• First up was a dual controller, dual processors per controller 8 core processing chips (32cores in all) running against an all SSD backend. The configuration was up for a short time but it seemed like 96 SSDs, so an all-flash VNX array.  They used Iometer, random-8KB IO to drive almost 975K IOPS at sub-msec. response time. They hit 1M IOPS with just slightly above 1 msec. response time. You could see the processor utilization of the 32 cores going up as the workload reached higher levels.  Couldn’t see precisely but all the cores were running at ~70-80% busy at the 1Miops level and it seemed like the system performance was entering the knee-of-the-curve
• Next up was the new VNX data app store demonstration. Similar to iPhone and Android App stores. EMC has identified a select set of apps that can be run directly on VNX hardware. The current demonstration had two versions of anti-virus, Recover Point Virtual Appliance (vRPA), (v?)VPLEX, CloudAccess and MySQL server.  The engineers showed how AV software could be installed and be running on the VNX as well as how vRPA could be installed and provide onboard replication services.
• Then, they demonstrated a VNX virtual appliance (vVNX?) which was able to run on white box server which I think was running ESX.  In this case, vVNX was running with onboard DAS storage but had all the advanced functionality of VNX
• Finally, they showed a vVNX running in a cloud services environment. Not sure if this was VMware vCloud or some other compute cloud but Rich stated that they will support many clouds.  With vVNX running in the cloud accessing storage behind the compute engine it’s unclear what the performance would be and how one would access the storage (file or iSCSI no doubt) but it did open up new possibilities as to where one could run VNX services.

It’s readily apparent that the next iteration of VNX software seems focused on taking advantage of multi-core processing (called MCx) to boost storage system performance, providing a virtualized environment within the VNX engine to run specialized data services and supplying a new vVNX functionality which can be deployed just about anywhere you would want.

That’s all for the public sessions, spent much of the rest of the day in NDA sessions.

I had a good time at EMCworld 2013, seeing old friends again and meeting new ones and thank EMC for inviting me.  For information on previous days at EMCworld 2013 please see my Day 1 and Day 2 posts.

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Post tags: EMC, EMC Unified Storage Division, EMC USD, EMCworld 2013, VNX data app store, vRPA, vVNX

Mainly they will use Pivotal, VMware, RSA and their software defined storage (SDS) product to go after the 3rd platform applications.  Pivotal becomes the main enabler to help companies gain value out of the mobile-social networking-cloud computing data deluge.  SDS helps provide the different pathways for companies to access all that data. VMware provides the software defined data center (SDDC) where SDS, server virtualization and software defined networking (SDN) live, breathe and interoperate to provide services to applications running in the data center.

Joe started talking about the federation of EMC companies. These include EMC, VMware, RSA and now Pivotal. He sees these four brands as almost standalone entities whose identities will remain distinct and seperate for a long time to come.

Joe mentioned the internet of things or the sensor cloud as opening up new opportunities for data gathering and analysis that dwarfs what’s coming from mobile today. He quoted IDC estimates that says by 2020 there will be 200B devices connected to the internet, today there’s just 2 to 3B devices connected.

Pivotal’s debut

Paul Maritz, Pivotal CEO got up and took us through the Pivotal story. Essentially they have three components a data fabric, an application development fabric and a cloud fabric. He believes the mobile and internet of things will open up new opportunities for organizations to gain value from their data wherever it may lie, that goes well beyond what’s available today. These activities center around consumer grade technologies  which 1) store and reason over very large amounts of data; 2) use rapid application development; and 3) operate at scale in an entirely automated fashion.

He mentioned that humans are a serious risk to continuous availability. Automation is the answer to the human problem for the “always on”, consumer grade technologies needed in the future.

Parts of Pivotal come from VMware, Greenplum and EMC with some available today in specific components. However by YE they will come out with Pivotal One which will be the first framework with data, app development and cloud fabrics coupled together.

Paul called Pivotal Labs as the special forces of his service organization helping leading tech companies pull together the awesome apps needed for the technology of tomorrow, consisting of Extreme programming, Agile development and very technically astute individuals.  Also, CETAS was mentioned as an analytics-as-a-service group providing such analytics capabilities to gaming companies doing log analysis but believes there’s a much broader market coming.

