Virtual Winfrastructure

Get Smart at EMC World

"Would you Believe".. EMC World (EMC's annual technical conference, May 21^st-May 24^th in Las Vegas) is right around the corner and we are all busy getting ready for another big show!

At the EMC Solutions Booth (112), we'll be running a twitter challenge called #GetSmart… about Everything at EMC. By attending sessions and visiting booths and then tweeting about them using the #GetSmart hashtag, you'll be eligible to win an iPad, an Iomega PX4 and many other prizes! This twitter challenge will drive awareness around the public communities we created last year called Everything insertpartner at EMC. For instance, Everything Microsoft at EMC, Everything SAP at EMC, and several others.

The purpose of these communities is to take all of the great information EMC has on our support and integration with Microsoft for instance and make this information available outside of the walls of EMC. To find information on EMC's Powershell cmdlets or System Center 2012 support, you can easily type in a search into Bing and find everything you are looking for on the Everything Microsoft at EMC Community. If a customer has a question, they can easily post a question on the community and get instance responses from hundreds of EMC Microsoft specialists who follow and monitor the community.

Since the launch of the Everything Microsoft at EMC Community eight months ago we have posted over 200 documents, over 140 discussions as well as demos, links and much more content. We average over 5000 hits per day on our community and we are seeing a lot of positive feedback from our customers, partners and employees. But unfortunately, not everyone knows about these communities and so my team along with several others in the EMC Solutions Group will be at EMC World supporting the #GetSmart contest, giving out Get Smart t-shirts and helping people register for the EMC Community Network (sign up is free and easy!)

In addition to this contest, we have a huge show planned for Everything EMC and Microsoft! At the EMC Solutions booth (112) we will have our EMC Microsoft experts available to meet with attendees and to show demos or have discussions around topics such as:

• EMC Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track based on Hyper-V and System Center 2012
• Microsoft Management of EMC Infrastructure through System Center 2012
• EMC Storage Integrator (ESI) for simple provisioning of Microsoft Windows
• SQL Server 2012 Performance and DR with VMAX and VNX
• Exchange 2010 Best Practices
• SharePoint Performance, DR and Storage Efficiency
• Simple replication for Microsoft applications and Hyper-V

Once again Microsoft is a top tier sponsor with a booth showcasing their System Center 2012, Private Cloud virtualization, SQL Server 2012 and other technologies. EMC Microsoft specialists will be there too along with Microsoft to help answer questions and promote the EMC Microsoft partnership! Microsoft will also be presenting at a breakout session entitled Microsoft: Understanding Microsoft Fast Track Advantage for the Microsoft Private Cloud (Monday, May 21^st at 4PM). At this session you will learn about Microsoft's Private Cloud Fast Track program and EMC's solutions in this private cloud reference architecture developed by Microsoft and EMC.

But that's just a start, check out the full list of Microsoft related sessions:

• Application Protection as a Service Best Practices for Virtualized Exchange and SQL Server on VNX Platforms (Tuesday & Thursday at 10AM)
• Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery for Microsoft Applications and How to Augment SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups with RecoverPoint (Monday 10AM & Wednesday 4:15)
• Design, Deploy and Optimize Exchange 2010 on vSphere (Tuesday & Thursday at 11:30AM)
• Design, Deploy and Optimize SQL Server on vSphere5 (Monday 4PM & Thursday 10AM)
• EMC Backup – Strategies for Backup and Recovery of Microsoft Applications (Exchange, SQL, AD, SharePoint) (Monday 10AM & Tuesday 4:15)
• EMC Microsoft Private Cloud Solutions (Tuesday 10AM & Thursday 1PM)
• EMC SourceOne Fundamentals: Archiving and information Governance in a "Microsoft 2012" World (Monday 10AM & Thursday 1PM)
• Extend Interoperability Between Microsoft SharePoint and EMC Documentum (Tuesday 4:15)
• Introducing Application Protection as a Service for Virtualized Applications on VNX Platforms (Monday 8:30 & Wednesday 11:30)
• Introduction to the EMC Documentum Records Adaptor for Microsoft SharePoint (Thursday 10AM)
• Leverage VNX for your High-Performance and High-Bandwidth Microsoft SQL Server Data Analytics (Wednesday 11:30 & Thursday 10AM)
• Leveraging EMC VFCache with Enterprise Applications (Monday 4PM & Thursday 10AM)
• Microsoft cloud and Applications Enabled by Symmetrix VMAXe (Wednesday 10AM & Thursday 8:30)
• Proven Methodology for Implementing Microsoft SharePoint and EMC Documentum (Monday 2:30 & Thursday 1PM)
• Simplify the Management of Microsoft Applications Leveraging the EMC Storage Integrator (ESI) (Monday 2:30 & Thursday 1PM)
• VNX & VNXe: Best Practices Planning for Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint and SQL Server (Tuesday 2:45 & Wednesday 10AM)
• VPLEX and RecoverPoint: Operational Best Practices for VMware and Microsoft Environments (Wednesday 4:15 & Thursday 8:30AM)

