EMC CEO Joe Tucci officially kicked off EMC World 2010 with a keynote speech this morning that included an obvious reference to Oracle Corp.’s “stack” offerings. “Other companies are building the whole stack,” including servers, database, middleware and storage, Tucci said (it’s the reference to database and middleware that’s the Oracle giveaway).

Tucci said this approach will lead to a siloed data center, as with previous waves of IT that now includes silos of mainframe and distributed systems at many enterprises. “If three or four vendors do it and you’re not using everything from one vendor, you’ll have stacks that run into the same problems we have today,” Tucci said. “We also have a stack,” he said, referring to EMC’s vBlock products with Cisco and VMware, “but rather than a verticalization approach, we’re taking a virtualization approach.”

Tucci also referred to EMC’s most recent Digital Universe report on data growth, and outlined EMC’s general vision for managing that growth using cloud computing and data center federation. While much of the data growth will be introduced by consumers using mobile phones that send multimedia such as photos and video, or specialized machines like medical imaging devices, some 80% of the data will still be managed by enterprises, Tucci said. “You won’t have to buy [resources] for the peaks of the year or the day When you reach the peaks, you can federate,” Tucci said.

In support of this vision, EMC announced VPlex, a new wide-area caching device that will pool data over geographic distance this morning.

In a Q&A session following the keynote, Tucci was asked about acquisition strategies given EMC’s estimated $6.5 million in free cash per its most recent 10-Q. Despite this free cash flow and the $2 billion acquisition of Data Domain last year, Tucci said he still prefers the “string of pearls” acquisition approach. So far this year, EMC has bought one company,  Archer Technologies, LLC, a provider of governance, risk, and compliance software.

After Tucci mentioned EMC needs to compete better in the low end of the midrange on EMC’s last earnings call, its Iomega division came out with the ix12-300r, which blurred the lines between the top end of the Iomega line and the low end of EMC’s Clariion and Celerra lines. Would the new low-midrange products Tucci alluded to on that earnings call come from the Iomega or Clariion/Celerra side? “We will have a line with functionality from Clariion and Celerra that will be driven significantly downmarket,” Tucci said. “Iomega will remain below that.”

VPlex was first publicly discussed at last year’s VMWorld conference. At the time, EMC officials referred to it as “active-active” storage to support distance VMotion. The key difference between this and metro clusters is cache coherency, enabled by EMC’s acquisition of technology from YottaYotta three years ago. While the stretched array cluster remains locally “array aware” — integrating with EMC FAST, for example — it can propagate data as a distributed pool quickly enough to support running applications being VMotioned over distance.

The VPlex device is an appliance which begins at 1U and can scale up to 4U, with 32 GB cache, two quadcore processors per appliance, and can front any of EMC’s arrays. The goal, according to Pat Gelsinger, President and Chief Operating Officer, EMC Information Infrastructure Products, is to be able to front third-party arrays as well, although Brian Gallagher, President, Symmetrix and Virtualization Product Group, said those third party arrays are not fully supported yet.”

Two separately licensed versions of VPlex are available today — VPlex Local, which covers local data center data migrations, which starts at $77,000 as an up-front fee or $26,000 for subscription-based pricing. VPlex Metro is also becoming available today and will support data over over distances up to 100 km (5 ms latency) using synchronous replication.

In early 2011, officials said, EMC will release VPlex Geo, which will support “thousands of virtual machines over thousands of miles” and asynchronous replication. Finally, VPlex Global, also due out next year, will support multi-site pooling using asynchronous or synchronous replication.

Stay tuned for more on this announcement and other news from the show.

At last year’s VMWorld in San Francisco, Cisco and VMware demonstrated distance VMotion, a technology that will be key to VMware’s vision of data center federation and fluidity between public and private clouds. However, distance VMotion as of that conference had several limitations, the most significant of which from a storage perspective is the need to migrate potentially large volumes of data over distance very quickly in order to support VMotion between data centers.

VMware said last year it will support customers if they deploy distance VMotion using the Cisco network, but its support statement included extensive fine print, including a minimum network bandwidth of 622 Mbps, or an OC12 connection.

Partners were scrambling at that time to step in to solve the data migration problem (including EMC, which was developing “active-active” storage to support distance VMotion), and some of the exhibitors on the show floor, including NetEx and F5 Networks, claimed to be able to solve the problem today. At the time, however, no WAN optimization products were certified for distance VMotion with VMware.

