StorageTexan's Blog

A funny thing happened on my way to my 11 year anniversary at Xiotech….

For those of you that are new to my blog, here is a little background information.  I started with Xiotech back in January 2000 and embarked on a remarkable ride.  The past 10+ years were amazing, with tons of professional and personal opportunities but as they say, all great things must eventually come to an end and this ending is especially difficult.

Xiotech is a FANTASTIC company, and Alan Atkinson and his team of rock stars are bound and determined to take this company to great places. I think in the pure storage space, there are very few that can go head to head with Sicola’s ISE technology.  It’s just solid.  Although this is an end to my Xiotech career, it’s an absolutely awesome start to the next chapter in my life and has me vibrating with excitement (my A.D.D is in OVERDRIVE).

What would compel me to leave a company like Xiotech?  This is a place that I’m pretty well respected and that I’ve passionately been spreading the evangelistic pure storage message these last 10+ years.  I have not been just drinking the Kool-Aid but making it in large batches!

Well, I found myself in a really awesome position to join a team of passionate, like-minded individuals in a group that is held in high regard in the cloud space.  This position will allow me to spread my wings even further and continue to speak about the cloud and virtualization.   I describe this change as giving me an opportunity to no longer talk just about the car in the proverbial garage (storage), but the whole house.  I look forward to sharing my passion about virtualization (storage, server and desktop), infrastructure, backup, replication, security and, most importantly, how to pull it all together holistically into something customers can use to drive value and efficiency in the data center.  Does anyone want to guess where I’m going?  If not, keep reading!

This group was pulled together by a pretty remarkable individual with an equivalent passion for this space.  So much passion that he was able to convince the powers that be to start an organization with the sole purpose of evangelizing the cloud.  This person’s name is Chad Sakac and his group is sometimes referred to as “Chad’s vArmy”  (click the link – it ROCKS) but at EMC they are known as vSpecialists.  Their mission is to spread the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) message.  He and his team have recruited some of the best and the brightest—and I can’t tell you how excited I am to nerd out with them.

I’d like to thank Marty Lonergan, John Elliott and the Dallas (and various other) vSpecialist team members  (@daverdfw, @lynxbat, @teeglasgow, @pgkeilty, @Justin_Lauer and @abhojwani) for giving me an opportunity to add value to the organization.  This is an incredible opportunity for me to work for the “powerhouse” of the cloud industry in the absolutely most coveted position of an EMC vSpecialist.

Finally, due to my change in focus and for the respect I have for Xiotech, I’m going to “retire” this blog site.  Starting soon, I will be shutting off the comments and changing my twitter handle name.  Moving forward, you can start following me over at www.vTexan.com ( Cool huh !)  If you currently e-mail subscribe to the StorageTexan blog, I would encourage you to do the same at vTexan.

Stay tuned for more cloud and virtualization goodness on http://www.vTexan.com.  I have an incredible amount of things to absorb over the next few months and look forward to sharing my experiences with my readers. 

 Until then…

@StorageTexan soon to be @vTexan 🙂

My First VMworld Show!!  WOW.

I’m just about recovered from VMworld last week. It was crazy and the Xiotech booth was just NUTS.   I think I’ve finally gotten my voice back!!  This was my first VMworld and I have to tell you, I really hope it’s not my last!!!  The amount of content, speakers, sessions, lab and just plain old “networking” amongst your peers was just unbelievable.  I finally was able to put a face to a ton of twitter names 🙂  which was really cool.  Shout out to the following:  @3parfarley  @charleshood @cxi @hpstorageguy @jtroyer  @keithnorbie  @KendrickColeman  @rootwyrm  @stu @Texiwill @kculw @trey_anderson @NerdBlurt @vrobm @juicelsu009 @daverdfw @lynxbat  @Creedom2020 @mvaughn25 @davidmdavis  the @Mirazon Team as well as the @Veeam Team !!.  I’m sure I left a ton out – feel free to leave a comment below if I did 🙂

So, my biggest regret was not sitting in any of the labs.  I’m just kicking myself.  Truthfully that is the biggest lesson learned of the event.  I did get a chance to sit through about 4 sessions before I finally threw in the towel.  It seemed that every day you had to show up about 15min’s earlier then you did the day before to any given session.  45min wait to get into some was a little crazy but in most cases it was worth it.  My hope is next year in Vegas will be better.  Now, I’m not a big Vegas fan.  One of the cool things about being in San Fran was the ability to go from event to event and Vegas can get crazy with locations.  We’ll see how that goes!!  Vegas is good for about 2 days before it becomes a HUGE beating. 