Still looking for more? I'll be presenting a theatre presentation on Virtualizing Mission Critical Microsoft Applications with EMC on Tuesday May 22^nd at 3:30 followed by a presentation by Microsoft at 4:15. And if that's not enough, we will have all of our EMC Technical Consultants in town for several days of technical training including a session on Big Data with Microsoft SQL Server 2012 and EMC.

So if you're coming to Vegas, be sure to stop by Booth 112 to meet me and the other EMC Microsoft Specialists who will be on hand to help you Get Smart on Everything Microsoft at EMC!

Microsoft Private Cloud Amplified with EMC

Last week was the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) in Las Vegas and what a show! Microsoft took the full wraps off System Center 2012 with a week full of sessions showcasing how Microsoft management can simplify administration for physical and virtual environments as well as infrastructure monitoring, desktop management and tools for the public and private cloud. Microsoft also officially named the next version of Windows Server to Windows Server 2012.

Overall EMC had a great week with thousands of attendees at our booth (check out this crowd below!) engaging with our many specialists in conversations about System Center integration, EMC tools for managing private cloud, to discuss EMC best practices for virtualizing Microsoft applications with Hyper-V, to learn more about EMC VSPEX with Hyper-V and to hear about our technologies for local and remote protection of virtualized workloads.

During the week I also had the opportunity to present a breakout session along with my EMC colleague, Txomin Barturen. In our session entitled Microsoft Private Cloud Amplified with EMC we presented how to achieve not just virtualization but full automation with Microsoft Private Cloud and EMC. While virtualization is an important step on the Journey to the Private Cloud, virtualization alone doesn't solve many of the challenges facing IT organizations that are interested in realizing automation in the Datacenter. Many customers are still looking to address operational inefficiencies through simplified management, orchestration and self-service cloud so that end users can request their own resources.

The technologies are in place to realize full automation today and this is what we demonstrated in our session through a series of scenarios. For our first scenario we demonstrated how a customer can use EMC's Storage Integrator (ESI) tool to manage and provision storage for physical or virtual servers using an easy to use MMC tool. ESI provides the administrator a view into relationship between storage to server to VM. We also demonstrated how to use ESI's Powershell cmdlets to script these same storage provisioning tasks so that we could show a new LUN being created, formatting the LUN, attaching the LUN to a host and making the new LUN part of a Cluster Shared Volume (CSV) cluster – all using Powershell cmdlets. By using Powershell, we also demonstrated how to boot a VM from SAN using Cisco Powershell cmdlets to configure the UCS.

Our next scenario was to deploy a VM template using Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2012. Since many of our customers use System Center to manage their virtual environments, we presented a use case in which an administrator manages the EMC SAN though SCVMM by creating a new LUN and using EMC's snapshot capabilities to create a replica of a VM template all done through SCVMM 2012 using the SAN Copy Capable feature. How is this done? Using SMI-S or Storage Management Initiative Specification. SMI-S is a standards approach from SNIA for managing storage and technology that Microsoft added to System Center 2012 to allow SCVMM 2012 administrators to attach to and manage storage arrays that support SMI-S such as EMC.

We then discussed how EMC storage can be managed by System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) for full end to end monitoring of the Datacenter including servers, clients, applications, networks and storage with EMC's SCOM integration. By monitoring storage in SCOM, an administrator can view detailed information about the various storage components as well as have access to monitoring, alerts and diagnostics. SCOM also allows for actions to be addressed such as initiating Microsoft PRO (Performance and Resource Optimization) Packs that can perform tasks such as alert administrators to potential resource problems and move virtual machines to hardware that has more resources available to ensure workloads remain available.