Today, NetEx announced certification of its HyperIP software as VMware Ready, which according to a press release means “HyperIP integrates consistently with VMware technology and is ready for deployment in customer environments.” The press release doesn’t mention distance VMotion specifically, but a NetEx spokesperson said a large oil and gas company has deployed the software for distance VMotion. That customer is not open to taking questions from press, the spokesperson said.

But another detail offered by an industry source earlier this week caught my eye and rang a bell when it comes to this announcement – 

Deeper integration with VMware — “integration not available elsewhere,” according to one source – is supposedly a big feature of the new Clariion. EMC will apparently play up storage virtualization as well, although it’s unclear yet what new virtualization features will be included.

That’s when I remembered something I came across at EMC World two years ago, in an exhibit on the show floor called the Innovation Showcase. Among the product sneak previews I noted at the time:

Senior consulting software engineer Sorin Faibish was showing off his own diagram of “Application-Aware Intelligent Storage.” This would combine artificial intelligence software capable of being “trained” with hardware-embedded VMware ESX servers to automatically spawn services like data migration, encryption and replication to data as it comes into the cache on a storage array. The embedded ESX host would run EMC’s RecoverPoint CDP inside, logging and catalogging I/O, indexing data for input into a modeling engine, which would then decide on the proper way to store and protect the data before flushing it to disk.

No time frame was given on any of the prototypes.

Just something to ponder while we’re all waiting for a press release.

At first, this seemed like a ho-hum announcement. Plug-ins that integrate with vCenter are part of the new standard APIs VMware is making available for partners — everyone and their brother seemingly has something along these lines already (including EMC, which introduced a management plug-in for its Clariion and Symmetrix disk arrays last year). Ditto integration with Site Recovery Manager — FalconStor Software, for example, launched an SRM plug-in for its Network Storage Server (NSS) last year around the time of VMWorld in August.

But EMC director of unified storage marketing Brad Bunce claimed EMC’s integration of automated failback for VMware environments running on NFS is unique. “The difference [between the Celerra plug-in and competitors] is that failback is automated without requiring advanced scripting in the NFS environment,” he said.

At least one competitor acknowledges that the NFS support with automated SRM failback is not something it has yet offered — “As an NFS mounted device Celerra may be the only product with auto failover for SRM,” wrote Falconstor director of marketing Fadi Albatal in an email to Storage Soup. However, he added, “from our side, we can say, welcome to the party–you’re six months behind. Falconstor’s SAN virtualization and DR solutions have a block storage service for SRM and our plug in has an auto-discovery feature that eliminates the need for scripting and ensures full integration with VMware SRM.”

EMC’s vCenter plug-in for management also includes automated provisioning features for VMware in Celerra NFS environments, including automatic mounts to ESX servers and clusters, virtual machine cloning, and compression.

In the letter to customers, VMware said its data backup partners will offer integrations with new vStorage APIs for Data Protection to replace VCB with the next vSphere release.

Industry experts say VCB had fallen short of its promise to simplify virtual machine backups in networked storage environments. To wit, according to backup expert W. Curtis Preston in a story we did recently about vSphere and backup:

“At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if 80% of users currently have agents in guests,” said data backup expert W. Curtis Preston. There are two ways to use the current VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) option, which transfers the quiescing of applications and execution of snapshots to a proxy server. One is a virtual mount, which means that the C: drive of a guest machine is transferred to the proxy server and backed up using regular backup software as if it was a local drive on the proxy machine. The other is to send an image of the virtual machine itself to the VCB proxy, where it can be backed up in its entirety.

 

According to Preston, “at the least it’s a two-stage backup and restore” process to use VMware Consolidated Backup. If a virtual mount is used, the user must have a separate tool. Popular choices include Vizioncore’s vRanger Pro and Veeam Software’s Backup & Replication to back up the guest machine itself. If an image-level backup is used, the full Virtual machine disk format (VMDK) file is copied to the proxy machine and then backed up. Should users need to restore a single file or object from an image level backup, the full virtual machine must often be restored. Even incremental backups often copy the entire VMDK file over to the proxy server, Preston said.

The new APIs will allow data backup software tools to query virtual machines directly.

Meanwhile, there’s palpable joy in at least some parts of the IT blogosphere about this announcement. “Boy-oh-boy-oh-boy, this is the best day since I know what VCB is! Finally, it’s being retired!” exulted Joep Piscaer, a product manager for a Dutch VMware partner.

Another blogger wondered aloud if VMware Data Recovery (vDR), VMware’s own backup tool launched with vSphere 4, will take over for VCB, but I would be surprised if that happened. DataRecovery is based on the same vStorage APIs VMware is making available to partners, but VMware has said DataRecovery will be limited to disk-based backups of virtual machine images only, and will support up to 100 virtual machines or 2 TB of storage. So for the low end of the market, probably, but most users will still be working with third-party tools.

