Breathing Data

This may seem obvious to some readers but I haven’t seen a good list of considerations to help ensure a successful PoC project.  Here are some training wheels to make sure you don’t crash and burn.

1. Lack of requirements – All key stakeholders involved should sign off on a detailed requirements document.  It doesn’t have to be in blood, an email response with a “yes” will suffice unless there are contractual obligations.  I hear, “We just want to see if it will work” all the time.  When you’re doing a PoC, be as specific as possible in defining “IT”.  Unless a solution is completely unbaked, think about how you would envision it working in your environment.  Talk to people and ask them how it works in their environment as you come up with requirements.  Be as transparent as possible with the vendor so there is no hidden agenda or confusion.
2. Lack of a leader – Designate a lead. I’d be rich if I got a nickel for every PoC that failed because of a lack of a leader.  You need someone to keep track of the requirements, vendor involvement and testing.  PoC’s are easy to get lost in the fray because there aren’t obvious penalties for the customer who doesn’t see a PoC through. Conditional PO’s instead of freebie PoC’s are becoming more common.
3. Lack of experience with the product – Let the vendor show you how a product was meant to be used.  If you’ve never touched a product before, why would you want to run a PoC all by yourself?  Seriously, your parents had to teach you how to velcro your shoes.  Which leads me to the next point that comes after someone says “We couldn’t get it to work this way so we tried X, Y and Z”.
4. No documentation – Document your setup and any changes as they’re made. There are a ton of variables in your environment, document them.  I can’t stress this enough.  First make sure you deployed the product according to best practices.  If you need exceptions then run them by someone who knows what they’re doing and note them.
5. Not asking for help – If you must, call and allow time for help. Yes, you might anger someone but it’s worth calling in for help before declaring a project a failure.  I can’t promise that a white knight will come in and save the day as the deadline for your PoC approaches but call for help anyway.

When I come in to help out with PoC’s that are in trouble in their 11th hour, two things are usually immediately apparent.  First, there was no leader or everyone went off in their own direction without accountability.  Second, there was a lack of familiarity with the product.  This list isn’t for my benefit, it’s all to help others have successful PoC’s.  If you have suggestions, send them in!

Tags: POC, srm, VMware View

Unbelievable. The image below shows an EMC Symmetrix that is still running after it fell over during the earthquake in Chile.  We don’t have many details at the moment but our team got a pic of this DMX that fell over in the 8.8 earthquake that hit Chile.

On a serious note, our hearts go out to those in Chile who have lost their lives.  Please treat this post more as utter amazement at what can happen during an earthquake from a technology perspective and not a slight at the human lives that have been lost or the hardship endured.

Some of you may know already but for those who don’t, I decided a bit ago to pursue some new challenges. I’ve joined EMC and the VMware Alliance team. My role as a systems engineer and virtualization practice lead at Network Storage, Inc has been extremely rewarding over the last 3.5 years. I got to build something from the ground up and work with some amazing colleagues and customers. I’ll be exposed to more challenges and the neat thing is being right in the middle of sales, marketing and engineering. We get to tell customers what EMC is doing but more importantly take feedback from customers and deliver it to engineering. The feedback loop is short so I encourage you to use us if there are things you need with regards to storage and virtualization that you aren’t getting.

The team I join is growing fast. Scott Lowe, Rick Scherer and John Avery have just recently announced that they’re joining the team as well. I feel honored to join a team with so many talented folks coming on board. If you’re interested in joining, let myself or one of the others know.

As others have posted regarding their blogs, this blog should not change much except for the espousing of EMC futures. Before I didn’t know much and I worked closely with Devang Panchigar but now I do know a lot more and can hint at direction but limit the specifics. I’ll continue to blog at GestaltIT.com and work with my peers just as I have in the past. I feel that independent voices are critical in the technology world. Also, this blog nor the opinions and information are mine and not EMC’s.

The GestaltIT Tech Field Day event just wrapped up and it was a very interesting event. Stephen Foskett and Claire Chaplais did a phenomenal job at keeping the wheels on the bus. I realized that the attendees were just as critical as making the event a success above and beyond the vendors. I learned so much from others who either knew more or had different perspectives. The genesis of this list comes from the question I asked myself and other attendees constantly which was, “What can we do to get deeper than a standard technical presentation or trade show booth demo.”