Finally we addressed how to extend automation to the end users through self-service portals, Microsoft Orchestrator and App Controller. By using service delivery and automation workflow through tools like Orchestrator you can automate the deployment of resources. When using an Integration Pack from EMC, you can perform actions such as creating LUNs and presenting them to hosts. With App Controller you can deliver a self-service experience to manage service or applications across private and public clouds. This gives a person the ability to rapidly deploy a template that can consist of multiple VMs with applications pre-loaded so that App Controller submits the job through SCVMM or coordinate this request with other System Center resources. Below is a screen shot of EMC's Integration Pack for Microsoft Orchestrator or visit Inside the EMC MSFT Partnership for a demo of our App Controller capabilities!

So, what if you don't have these technologies today? How do you get started? An easy solution is the Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track program. Microsoft announced the v2 version of the Private Cloud Fast Track program last week that included two solutions from EMC. This means customers can purchase a pre-built configuration that includes all of the software I just discussed as well as validated hardware from Microsoft to quickly deploy a proven Microsoft Private Cloud architecture. Interested? I'll be blogging about our two solutions soon so stay tuned for more information!

There is a lot going on right now including the upcoming EMC World show in a few weeks in Las Vegas! EMC World is a great show with a lot of Microsoft related content, best practices, solution references, demos, etc. I'll be there representing the Everything Microsoft at EMC Community on the show floor and presented on Virtualizing Mission Critical Microsoft Applications. Be sure to stop by if you're there and more information on EMC World and Microsoft TechEd coming soon!

EMC at MMS: Cloud Transforms IT

The Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) is right around the corner (April 16^th-20^th) and EMC is busy preparing for the show with plans to top what we did last year (if that's even possible)!

MMS 2012 looks to be even bigger and better than in years past considering Microsoft plans to launch System Center 2012 with a heavy concentration of sessions and information on the new System Center features as well as private and public cloud updates. Also, a glance at the agenda indicates that the much anticipated next version of Windows and Hyper-V due out later this year will be previewed!

So what's EMC up to for MMS 2012? EMC will be a Gold sponsor for the event where we will be highlighting our Microsoft Management and Virtualization solutions including:

• System Center 2012 Integration
• SCOM monitoring, reporting and alerting
• Native SMI-S integration with SCVMM for storage provisioning
• Dynamically provision and scale applications
• Simplify and automate IT infrastructure management
• Deliver Application aware management solutions
• Enable self-service management
• Advanced solutions for Hyper-V Private Cloud

You can also come meet the EMC experts at our booth (#315) featuring 4 solution workstations and multiple demonstrations focusing on the following technologies:

• Cloud and Datacenter Management
  • System Center 2012 Integration
  • Simplify management with common toolset
  • Dynamically provision and scale applications
• Simplified Cloud Management
  • Simplify and Automate IT Infrastructure Management
  • Deliver Application Aware Management Solutions
  • Enable Self-Service Management
• Accelerate to the Cloud
  • Flexible/Cost-Effective Hyper-V Infrastructure
  • Automated Data Tiering
  • Private Cloud FAST Track Solutions
• Accelerate Backup Transformation
  • Simplify Backup Across Microsoft Applications
  • Fast Online Backup with Data DeDuplication
  • Protecting Critical Applications in the Clodud
  • DataDomain

We will also have the following sessions at the show including:

• Microsoft Private Cloud Amplified with EMC - Learn how EMC's integration with Microsoft management technologies can simplify management across your Microsoft Private Cloud including tools to help automate and simplify management of storage provisioning for Microsoft environments. Session FI-B294 will be held on Thursday (4/19) at 10:15 in Room Titan 2203.

• Got Cloud? Get Simplified Cloud and Data Center Management – A brief overview of EMC solutions for Microsoft management and Private Clouds including demos and discussions. Tuesday (4/17) at 12:45P and Wednesday (4/18) at 2:05 in the Expo Hall Booth #450.

• Cisco and EMC: Cloud Solutions for Hyper-V – Learn about the new Cisco and EMC collaboration for Microsoft private cloud scenarios leveraging Cisco UCS and Nexus offerings and EMC storage capabilities. Tuesday (4/17) at 1:45 in the Expo Hall Booth #450.