The software VMware acquired includes Server Configuration Manager (formerly Configuresoft), FastScale, Application Discovery Manager (formerly nLayers), and Service Manager (formerly Infra). EMC will retain reseller rights to Ionix, while VMware will take over its engineering, marketing, sales and support operations in the United States, Europe, Israel, India and Australia.

Owning this portfolio was kind of a head-scratcher for EMC — while it has been steadily expanding its business well beyond storage hardware, it seems a more organic fit for customers to buy systems management software from the closest thing EMC has to a server hardware division in VMware. This also fits in with VMware’s ambitions to be the data center operating system — and management console — of the future.

According to a blog by Ben Verghese, chief management architect in VMware’s Virtualization and Cloud Platforms business unit, “An IT-as-a-Service model demands strong capabilities and automation across several aspects of management: provisioning, capacity, configuration, performance, business continuity. With the acquisition of the Ionix products, VMware will extend the capabilities of vCenter in order to meet these demands, especially around configuration management and compliance in the enterprise private cloud.”

The acquisition is expected to close in the second half of 2010. For ongoing analysis of what this move means for VMware users, stay tuned to our SearchServerVirtualization.com sister site.

Yes, we agree, that VMware should update their [sic] VSS writer code and we believe this is the best place for this issue to be resolved. We’re probably not the only one who believes this which is why only two vendors have created a work around here. VMware tools is constantly updated [sic], so when updates are provided by VMware, it lowers administration effort which is not trivial when you have 100s of VMs. With third party VSS writer code in a VM you run the risk that an upgrade from VMware tools will cause a conflict with the VSS writer there and you have separate code that has to be updated. This is why we focus on integration with VMware, rather than work-around efforts. We believe that VMware will address this issue in the future. Finally, we recommend agents when protecting mission-critical applications within VMs because not only does it assure consistency and proper log management, it also offers many more recovery options tailored to that application, e.g. Oracle tablespace recovery, or SQL Server filegroup recovery.

So there you have it. Until VMware’s VSS integration changes, we will probably still see users deploying backup software agents on guest machines, as recommended by Symantec.

These APIs are among the more widely hailed updates in vSphere 4 for storage pros. They promise to eliminate the cumbersome VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) from the infrastructure and allow existing enterprise backup software tools to make backups directly from virtual machines, the same way they’ve been doing for physical servers.

Backup Expert W. Curtis Preston has been among those claiming the vStorage APIs for data protection will be a boon for improving virtual server backups, but points out in light of Symantec’s announcement that its approach of integrating NetBackup 7 with VMware’s VSS implementation leaves something to be desired.

According to Preston’s research, VMware’s VSS support will perform consistent backups of a data volume, which he calls “table stakes” in the snapshot backup market. But Preston says the VMware VSS integration can’t perform application consistent backups with Windows 2008 hosts, and in the case of either Windows 2003 or Windows 2008 hosts, it won’t notify the application when a recent backup has been made or refresh where it starts tracking incrementally changed data. (Think of it as resetting the trip speedometer in a car after a trip is finished).

“What this means is that anyone wishing to get proper backups of applications in Windows must run an agent of some kind in their guests in order to make this happen,” Preston wrote in a Jan. 11 blog post. He goes on to warn, “This means that any backup tools that are using only VMware’s infrastructure are going to have the same limitations.”

Symantec declined comment on the limitations cited by Preston. VMware officials confirmed that for Windows 2008, vSphere supports backups at the operating system level (as opposed to the application or transactional level). They also confirmed that vSphere’s integration with VSS doesn’t make the application aware it’s backed up (see the trip speedometer analogy above), but said through a spokesperson, “Back in the old file-level days there used to be an archive bit that was changed, and hence the application was aware of the backup. [But] the question is, does it really matter for the image level backup?”

“This has nothing to do with the archive bit,” Preston responded in an interview with Storage Soup. “Applications need to know when to truncate their transaction logs.” If transaction logs aren’t truncated, in the case of a database application, “they’ll eventually fill up and crash the database.”

VMware plans to continue innovating around VSS backups, the spokesperson added. Preston’s blog post also mentions VMware is working on more granular VSS support.

In the meantime, I’m wondering if anyone out there reading this in blogland has personally encountered these problems, or better yet, any workarounds they would like to share.