Paul also showed some impressive numbers on their new Pivotal HD/HAWQ offering which showed it handled many more queries than Hive and Cloudera/Impala. In essence, parts of Pivotal are available today but later this year the whole cloud-app dev-big data framework will be released for the first time.

Next up was a media-analyst event where David Goulden, EMC President and COO gave a talk on where EMC has come from and where they are headed from a business perspective.

Then he and Joe did a Q&A with the combined media and analyst community.  The questions were mostly on the financial aspects of the company rather than their technology, but there will be a more focused Q&A session tomorrow with the analyst community.

Joe was asked about Vblock status. He said last quarter they announced it had reached a $1B revenue run rate which he said was the fastest in the industry.  Joe mentioned EMC is all about choice, such as Vblock different product offerings, VSpex product offerings and now with ViPR providing more choice in storage.

Sometime today Joe had mentioned that they don’t really do custom hardware anymore.  He said of the 13,000 engineers they currently have ~500 are hardware engineers. He also mentioned that they have only one internally designed ASIC in current shipping product.

Then Paul got up and did a Q&A on Pivotal.  He believes there’s definitely an opportunity in providing services surrounding big data and specifically mentioned CETAS as offering analytics-as-a-service as well as Pivotal Labs professional services organization.  Paul hopes that Pivotal will be $1B revenue company in 5yrs.  They already have $300M so it’s well on its way to get there.

Next, there was a very interesting media and analyst session that was visually stimulating from Jer Thorp, co-founder of The Office for Creative Research. And about the best way to describe him is he is a data visualization scientist.

He took some NASA Kepler research paper with very dry data and brought it to life. Also he did a number of analyzes of public Twitter data and showed twitter user travel patterns, twitter good morning analysis, twitter NYT article Retweetings, etc.  He also showed a video depicting people on airplanes around the world. He said it is a little known fact but over a million people are in the air at any given moment of the day.

Jer talked about the need for data ethics and an informed data ownership discussion with people about the breadcrumbs they leave around in the mobile connected world of today. If you get a chance, you should definitely watch his session.

Next Juergen Urbanski, CTO T-Systems got up and talked about the importance of Hadoop to what they are trying to do. He mentioned that in 5 years, 80% of all new data will land on Hadoop first.  He showed how Hadoop is entirely different than what went before and will take T-Systems in vastly new directions.

Next up at EMCworld main hall was Pat Gelsinger, VMware CEO’s keynote on VMware.  The story was all about Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) and the components needed to make this happen.   He said data was the fourth factor of production behind land, capital and labor.

Pat said that networking was becoming a barrier to the realization of SDDC and that they had been working on it for some time prior to the Nicera acquisition. But now they are hard at work merging the organic VMware development with Nicera to create VMware NSX a new software defined networking layer that will be deployed as part of the SDDC.

Pat also talked a little bit about how ViPR and other software defined storage solutions will provide the ease of use they are looking for to be able to deploy VMs in seconds.

Pat demo-ed a solution specifically designed for Hadoop clusters and was able to configure a hadoop cluster with about 4 clicks and have it start deploying. It was going to take 4-6 minutes to get it fully provisioned so they had a couple of clusters already configured and they ran a pseudo Hadoop benchmark on it using visual recognition and showed how Vcenter could be used to monitor the cluster in real time operations.

Pat mentioned that there are over 500,000 physical servers running Hadoop. Needless to say VMware sees this as a prime opportunity for new and enhanced server virtualization capabilities.

That’s about it for the major keynotes and media sessions from today.

Tomorrow looks to be another fun day.

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Post tags: Big data, Hadoop, Pivotal, SDDC, SDN, Software Defined Data Center, Software Defined Networking, VMware

Spent the morning in Analyst sessions mostly under NDA but it seems safe to say that EMC sees plenty of opportunity ahead.

The first session Q&A with BRS executives and customers was enlightening but the main message from the customers was that data protection is hard, legacy systems often can’t adjust quick enough and sometimes a completely new architecture is warranted. The executives were upbeat about current BRS business and where they were headed in the future.