So if you spent any time at VMworld, what was drilled into your head were Cloud Based Solutions and Virtual Desktops (VDI).  I spent the majority of my time in the VDI sessions.  VMware View 4.5 looks SOLID.  I’m most excited about their offline feature, as well as their tiered storage feature.  The Offline mode is the straw that I think finally breaks the camel’s back in regards to VDI adoption rates. 

 In my opinion, one of the largest hurdles (other than Storage cost) was connectivity to the network in order for VDI to work.  Now, with a lot of companies that have field offices or even field employees this gives them a tremendous capability to unleash VDI as a desktop solution.  One of the sessions I sat through that was the most appealing was the VDI Performance session, Specifically around “How to benchmark VDI”.  VMware View Planner was positioned as the next generation of VDI workload generator.  It’s essentially an appliance package that is designed to work with View 4.X and it allows you to setup Workload profiles, enter in the types of applications that type of user would utilize and then run against your system.  It would then run and give you a “pass/fail” on the overall solution based on a QoS you define.  Please note, I’m really summarizing its features and abilities but the net-net is that VMware View Planner should be a great tool to use when trying to get a better understanding of what your infrastructure can support.  I also like the idea of “What if I add another host, what happens” type scenarios you can play around with.  Lots of cool stuff!!

Tiered Storage as part of View 4.5 is yet another validation around OS’s and Hypervisors getting smarter about storage functions.  Today, tiered storage is typically a feature that a Storage array handles (poorly in most cases) and with VMware View 4.5 you have the ability to setup various tiers of storage within View 4.5 and have it manage where things should go.   The ability to have linked clones sitting on tier 2 or 3 storage allows better use of drive resources

Finally, another session I sat through discussed the market trends in driving desktop virtualization. 

It seems that Apple is driving some of the need.  I don’t know about your company, but at Xiotech I’m seeing more and more people utilizing MacBook’s and iPads for business use.  Virtual Desktop is the perfect fit for these types of situations.  The ability to serve up Microsoft specific applications, on a non-Microsoft product (Apple, Linux etc) is a great value-add.  It also really speaks to the “Bring your own PC” discussion that typically comes up in VDI discussion.

So heed my advice, go to VMworld the next chance you get, remember Vegas is going to be a beating !!  It is so worth the time and effort.  VMware did a spectacular job in pulling everything together.  This is definitely on my list of “Must attend” events!

@StorageTexan

In April 2010 Xiotech launched our CorteX (RESTful) architecture and one of the first things we rolled out to show the power of RESTful was our iPhone/iPad monitoring app.  It was a great success and really spoke to the power of a simple, easy to write to, open architecture.  We then took it to the next level and created a website www.CorteXDeveloper.com and encouraged people to sign up and participate.  So what’s next? 

The thing we hear most in the storage industry is the need for robust reporting tools for the array’s these customers are running.  With that said, we created a product called ISE Analyzer based on our CorteX RESTful API.  This robust API gives us some really unique capabilities.  ISE Analyzer gives our customers:

• Dynamic User Interface based on Microsoft Silverlight
• Quick View Status & Drill Down of their ISE, Servers and Storage Volumes
• ISE Network Discovery – which is great in Storage Clouds
• Data Analysis via Export – ability to export data into just about anything you need.
• Visibility of historical data – trending etc
• Local Alert Notification

The ability for customer to get their hands around all of their ISE’s they have in their environment, performance information as well as capacity planning is HUGE.  These ISEs could be deployed as standalone systems, integrated into Emprise 9000, Emprise 7000, ISE NAS, or even behind third-party storage virtualizes. It really continues our discussion around using ISE as a storage foundation.  Here are a couple of screen shots to look over.