I’ve been incredibly busy this year and my lack of posts really shows it, one would think I forgot my login or something. In that time, however, there has been no lack of great topics to talk about, and here are a couple that lit my candle in 2009:

Consumer computing is fast approaching levels of enterprise computing, making corporate citizens more computer savvy, and making IT management work harder to keep things humming along. Mark my words, you are going to see quite a bit of work-slash-home networking products come to the market in 2010, specifically around data protection and storage that are going to tout “office integration” or “workplace integration”.

The mobile computing and storage space and the rate at which consumer mobile devices are making inroads into the datacenter is something that I’m paying close attention to. Specifically, the Android OS and the Nexxus One and Droid hardware–these devices are significant to enterprise computing because they take the whole idea of a netbook to another level!!

If you remember the Toshiba Libretto, these new devices are what the Libretto could have been. The mobile phones are both fast and offer the ability to the savvy user to essentially replace their office with a hand-held device. And for those with super security conscious IT departments, there are companies like Good Technologies “Good for Enterprise” that allows an administrator to remotely wipe Exchange data from a Droid in a fully encrypted container so “security” can’t be used as a reason not to support the platform.

Take this a step further, I’m sure you’ve been asked at least once already to store backups of a user’s phone to tape, or better still seen a backup of a user’s phone on their shared drive. If you haven’t yet, you’d better get ready for it!

Virtualization has been rampant, and I predict it will be in my toaster within the year, allowing me to virtually toast multiple slices of bread simultaneously and store the trend info on how many times I’ve burned my Eggo’s on SSD. While I’m being flippant, we may actually see a hypervisor capable toaster or fridge or washer, and apparently I’m not the only one that thinks so–in an article on a New York times blog Sehat Sutardja has been quoted as saying: “[Virtualization] will become pervasive…It will be used in everything from TVs to IP phones to digital picture frames to washing machines.”

If Android is in a washing machine, then I have Linux and everything that is available to Linux in that washing machine … just think of the Folding at Home scores you can rack up if we linked the neighborhood washing machines up!! Think about all the data that will need to be stored when they start tracking wash cycles of a particular garment via RFID!!!

On a more serious note, the age of operating systems for small to midsized branch office network attached storage devices, as well as smarter switches and other infrastructure devices, is upon us. Microsoft is not standing still — Windows 7 is small and much faster than its predecessors (why do I feel like that is a paraphrase of the architect from the Matrix?) and is definitely a viable OS for these devices, so now we have raw Linux; Moblin is making its way onto the stage with Android, among others. And remember, all these things have one thing in common: they need somewhere to store the data they produce.

Speaking of virtualization, the march of development in the virtualization management software space is going to pick up steam in 2010, and there are going to be some casualties. The winner will be the one that allows truly heterogeneous management of my virtual data center from storage up, and after taking a look at Cisco’s offerings I’m going to be paying very close attention to what they do. I’ve been digging really deep into vSphere, and it’s jam packed with goodies. Orchestrator is a little gem – properly executed, it can add a good bit of speed and agility to any rapid provisioning initiative you may have, BUT be careful, with a poorly orchestrated (you knew that pun was coming didn’t you?) workflow that shiny new NAS with 400TB of storage will be gone in a day.

Enterprise Storage has continued to move forward at a blistering pace, with drives breaking the 2 TB mark, and some serious performance increases in the form of SSDs, Sata III and Fusion IO putting Flash directly on the bus. I look at price in this space. The price of SSDs will get lower and lower and the performance will continue to go up. We will see the proliferation of end-to-end solutions mixing the two, a la Exadata and the Sun 7000 line. Take a look at what Fusion IO is doing in the high end gaming market! It’s funny but the consumer machines of today are looking more and more like the specialized workstations and servers of yesterday.

I see some things that we really missed the ball on last year, too. Convergence really isn’t here yet. The drive to make a device the “media hub” and then backing all that stuff up is getting there, but hasn’t quite caught on yet. I think once it gets closer it could drive an entire wave of datacenter build outs to handle it. I can also see telcos getting into the act a little more aggressively, offering storage services at their major POPs to enable some of the consumer products to work properly. This has some unintended but positive side effects for the small to medium business because they will have ready access to fast, reliable online storage. Well, at least in theory. I’m still waiting for it to happen!

Cloud storage also hasn’t really shaped up to be the game changer I thought it was going to be. I like the idea of not owning infrastructure and I’m a really big fan of the rapid provisioning/de-provisioning model, but I just don’t see the bandwidth needed for that to work here in the US the way it really should. In Korea and various places who’ve deployed infrastructure recently I see cloud as a viable model, but not here.

With that, folks, I’m back and rarin’ to post!!!