Rest of the morning was with Jeremy Burton EVP Product, Operations and Marketing and John Roese, the new SVP and CTO of EMC (6 months on the job). Jeremy talked about an IDC insight that there’s a new world emerging so-called 3rd platform applications based on mobile and consumer grade technology  with literally billions of users, millions of apps built on mobile-cloud-bigdata-social infrastructure which complements the 2nd platform built on lan/wan, client server frameworks.

For an example of this environment Jeremy mentioned that AT&T provisions 12PB of storage a month.

What’s needed for this new platform is a new type of storage built for the 3rd platform but taking advantage of current enterprise storage characteristics.  This is ViPR (more on that later)

John comes by way of Huawei, Nortel and myriad others and offers a broad insight to the way forward for EMC. It looks like a bright future ahead if they can do half of what John has outlined.

John talked about the intersections between the carrier market (or services), enterprise IT and consumer market.  There is convergence between these regions and at each of these intersections new technology is going to answer many of the problems which exist. For instance in the carrier space:

• The amount of information they gather is frightening they know everything about you. Pivotal will be the key here because its good at 1) ability to correlate information across different information sources. Most carriers have a whole bunch of disparate information stores; and 2) It’s not just focused on Big Data as a non-realtime problem but also provides realtime analytics as well.
• Capital costs are going down but $/bits are going way down.  VMware & Software defined data center is the right way to drive down costs.  Today servers are ~50% virtualized but networking is not virtualized at all.
• Customers are dissatisfied with service providers (carriers).  Again Pivotal is key here. One carrier customer was focused on customer churn and tried to figure out how to minimize this. They used  Gemfire’ high speed infrastructure that could watchc all transactions on cell tower infrastructure pick out dropped calls, send it to Greenplum and correlate this with the customer attributes (good or bad), and within 100msec supply an interaction with the customer in to apologize and offer some services to make it better.
• Internet is the new wild west –use at your own risk,  spoofing websites, respond to email could be anyone, chaos to security. RSA can become the trusted internet provider by looking at the internet holistically, combining information from many customers, aggregating and sharing these interactions to deterimine the trust of every transaction. Trust is becoming a new big data problem.
• Hybrid and public cloud is their biggest opportunity but they don’t know how to attack it. VMware and SDDC will evolve to provide orchestrated movement from private to public and closed to open.

The thinking seems pretty straightforward given what they are trying to accomplish and the framework he applied to EMC’s strategy going forward made a lot of sense.

Brian Gallagher did a keynote on enterprise storage new functions and features which covered VMAX, VPLEX, RecoverPoint, and XtremIO/SF/SW. Mentioned RecoverPoint virtual appliance and sort of a statement of direction on being able to move application functionality directly on VMAX. He kind of demoed this with VPLEX running on VMAX.

He also talked about FAST speed of reaction versus the competition, mentioned that FAST provides information about the storage tiering to up to 4 different VMAX arrays. Showed a comparison of VMAX 10K against another prime competitor that looked downright embarrassing.  And talked about VMAX cloud edition.

After that 1 on 1 meetings all under strict NDA. But then the big Keynote with Jeremy again and David Goulden President and COO on ViPR. They have implemented software defined storage (SDS).  Last week I did a post on SDS trying to layout some of the problems and promises of SDS (please see The promise of SDS post).

But what I missed was the data path transformation that ViPR can do to provide object and HDFS access to traditional and commodity storage systems.  ViPR starts out primarily in the control layer providing automated provisioning, self management, across heterogeneous storage pools. With ViPR one can define virtual storage arrays and then configure virtual storage pools across those arrays regardless of the physical infrastructure underneath them.

More on ViPR in a separate post but suffice it to say EMC has been working on this for awhile now. But how it’s positioned with VPLEX and the other storage virtualization capabilities in VMAX and other products is another matter. But it seems they are carving out a space for ViPR between and above the current storage solutions.

End of day one is in the Expo and then cocktail parties… stay tuned for day 2.

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Post tags: EMC, EMC RecoverPoint, EMC VMAX, EMC VPLEX, EMCworld 2013