And that's just the start; we'll have exciting prizes and giveaways in the booth as well as some updates and announcements for the show! Be sure to follow us on twitter @window2cloud and Window to the Private Cloud for continued updates from the EMC Microsoft experts! We'll also post presentations and demos on the Everything Microsoft at EMC Community after the show for those of you who are unable to make it.

See you then!

Lightning Strikes Again for SQL Server 2012!

Earlier in February, EMC announced a new server Flash caching solution called VFCache, a hardware and software solution that leverages PCIe Flash technology to extend performance based caching from the storage array to the server. VFCache (codenamed "Project Lightning") increases throughput and reduces latency with a focus towards read intensive workloads including Microsoft SQL Server.

When used with an EMC Flash enabled array, VFCache can actually increase throughput up to 3x which means customers can extend the benefits they are seeing on the EMC array since the use of an embedded SSD on the PCIe card helps to bridge the performance gap between the server and storage. VFCache reduces the need to access data across the network from the storage array which is what helps to decrease the response times and increase the performance of the application. VFCache automatically determines which data is being frequently accessed and promotes this to the server Flash cache so reads are being serviced by VFCache while writes are being directed to the storage array.

In support of Microsoft SQL Server 2012 which was released last week, EMC recently completed testing of the EMC VFCache and SQL Server 2012 and achieved compelling results as noted below:

• VFCache benefits SQL Server 2012 by:
  • Lowering database I/O latency by 60%
  • Enabling 50% more I/O serviced within 1ms
  • 4X more transactions per SQL Server database
  • Perfect fit for OLTP workloads

EMC continues to provide innovative enabling technologies that help customers extend their Microsoft technology investments. Stay tuned for more EMC whitepapers focused on SQL Server 2012! In the interim, below are the recent test results based on SQL Server 2008 R2.

In a recent white paper entitled EMC VFCache Accelerates Microsoft SQL Server, we tested an online transaction processing (OLTP) database on SQL Server 2008 using a 90% reads to 10% writes workload. After establishing a baseline, the VFCache was enabled and testing proved an increase of transactions per second (TPS) from 1.0 TPS to 3.6 TPS – an increase of 260%!!!

The test results also displayed a reduction in latency from 1.0 read latencies to 0.13!

This momentum will continue, we encourage you to visit EMC at Microsoft Management Summit (MMS), Microsoft TechEd and EMC World to learn more about EMC VFCache and SQL Server! EMC has already indicated that another announcement called Project Thunder will be out soon in Q2 of 2012 and you know what they say…when you see Lightning, Thunder is close by! Stay tuned!

SQL Server 2012 Has Arrived

Today Microsoft released SQL Server 2012 to Manufacturers. SQL "Denali" as it was known in its code name has several new features including improved availability through its Always On technology, new business intelligence tools and cloud ready technologies. Want to learn more? Join Microsoft's free SQL Server 2012 Virtual Launch on March 7^th, 2012 to attend keynote presentations, attend tracks around Mission Critical Confidence, Breakthrough Insights or Cloud on your Terms and visit exhibitor booths such as EMC's – all from the comfort of your office or home.

So what exactly does EMC have to do with all of this? A lot. EMC has been a major partner with the SQL Server team for many years. Through our integration and support, EMC helps to provide additional performance, extend availability, provide advance data protection, accelerate virtualization and provide services to help with deployments and migrations. For example, EMC support SQL Server through:

• Improved performance using EMC FAST (Fully Automated Storage Tiering) technologies. Using EMC's VFCache, test showed that EMC was able to reduce latency by 50% while improving throughput. With FAST Virtual Provisioning, tests have shown up to 40% higher performance at a lower cost of storage and with FAST Cache (extending storage array cache with Flash), testing proved a 300% performance improvement in SQL transactions.

• Data protection technologies such as Data Domain and Avamar provide up to 50% performance improvements compared to traditional solutions while technology like EMC Replication Manager provides snapshot copies of SQL Server databases for Read Only application consistent copies for test and development purposes to assist with testing new application code or running reports from a non-production copy of the data.

• Multisite failover clustering provides instance-level high availability and disaster recovery as one of the architecture choices under SQL Server AlwaysOn. EMC continues to support local failover clustering configurations on its storage solutions, as well as multi-site and multi-subnet clusters with EMC Cluster Enabler extension which expands the range of cluster storage and management capabilities across long distances. EMC replication technologies like RecoverPoint make use of consistency groups, which let users ensures that data at any point in time will be replicated together and fully consistent, a huge benefit when protecting a federated environment of multiple SQL databases, instances or even servers with various file systems dependent on a SQL database such as Microsoft SharePoint.

