Virtual Winfrastructure

Reason #8 to visit EMC at MS TechEd: EMC SANdbox

What to see one of our new cool VNX or VNXe Unified Storage Arrays?  How about one of those Bada** Symmetrix VMAX?  Come to the EMC SANdbox to meet some new friends and play with one of these toys in our booth at MS TechEd! 

VNX and VNXe are affordable high performing unified storage arrays that are optimized for virtual applications.  I posted some recent blog posts about this including significant performance gains when using VNX with SQL Server.  We'll also have a Symmetrix VMAX at the booth, our high end networked storage that is one of a kind in performance, scalability and availability!  So come by the EMC booth (#901) to check out one or all of these storage arrays and talk to our experts about how they can help you with your Microsoft workload!

Reason #9 to visit EMC at MS TechEd: Mini Cooper and Teddy Bears

That's right, you heard me correctly.  Mini Cooper & Teddy Bears is reason #9 to visit EMC at Microsoft TechEd.  Why a Mini?  Well we will have one parked in the Attendee Recharge Lounge which is sponsored by EMC and the Mini will be filled with Teddy Bears.  We'll be running a contest to see who can correctly guess the number of Teddy Bears in the car and three winners will win $100 each! 

What do you do with a car full of Teddy Bears after TechEd?  We'll be donating them to Children's Heathcare of Atlanta, an organization with hospitals and offices across Georgia dedicated to helping sick children. 

So need some time to unwind while at TechEd?  Come to the EMC Attendee Recharge Lounge and take a guess at how many Teddy Bears you can fill in a Mini and you may just win some spending cash!

10 Days Until Microsoft TechEd..10 Reasons to Come Visit EMC

There are just 10 days until the start of Microsoft TechEd so I decided to start a countdown listing the Top Ten Reasons to Come Visit EMC at the show!  Every day I'll post a new reason to come see us as we count down to the show. 

TechEd is going to be great and definitely the biggest most awesome show we have ever done!  EMC is a Platnum sponsor and to say we are going *BIG* is an understatement!  Be sure to come by and see me as well as the rest of the gang to say hi and see some of the exciting things we'll be showcasing.  What does that include?  Tune in everyday for the next 10 days to learn something new or follow me on Twitter (@asimays) for daily updates.

So, without further delay - Reason #10 to visit EMC at MS TechEd:  EMC is Your One Stop Shop for Everything you Need to Enhance your Microsoft Experience! 

Throughout the show we'll have experts at the booth giving demos and talking about the following technologies:

• Simplified Cloud\Virtualization Management
• Simplifying Storage Provisioning for Windows Applications
• Total Local Protection for Microsoft Applications
• Deduplication Backups for Microsoft
• Sharepoint Archiving and Single Message Recovery
• Local and Remote Protection for Microsoft Applications
• Long Distance Clustering with VPLEX Storage Federation
• Information Management in a Cloudy World
• Information Meets Big Data - Solutions for MS Sharepoint
• Accelerating Deployment of Application and Desktop Virtualization Services
• Protecting Microsoft Assests with RSA Security
• Scale Storage in lockstep with the demands of your Microsoft Applications (Isilon)
• End to End Solutions for everything virtualization and cloud

Think about it, where else can you visit one vendor and learn about how to deploy technologies, better manage physical and virtual workloads, improve performance and scalability, locally protect applications, implement high availability and\or disaster recovery and secure the whole thing end-to-end??!!

And this is just the start!  Tune in again to see 9 other reasons to come see us!

Introducing EMC Storage Integrator (ESI)

I've mentioned a new tool from EMC in recent blogs and yesterday's press release also mentioned this new tool known as EMC Storage Integrator (ESI). So what exactly is ESI?

It's a MMC based management tool that makes storage administration in a Microsoft Windows environment easy, almost non-existent. Think about the steps you need to take to create a new LUN drive for that Exchange server or the steps you need to take when setting up clustering. You need to:

• Log on to the storage array management tool to create a new volume and\or new LUN.
• Assign permissions for the host to see the new LUN including configuring the Fibre Channel or iSCSI settings.
• You need to log on to the Windows server to rescan the disks, set alignment, format the drive and assign a drive letter.
• If using clustering you need to prepare the drive for use in cluster manager as a disk resource.

