Today, in their largest announcement since EMC, Cisco, and VMware jointly announced the company’s formation five years ago, VCE announced seven new additions to their product lineup. These new additions consist of:
I’ll walk through each of these in more detail below. Continue reading
Today, in addition to announcing a new model VNXe, EMC announced their Project Liberty as part of the pre-EMC World build-up.
What’s Project Liberty? EMC is calling it a “virtualized storage software technology based on VNX”.
What does that mean? Project Liberty is essentially a virtual appliance version of EMC’s VNX.
But, wait, I can hear you thinking this one:
Doesn’t EMC already make a VNX virtual appliance available? Continue reading
Today, VCE announced new additions to their Vblock converged infrastructure product line. The offerings announced include the Vblock Model 340, two new specialized configurations for high-IO workloads, and version 2.5 the VCE Vision Intelligent Operations management software. Continue reading
If you follow the storage industry at all, you know that today EMC is holding their “Speed 2 Lead” event. To some, this event is also known as “Mega-Launch III”. During the event, EMC is making several storage product announcements at once. (“Several” is what separates a “Mega-Launch” from a simple product launch.)
If you follow me at all, you know that I have the privilege of being one of the members of the EMC Elect 2013 community.
Today, those two things have come together very beautifully for me. I was one of four members of the EMC Elect 2013 community invited to join EMC at the Speed 2 Lead event live in Milan, Italy and receive the same level of access at the event that industry press and analysts receive. While I’ve received advance briefings on product announcements from vendors in the past, this is the first time I’ve been flown to a launch event like this.
So far, it’s been a whirlwind of activity leading up to the event. The buy-in to the EMC Elect program at EMC’s executive level has been nothing short of impressive. I believe this to be a dual testament, first to the hard work put in by the EMC team that created and curates (shepherds? feeds? I’m really not sure what the right word to use here is…) the EMC Elect program, and second to EMC’s commitment to social media engagement.
I said above that the EMC Elect here in Milan are being given the same level of access that press and analysts receive, but — quite frankly — I think we’re actually getting more access. On the day before the event, we were invited to take a behind-the-scenes walk-through of the event site — while the stage and sets were still being constructed. I got to have my picture taken while I was sitting on a Team Lotus F1 racecar. I got to sit in on some of the “dress rehearsal” that the EMC presenters were doing to ensure they were fully prepared for the event. How often does a guy like me get to do all that?
At some point after I’m home and rested up, I’ll do a full write-up on what the whole experience was like.
Until then, if you’re interested in what EMC actually announced at the event, you can read my thoughts about it here:
As a member of the EMC Elect, I’m grateful to have gotten to be a part of this. As an EMC partner, I’m looking forward to getting to bring these products to my customers.
Today EMC announced new offerings in its VSPEX program. VSPEX is EMC’s collection of pre-validated reference architectures, delivered by their channel partners. VSPEX provides a middle-ground. It offers greater speed for deployment than building and testing your own solution from scratch, and it provides more choice and flexibility than the converged infrastructure of the VCE Vblock.
Several existing VSPEX solutions have been rearchitected to use the new generation of VNX storage systems. These solutions include ones for:
EMC introduced some new VSPEX reference architectures that are available now. These include:
EMC also introduced two new VSPEX solutions that will be coming soon. They are:
Today EMC announced version 1.5 of their AppSync data protection software for the VNX storage platform. The software provides application-consistent data protection for applications running on VNX, regardless of whether they’re running on physical or virtual servers. AppSync provides an application-centric point of view and uses the native APIs of both VNX and RecoverPoint to deliver user-definable levels of protection to the applications.
The AppSync server runs a centralized Unisphere-like interface. From this interface, admins can push AppSync agents out to application servers. Continue reading
Today EMC announced the availability of the next generation of their VNX unified storage platform, previously codenamed “Rockies”. The new platform — actually available for purchase for the past month or so — which some are calling “VNX2”, offers a significant performance increase over the previous generation. Rather than VNX2, EMC refers to this generation as “MCx”, which stands for “Multi-Core Optimized”.
EMC has seen the greatest growth in the VNX line in its use as an engine for server virtualization. With the hyper-consolidation that server virtualization technology like VMware vSphere allows for, storage arrays become aggregators for tens, hundreds, and even thousands of virtual machines.
Designing storage for virtual environments isn’t always easy.
Continue reading
If you follow me on Twitter, you may have caught some of the story of chasing certifications in October and how the best-laid plans meant nothing to Hurricane Sandy. Despite the obstacles thrown in our way, my teammates and I charged ahead and succeeded in the Bold Plan that was Certification Quest, wherein 6 people achieved 10 EMC certifications in 3.5 weeks (I got 4 of them, taking 4 exams over a 2-day period).
Now that’s it’s over and we’ve had the chance to relax a little, I thought I’d pull together some of my thoughts about the whole process. Continue reading