The above screen shot gives a nice home screen.

What’s really cool is ISE Analyzer doesn’t have to be installed at a customer’s site.  From a service provider point of view, it can be installed in a monitoring site and the system can collect the information from many different locations or customers.  Ie) Service Provider wants to offer up a service around monitoring ISE’s at their customer locations.  ISE Analyzer gives them that ability.  This is fantastic for the SMB space who doesn’t have a 24/7 support staff.  We have also run into “dark sites” that don’t allow alerting/reporting to flow outside the firewall.  This solution would be perfect for them as well !!

I should also point out that we offer 2 kinds of ISE Analyzer.  We have the ISE Analyzer Software Service (SaaS) which comes as part of our zero cost, 5-year hardware maintenance contracts as well as an appliance based that is installed at a customer’s (or partners) location.  The big difference between the two is the ISE Analyzer Software Service is accessible via our customer portal and is based on a 24 hour period.  The Appliance based solution, due in large part to our RESTful API can do real-time performance trending.  The great news is, if you choose the appliance based solution, you also have the SaaS solution as well!!

So, if you currently running ISE’s and you want to monitor them, make sure you reach out to your account team.  Tell them StorageTexan sent you for a 10% discount HAHAHA 🙂  Also, if you are looking at Xiotech for your future storage needs, this will be a fantastic tool to help you better understand your utilization rates.

@StorageTexan

If you look up Emprise in the Merriam-Webster dictionary you will see that it means “an adventurous or daring enterprise.”   That pretty much describes the Emprise product family’s launch 2 years ago.  We did something that no one else was, or is doing today.  Imagine being able to start from scratch on a storage solution, and I’m not talking about controller software.  I’m talking a complete re-engineering/architecting a solution that is built with enough resiliencies to offer the only zero-cost 5-year hardware warranty in the storage industry.  Not only is it super reliable, but it’s ridiculously fast and predictable.  When you can support 600+ Virtual Desktop (Performance VDI) “bootstorm” instances at a whopping 20 IOPS per bootup in 3U of space, I would classify that as wicked fast!!!  

In those 2 years we have not sat around on our laurels.  Steve Sicola’s team, headed up by our VP of Technology David “Gus” Gustavsson, has really outdone themselves with our latest Emprise product launch.  Not only did we move our entire user interface from “Web Services” to a RESTful API (ISE-Manager (blog about this later) and our iPhone/iPad App), he also released our 20(ea) 2.5” disk drive DataPac which has 40(ea) 2.5” drives in 3U of space for about 19.2TB’s space and a TON of performance.  His team also released our ISE Analyzer (advanced reporting solution built on our CoreteX/RESTful API (www.CorteXdeveloper.com )– I’ll blog about that soon) and our next release of our Emprise product family, the Emprise 9000.  I swear his team doesn’t sleep!!!

 So, the Emprise 9000 is a pretty unique solution in the market.  Today, when you think “scale out” architecture the first thing you might think about is NAS.  Hopefully our ISE NAS !!  We hope moving forward you will also think of our Emprise 9000.  The Emprise 9000’s ability to scale to 12 controllers puts it way above the 8 controllers the 3PAR solution scales to and above the 2-controllers the rest of the storage world produces (EMC Clariion, Compellent, HP EVA, IBM XIV etc).  When married with our Intelligent Storage Element (ISE) it truly gives our customers the most robust, scalable solution in the storage market today.  

Let’s be clear, the Emprise 9000 is not just a controller update.  It’s a combination of better, faster controllers, RESTful API and our ISE technology combined to solve performance starved applications issues like Virtual Desktops, Exchange, OLTP, Data Warehouse, Virtual Servers as well as various other types of applications found in datacenters today.  The ability to give predictable performance whether the solution is 10% utilized, or 97% utilized is a very unique feature.  Did I mention it comes with our free zero-cost hardware maintenance?  24x7x365 !!!