ESI eliminates the need to perform all of these steps manually by automatically completing these tasks for you after collecting some basic information. ESI even integrates with the applications so you can create a Sharepoint site from within the ESI wizard including creating all of the necessary files and database just by answering a few basic questions. I could go on and on about this but a picture is worth a 1000 words so a demo must be worth a million. J Here you go:

 

 

 http://youtu.be/GrNi5jZtILE

Be sure to come to EMC World next week to hear more about ESI and see some live demos or talk to the development team! If you are attending EMC World, be sure to attend the Simplify Storage Provisioning for Your Windows Applications session which will be on Monday May 9^th at 5PM and again on Thursday May 12^th at 1PM. This session will go into much more detail around ESI including more functionality not covered here and future plans for the tools.

We'll also be demoing the tool at Microsoft TechEd so be sure to come to EMC booth (booth #901) and talk to myself or other EMC Microsoft specialists about how we can continue to simplify the management of your Microsoft environment!

EMC Enhances Management of Virtualized Microsoft Applications

EMC issued a Press Release today to announce new EMC solutions and technologies for virtualized Microsoft Applications as customers Journey to the Cloud with Microsoft Virtualization. What exactly does this mean? Well as customers embark on their journey to the Private Cloud by virtualizing key business applications with Microsoft Hyper-V, they need advanced technologies to help simplify management and provide data protection for the virtual landscape. For most companies, this includes a combination of technologies from a variety of vendors including tools such as Microsoft System Center as well as tools from EMC as highlighted in the release. For those of you who have been following my blog, you've already read about many of these solutions!

There are two main components to the press release. First, EMC has several tools available to help customers manage their private cloud infrastructure.

• For customers who are using System Center, EMC has a System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) management pack for EMC hardware to provide visualization of the SAN environment including health reporting on EMC SAN devices. I posted a blog update about this capability back on April 22^nd.
• The other System Center plug-in is an EMC PRO (Performance Resource and Optimization) Pack for System Center Virtual Machine Manager. EMC's PRO pack will alert an administrator when an EMC volume hosting Hyper-V virtual machines is low on space and will present the VM administrator with a PRO tip. The PRO tip contains details about the alert and the low space warning and will present the administrator with the option to migrate the VMs off of the volume that is low on space onto another volume on the array that has available capacity. Why is this important? Without this scenario, there is a chance that the volume could fill up with data and cause any other VMs sharing the same disks to shut down unexpectedly causing potential data loss.
• EMC also announced a new tool called EMC Storage Integrator (ESI). ESI is designed for the Windows administrator and it removes much of the complexity associated with managing storage, especially for the Windows or application administrator. ESI is a MMC tool and the main console displays the Windows servers, applications and EMC storage in the customer's environment. From here the administrator can select a series of wizards to perform tasks such as auto configure storage or set up a disk for clustering. Imagine answering a few questions about your application (like Sharepoint) and the tool takes care of creating storage LUNs, assigning permissions, formatting drives, assigning drive letters and presenting disks to Windows. I've alluded to this tool in several blog posts as we gave a preliminary demo at MMS and anyone attending EMC World or Microsoft TechEd will have a chance to see the latest version! For those of you who can't make it, I'll be posting a blog post and demo of this tool soon!

The second component to the release was to highlight some of the performance numbers that EMC has published when running Microsoft Hyper-V on the VNX array. I blogged about some of these already including the Microsoft Sharepoint with Hyper-V and EMC VNX as well as the SQL Server performance numbers with Hyper-V on VNX. You may have already seen the performance numbers that were published in the press release but they are worth repeating:

• EMC VNX deployed with FAST Cache delivers incremental benefits over VNX deployed alone including increases in virtualized SQL Server performance up to 300%, enables incremental management of up to1.6 million Exchange emails without the addition of new hardware, improves SharePoint Search crawl performance by up to 91% and reduces search response time by up to 27%.
• EMC Replication Manager simplifies end-to-end protection and recovery of virtualized applications and can restore a 100 GB SharePoint content database within 6 minutes and as well as automating recovery of SQL Server, Exchange and SharePoint.

Why is this important? When virtualizing on EMC VNX you can expect improved performance as you consolidate your workloads!

There are some exciting things going on including more updates and announcements around EMC World next week (May 8^th-12^th) and Microsoft TechEd the week after (May 16^th-20^th) so stay tuned!!