• EMC is a leading partner in the Microsoft SQL Server Fast Track Data Warehouse program since its introduction. EMC has created, tested and validated high-performance SQL Server Fast Track Data Warehouse configurations approved by Microsoft. Using these Fast Track architectures, EMC helps accelerate the planning and deployment of data warehouse configurations using best practices and documented guidance.

• EMC's Storage Integrator (ESI) is a free easy to use tool for creating new disks in a physical or virtual Windows environment. Using wizards, administrators can view Hyper-V to EMC storage relationships while creating new disks and even configuring new SQL Server databases.

• EMC Consulting provides a full offering of SQL Server and database services to help customers migrate or deploy a SQL Server infrastructure. Services include Consulting Services for Microsoft SQL Server, Upgrade and Migration for Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle to SQL Server migration services, Business Intelligence for Infrastructure and many more.

Interested to learn more? Be sure to visit the EMC for SQL Server 2012 Launch Page, visit the EMC SQL Server Solutions page for documentation and presentations on previous versions of SQL Server or finally, visit the Everything Microsoft at EMC Community for more information around Microsoft products as well as EMC resources, discussions, demos and data!

Help – I need that email I deleted!

 

Anyone who knows me wouldn't be surprised to hear that I delete just about everything in my Inbox. I don't like clutter. I have been known to put dishes away when my guests are still using them even though they only walked away for a minute. I carry this with me to work and I don't know why but seeing an inbox full of emails drives me nuts so I just delete 'em while they come in…and I get a lot of emails (don't get me wrong co-workers and friends, I actually read the emails but why do I need to save them?! I either send a response, file in a folder for reference, or I nuke it)!

Well as you can imagine, this gets me into hot water every now and then. There are times when I try to find an email I remember receiving or someone has referenced and I can't find it anywhere. Sure, I can use the "Recover Deleted Items" option in Exchange (best feature in Exchange\Outlook if you ask me) but if your company is like ours, this only goes so far back because it is costly to store and protect employee's deleted items.

So what do I do when I need to retrieve a long lost email? Well, previously I didn't have many options outside of asking someone to resend it or fumbling my way through the issue. Luckily, I've never been in a situation where my job or an important deal depended on it. Well, now I have another reason why I can continue to wear out my delete button!

Introducing EMC ItemPoint! ItemPoint is software that when used with EMC Replication Manager, it allows you to quickly search and recover Microsoft Exchange mailboxes, attachments, contacts and even tasks! If you are an existing EMC customer and you are using EMC snaps, clones or RecoverPoint continuous data protection (CDP) than you already have easy access to array based replicas of your Exchange data. To recover an individual item, simply right-click on your backup from within Replication Manager and choose Restore – Item Level as seen in the screen shot below.

 

Then select the backup or replica that you want to recover an item from, specify the source Exchange files and find the email or item you are looking for from within the backup. What's great is that you can choose to connect to the target mailbox that you want to restore the email or item to and simply drag and drop the recovered item back to the live Exchange system. By the time you pick up the phone and tell the user to look in their inbox for the recovered item it will already be there!!

ItemPoint includes an advanced search function so if you forget the subject of the email you can look for additional details such as dates, who the email was sent to or from and even perform searches within attachments!! Additional features include ItemPoint ExtractWizards to recover items from a backup server including support for backup products such as Windows NT Backup, Symantec Backup Exec and EMC Networker as well the ability to assist with migrations including automating the process to copy legacy email to a new server.

Interested to learn more?...check out Sam's Inside the Partnership video on YouTube where he explains the Exchange recovery process and provides a demo of ItemPoint recovering a much needed email. 

If email is as critical in your environment as it is in ours, than ItemPoint is something you should be using to ensure you can provide easy item level recovery for end users or to assist with data retrieval as part of your company regulations!

Lightning Strikes!

Earlier this week EMC announced a new server Flash caching solution called VFCache, a hardware and software solution that leverages PCIe Flash technology to extend performance based caching from the storage array to the server. VFCache (codenamed "Project Lightning") increases throughput and reduces latency with a focus towards read intensive workloads including Microsoft SQL Server.

