Look, every great marketing ploy has a gimmick. This is no different. Although the difference here is this is a gimmick with in a gimmick. Varrow Madness being centered around March Madness, mine being centered around 2000 nickels and a Kindle Touch. So here is what I propose..
You - Customer, Partner, Competitor - when registering for Varrow Madness make sure to add my name, Joe “Boom Boom” Kelly to the “How did you hear about Varrow Madness? (If someone from Varrow told you please list their name)” section. In doing so you will be entered into a drawing where you could win either…
A) A Kindle Touch (or)
B) A bag of 2000 nickels (in which VCDX #49 will sign each one - still in negotiations)
So what are the stipulations?
Disclosure: This is not sponsored or endorsed by Varrow (my employer). Its an attempt by me to have fun, to get you to register, and to ultimately get you to attend the most premier partner event in the Carolinas.
And for those that aren’t aware of Varrow Madness then crank up those listening receptors…
In its inaugural +1 year, Varrow Madness is pure technical. With multiple informative sessions, plenty of hands on labs (care of EMC vSpecialist’s), college ball, industry socialites/experts and more. You simply can’t afford to miss this. Last year was a huge success and this year will be even better. Here are some highlights for this year…
Chad Sakac, EMC
Technology and Trends – Where I see customers, EMC and VMware on our shared journey
David Davis, Train Signal -
Now go, go register here. Follow the infographic I have provided. Shine those IT boots and charge those smart phones this will be a day of IT repentance. And if all else fails bring your bag of Happy Nickels to the Hour of adjectivity. Whatever the Hell that means : )
Over the past week I had the pleasure of attending VPLEX training in Milford MA at one of EMC’s training facilities. Obviously one of the benefits of attending these classes as a partner is the depth of information you receive. Certainly much more than the customer training. In most cases there is a nice mix of EMC internals and partners that naturally draws spirited debate. Given the amount of information thrown at you in such a short time, I thought it would be appropriate for me to focus on Planning and Design considerations. After all these areas contribute tremendously to the overall success of the project. Especially for VPLEX. By the way, my intent is to carry this out over several posts. The focus will be expressed in an advisory manner, everything doesn’t have to be so complex does it? Vendor documentation is built for technical depth. If something needs further explanation hit me up on the twitter and I can point you in the right direction.
So lets get started…
What and Why VPLEX?
In short VPLEX is the middle man between your storage array and your hosts. Today you would typically zone your hosts to a storage array for storage access (LUNs). With VPLEX in the mix, your storage is derived or pooled between one or many backend arrays (of various vendors or just EMC). Think of it as the hypervizor of storage virtualization. Zoning, at this point is directed to the VPLEX engines (directors more specifically) themselves. By doing this, you are virtualizing/abstracting the underlying storage. Why would you do this? The same reason you virtualize your servers. To free your data of physical constraints, opening up a world where the impossible comes possible. Features like active/active storage between geographically dispersed sites, Stretched VMware clusters that lend itself to Live VM migrations between sites, and eventually worldly data mobility. Now other use cases could include disaster avoidance, zero downtime maintenance, or even site load balancing. Use your imagination. Multiple copies of your data, Read/Write, accessed across the world (Access Anywhere), its a compelling story and one that companies are seriously considering. Although not without its set of challenges, VPLEX is the future of data mobility and a product we (as technologists) should all be familiar with. This is EMC’s vision of Virtual Storage…
VPLEX Flavors - Product family below, current state (I purposely left out global due to it’s lengthly time to market) with a bit of design consideration sprinkled in.
More to come on FE and BE recommendations and other must knows…
On Feb. 13-16, VMware PEX 2012 will be on its way in Las Vegas. This being my first experience with PEX, I really have no expectations beyond lower technical intensity. Although based simply on the names of some of the presenters I am sure there will be enough technical filler to satisfy my thirst.
My intentions for the conference are to focus 50% on product (ie vCOPs, Chargeback, Service Manager, and vCO) and 50% on Methodology and Process. We at Varrow have a booming Managed Services business. My hope is to gain additional knowledge on cloud architectural direction (related to design, automation and process) to assist this area of the business. As well as think up knew and exciting offerings to increase our customers productivity, business value and ROI.
We have a large crew (about 8 of us) heading out to PEX. I can firmly say we at Varrow work hard but we also play hard. So please reach out via the twitters if you want to hang. We’re a fun bunch even if you don’t like all the evils of Vegas : )
There has been a technical advisory floating around that deserves a little more attention. First released I believe in December, the advisory focuses on SSD soft media issues. If you have a CX, VNX or NS with SSD drives in any configuration please take heed to this information below. Although remote, it needs to be addressed as soon as possible. So please reach out to the EMC support line to get scheduled. Here is more info on the issue…
EMC has become aware that there is a rare possibility that some solid state disk drives contained in your CLARiiON CX4, VNX and Celerra NS storage systems, including those used in mirrored FAST Cache applications, may experience media errors resulting in the following appearing in the Storage Processor (SP) event logs: “Date Stamp” “Time Stamp” Bus1 Enc1 Dsk0 820 Soft Media Error [Bad block] EMC’s CLARiiON CX4, VNX and Celerra NS products contain redundant solid state drives. This redundant design protects data in the event that a single drive becomes unavailable. In the very rare event that a second disk drive in the same RAID group were to encounter similar media events before the system automatically retires the first drive, a dual faulted RAID Group could occur resulting in data unavailability and potential data loss in RAID groups, Storage Pools, and in FAST Cache configurations. In order to mitigate risk of a dual failure, EMC is proactively installing a software patch on your CLARiiON CX4, VNX and Celerra NS storage systems. Further, please be aware that dual SSD events in a RAID group will necessitate engineering procedures to recover the system.
A picture is worth a thousand words. Straight from the unsolicited whiteboard of one of our customers.