, and the ways in which it is like or dislike the old VNX gateway boxes.  I will be attending a couple more Embedded NAS sessions this week to really wrap my head around things.

Private Brocade Session (EMCelect):

Several of us sat down and had a roundtable discussion on the future converged (FC and Network) equipment that Brocade has.  It was a very technical session talking with a Sr. SME from Brocade and also the Director of Product Management Truis Myklebust.  Since I have a small Brocade past (I really focus on Cisco lately) it was really cool to see what is new and what Brocade is doing in this space.

Solutions Pavilion:

I got to walk around the solutions pavilion and talk to some folks around what is new in the EMC datacenter.  EMC has a DC setup in the center of the pavilion running live versions of a ton of the products.  I will be doing a short video/interview of some things tomorrow!

Varrow/Sirius Customer Event:

Finally to wrap up the day, I got to hang out with my favorite people.  Coworkers and our customers.  It was also really good to talk to my new coworkers at Sirius and ask them questions about the company, etc.

More updates coming tomorrow!

@SanGeek