When used with an EMC Flash enabled array, VFCache can actually increase throughput up to 3x which means customers can extend the benefits they are seeing on the EMC array since the use of an embedded SSD on the PCIe card helps to bridge the performance gap between the server and storage. VFCache reduces the need to access data across the network from the storage array which is what helps to decrease the response times and increase the performance of the application. VFCache automatically determines which data is being frequently accessed and promotes this to the server Flash cache so reads are being serviced by VFCache while writes are being directed to the storage array.

(for an excellent and highly detailed overview on VFCache, I strongly recommend you read VirtualGeek's blog post on this subject)

In a recent white paper entitled EMC VFCache Accelerates Microsoft SQL Server, we tested an online transaction processing (OLTP) database on SQL Server 2008 using a 90% reads to 10% writes workload. After establishing a baseline, the VFCache was enabled and testing proved an increase of transactions per second (TPS) from 1.0 TPS to 3.6 TPS – an increase of 260%!!!

 

The test results also displayed a reduction in latency from 1.0 read latencies to 0.13! 

 
So what's next? Well EMC has already indicated that another announcement called Project Thunder will be out in Q2 of 2012 and you know what they say…when you see Lightning, Thunder is close by! Stay tuned!

New Update to EMC Storage Integrator

If you're already familiar with EMC's Storage Integrator (ESI) than you know that it is a tool from EMC that simplifies management and provisioning of storage for Windows servers (I've posted a blog in the past showcasing how easy ESI is to use).

Using a series of wizards and a Microsoft Management Console plug-in (MMC), ESI can easily and quickly create new disks or storage LUNs, enable the new LUNs to be used with Microsoft clustering or even automatically deploy applications such as Microsoft SharePoint Server on the new drives – all within literally a matter of minutes!  It also provides reporting of storage subsystem details and the relationship back to the Windows servers.

And what's the best part? ESI is FREE for all users of EMC storage.

So what could possibly be done to make this product better? Our incredible development team has done this by adding support for Hyper-V, providing Powershell cmdlets for all ESI functions as well as SharePoint FileStream RBS support, rollback support (undo recent changes), native MPIO support in addition to EMC Powerpath and several UI enhancements.

But enough talk, a picture (or video) is worth a 1000 words as seen in this latest demo on Youtube.

  

With the addition of Hyper-V support, administrators can now connect to a host and report on the total number of Hyper-V virtual machines on that server and access details about the VMs such as status or state of the VM, which storage array it is connected to, the disk details including name and capacity details and the type of VM (pass through or VHD). From the ESI console you can choose to connect to the host or attach to the virtual disk. This information can be especially helpful if you have a large virtual environment or if your VMs move from one server to another using Live Migration or Quick Migration.

The enhanced UI adds additional functionality in the Create Disk wizard so that you now have a choice to create a SCSI disk on the server or a Virtual Hard Disk or Passthrough SCSI Disk for Hyper-V.

So if you are a current EMC customer or partner and you're not using ESI, than reach out to your EMC counterpart to get a copy (or download it directly from Powerlink). If you have feedback or ideas on the tool, feel free to post them here! We'll also continue to have more information available on the Everything Microsoft at EMC Community.

In other news, my friend and manager two different times at EMC (including most recently), Chad Sakac just received a promotion to run all of EMC Global presales. This is exciting news for EMC and for our entire technical community as Chad has endless amounts of energy and passion in everything he does. If you haven't followed his blog post, be sure to check out Virtual Geek to see his plans for helping to implement positive changes throughout the company. If you are a fan of EMC, than be happy with this move as I guarantee it is as a game changer for us. If you compete against EMC than good luck and I wish you well.

Introducing EMC’s mSpecialist Program

Last month we unveiled a new program within EMC to recognize and reward our top contributors who specialize in Microsoft technologies. This new program, called mSpecialists is aimed at creating a community of highly specialized and highly motivated technologists who are passionate about Microsoft technologies.

For people who are familiar with EMC's Microsoft Community, we have a large group of existing resources who are already focused on Microsoft technologies and are recognized Microsoft experts both within the company and in the industry. So why create this new program? What the mSpecialist program will do is create a way to recognize these specialists and to better connect them to help share information among our Subject Matter Experts as well as extend this to our customers and partners. What is unique about the mSpecialist program is that we aren't limiting this to just EMC employees; this program will be open to our partners, resellers and other resources who help to promote and support EMC and Microsoft technology solutions.