So for those keeping a tally at home, and for those competitors that want a little more information on what the Emprise 9000 can do, here is a quick list: (this is not all the features)

• Each controller has a Dual quad-core Nehalem CPU’s!!
• Scale-out to 12 Controller pairs
• 8Gb Fibre Channel ports
  • N-Port Virtualization (NPIV)
• 1Gb or 10Gb iSCSI ports                (10GB later this quarter)
  • You can run both FC and iSCSI in the same solution.
• Scalable from 1 to 96(ea) ISE’s of any size
  • Max capacity would be 1.8PB with 96(ea) 19.2 TB ISE’s
• Support for greater then 2TB LUNS
  • Up to 256TB size LUN
• Thin Provisioned Volumes
• Snapshots
  • READ only Snapshots
  • Writeable Snapshots as well. Think “smart-clone” technology of VDI
• Heterogeneous Migration
  • You want to migrate off that EMC, HP, 3PAR, HDS, etc – we can do it natively in our storage controllers.
• Sync/Async native IP or FC replication

So, as you can see it’s a pretty impressive list!!  And as with all new products, we will be adding new features pretty quickly so stay tuned to announcements from us around the 9000.  BUT there’s more!!  But I can’t really go into it today 🙂  Just stick around a couple of months for some even cooler stuff Gus’s team will be rolling out.   I just got back from a week in Vegas getting feed by a firehose about all the stuff we will be rolling out by the end of the year.  WOW !!  Impressive to say the least !!! 🙂

@StorageTexan ß-Follow me on Twitter

What an AWESOME last couple of months this has been at Xiotech.  In the 10 years I’ve been with Xiotech it’s incredible the amount of attention we’ve been receiving lately!!  Just to rattle off a few things, our ISE launch has been a wild success. Our Virtual View VMware/Citrix/Hyper-V plug-in has just been fantastic, not to mention we are seeing a huge uptick in VMware / Citrix prospects and resellers wanting to partner with us to help move Virtual Desktop opportunities along.  Our VERY cool iPhone App and the new High Performance ISE-NAS launch we did out at Synergy in Las Vegas in April.  I didn’t even mention that last week I was at Microsoft TechEd in New Orleans and our booth was just PACKED.  We were talking about our recent ESRP Paper around 10,000 Exchange users in 3U of space.  Seems that Microsoft just LOVES DAS and we just happen to have a REALLY cool Storage Blade DAS solution !! 

Now, one of the cool things around the iPhone/iPad app really isn’t the App itself.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s been an awesome talking point, but it’s really around our move to CorteX which is our RESTful API.  For instance the recent business relationship that Dot Hill announced.  I think they can clearly see the advantage of RESTful API as well as our scalable Storage Blade architecture.  This opens up some really cool possibilities down the road.  So Dot Hill just validates our whole concept around RESTful API.  Commvault is running with RESTful, we are constantly talking with business partners and prospects in the “Cloud” space that want to see what they could do with our RESTful API and their widget/feature/function etc.  It sort of reminds me of the “WonderTwins” from the old “SuperFriends” days !! Then again, it could be that my 9 year old and twin 7 year olds have me feeling nostalgic as I see them watching these old school shows and I’m just reaching to find some sort of similarity 🙂

At the end of the day, I really enjoy working for a company that is just out-innovating the competition.  Applications are getting smarter and the perceived value-add of some of the traditional storage architectures are getting long in the tooth.  I truly believe that we are just a fundamentally different architecture that is just on the cusp of blasting off.  The days of monolithic or even “virtual” storage arrays are slowly going away.  Look at the success with the NetApp V-Series and some of the things coming out of EMC. 

Funny story, I was at TechEd and I had 2 different storage vendors come up to me to ask about our 5 year hardware warranty.  They kept trying to figure out what we hiding.  One even commented that they have had to change their strategy when competing with us.  They now have to add years 4 and 5 into their quote.  JUST PAINFUL for them !!

Oh well, time to get back to work.  It’s 2 weeks until the end of the quarter!!  Anyone need storage for their VDI project!!  🙂 We give you a sweet zero cost 5 year hardware warranty 24/7/365/4hr !!!  not to mention we can put about 500 to 700 Virtual Desktops in 3U of space !!!

Ahhh ya !!

@StorageTexan