So what makes an mSpecialist?

There are several attributes that help define an mSpecialist but the easiest way to define it is anyone who is helping to improve the company, the community and our customers by sharing information, educating others and developing new tools or solutions. In other words someone who is giving more than they are asking. Similar to Microsoft's MVP program in which Subject Matter Experts in their respective communities are sharing information to help educate others and are often the first to respond to questions or requests for help on specific, EMC's mSpecialists will include people who blog about technologies to help educate others around them or respond to questions posted on the Everything Microsoft at EMC Community.

So what does an mSpecialist get in return for their efforts? In addition to helping our customers, partners and fellow technologists better understand EMC and Microsoft's deep integration and joint solutions, there are several additional benefits for their participation. A sample of benefits include:

• Invitation to yearly gathering with special access to resources and roadmaps and hands-on labs on Microsoft and EMC technologies.
• Ongoing series of meetings with EMC solution and product teams to help bring field requests to influence EMC Corporate roadmaps.
• Webcasts with Microsoft product teams to learn of ongoing product developments and to discuss customer trends and requests.
• On the spot rewards for outstanding achievers (in December we gave out 20 different prizes including tablets, network storage devices and SSD hard drives).
• Passes to industry events.
• Advance access to EMC beta code.

Interested? To become an mSpecialist you need to be recognized by someone on my team as an active participant in the community. To start, use the Everything Microsoft at EMC Community to blog, post information, share data and ask\answer questions. We will be looking for people who go above and beyond to help make others around them and the community as a whole better! Other things include creating demos or tools, sharing references, volunteering to help and being socially active. As they say Cream Rises to the Top!

To learn more, check out Sam's Inside the Partnership (an example of someone going above and beyond!) interview and overview of this program and our recent EMC Microsoft Specialist gathering!

 

 

 

 

EMC & Microsoft Technical Summit Recap

Last week EMC and Microsoft held a three day Technical Summit in which approximately 120 of EMC's Microsoft Specialists from around the globe gathered in Redmond, WA to hear from Microsoft on some of their latest technologies. Some of the topics covered during the Summit included:

• System Center 2012 Fabric & Storage Management
• System Center 2012 Application & IT Process Management
• SQL Server 2012 BI, Reporting and Analysis Services
• SQL Server 2012 Always On Availability Groups
• Windows 8 Server and Hyper-V 3.0 Overview
• Sharepoint and FAST Scalability Testing
• Hyper-V Disaster Recovery Best Practices
• SQL Server and Private Cloud Fast Track Programs

What was great about the event was that it was largely material delivered by Microsoft speakers who were educating EMC specialists not only on the latest and greatest applications and tools but also on future technologies such as Hyper-V 3.0 which looks to be awesome (dare I say face-melting VirtualGeek?!)! When we did present EMC topics it was centered around Microsoft's technologies that were recently discussed and included EMC's management integration, best practices for applications and disaster recovery as well as EMC's Fast Track involvement.

Interested in some of these topics but couldn't attend? No problem we've posted most of the content on the Everything Microsoft at EMC Community (note due to the NDA nature of some of the presentations, we can't share them externally).

Below are a few pictures taken throughout the week including the Optional Hands-On Labs evening event in which over half the attendees joined us to play with EMC & Microsoft technologies hosted on EMC's vLabs and Microsoft Azure Hands-On Labs.

Stage and Room Setup to Host 120+

Lab Night in the EMC Offices

Partial Group Photo

One of the things we communicated during the event was the new mSpecialist Community at EMC. The mSpecialist Community is a new program to recognize the top Microsoft Specialists in the Company and provide them with special access and an assortment of goodies as a reward for their contribution. More to come on this in an upcoming blog post!

Overall the event was a huge success and I thank everyone for coming! We had attendees from throughout the US as well as Latin America, UK, Spain, Germany, Ireland, Australia, Singapore, China and the Middle East. Attendees also spanned different focus areas including pre-sales, solutions, engineering, product groups, consulting and Alliances which helped sparked some interesting conversations. It was great meeting everyone and I look forward to an exciting 2012, a big year for Microsoft and one that the EMC Microsoft Community will be ready for!