1. Ask yourself what you want out of it – Remember, some of your attendees have never heard of you but many know some of your pitch already. Figure out what you want to get out of the event ahead of time and ask yourself if attendees will walk away talking about your presentations the way you wanted them to.

2. Cover the basics and then get into the weeds – We love the weeds. Some of us do anyway. It shows us you know what you’re talking about. It separates you from your competition. Tell us your strengths and weaknesses. We are more effective when we are armed with more information.

3. Bring your best people - You want to bring your best and brightest because there will be people (like me) who will grind into the details. 3Par and Ocarina brought their rockstars and it was apparent to each and every attendee. They knew their stuff and didn’t push questions aside.

4. Think and re-think your demo or hands-on labs - Some of the ones we experienced were great but others weren’t effective. Demos and labs that cover the basics *aren’t* always the best. People who are following the event will say, “I could’ve done that. Show me something new and different.” Remember, some of us love the CLI and others could care less. Make sure your activity will keep people engaged. Data Robotics did this very well but a big reason is because their technology is *different*. They understood how to deliver an experience much like Steve Jobs and Apple does. Their CEO even did a whiteboard of their technology and he got into the weeds.

5. There is never enough time - Almost all the vendors were a bit over schedule. Don’t try to cram too much in if it won’t fit or get a bigger timeslot. Many vendors had this happen but kudos to them for rolling right through.

Remember that you will get both good and bad feedback but being in tune with your audience is what matters. The rules above are not a guaranteed recipe for successful but they’ll give you a good start. They are universal and apply whenever you are pitching anything, not just during a Tech Field Day event. Stephen will be posting the videos of the sessions, watch them and learn from what worked and what didn’t.

Tags: 3PAR, Bhava, Data Robotics, fiverules, HP, MDS Micro, Nirvanix, ocarina, Tech Day, Tech Field Day, TechValidate, Truth in IT, vmware, Xsigo

I was invited as an “influencer” to attend the 2009 Microsoft Professional Developer’s Conference by Brian Prince.  This is my first PDC and I’m absolutely stoked to be here.  The event is important because it is the official launch of Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform.

In case you don’t know what Azure is, here’s a description from Microsoft’s web site:

The Windows Azure platform offers an intuitive, reliable and powerful platform for the creation of web applications and services.

The Windows Azure platform is comprised of Windows Azure: an operating system as a service; SQL Azure: a fully relational database in the cloud; and .NET Services: consumable web-based services that provide both secure connectivity and federated access control for applications.

Currently in Community Technology Preview (CTP), the services are free to evaluate through January 2010. We will begin charging customers on February 1st, 2010.

I’m excited to be a part of such a big event for Microsoft. One thing that seems to be consistent is that this is not your dad’s Microsoft. Their cloud group started with twenty engineers and has ramped up over the last couple of years.

Like I’ve done in the past, here’s a “What I want out of PDC09″ list. If there’s something you would like out of PDC, feel free to leave a comment or e-mail me.

1. Get the latest updates on the Azure stack
2. Understand the limitations and where different services are best used
3. See how Azure addresses challenges like deployment, scaling, security and private cloud integration
4. Understand how Microsoft is making their software cloud-aware
5. Talk to more people using Azure and see examples of how they are using it

Much of it is cloud-focused because I spend a bit of my time running Indy Cloud Users and involved with CloudCamp. It has been awhile since I’ve spent time with developers so I’m sure I will be learning a lot. I’ve been impressed with the dynamic nature of the company and individuals like Brian who deliver the message about what Microsoft is doing.

Tags: azure, cloud, microsoft, pdc

The GestaltIT Tech Field Day is upon us… Stephen Foskett has put together an amazing event. The GestaltIT authors and other peers coming together to listen to the interesting things that some vendors are doing.  It’ll be held out in Silicon Valley from November 12th-13th.

Why is this important?  Because it will give attendees some good hands-on experiences with the products and not just marketcture slides.

We’ll all be blogging about the event and also tweeting with the #techfieldday hash tag on twitter.

Here are the sponsors:

Supporting sponsors for portions of the event:

Here’s the official blurb from the GestaltIT.com site.

Today, we are pleased to demonstrate an expanded vision by announcing the first-ever Gestalt IT event, Tech Field Day! We will be bringing many of our own authors as well as other like-minded folks to Silicon Valley on November 12 and 13, 2009 for a live, in-person event. We have invited some of the most interesting and innovative companies to sponsor the event, presenting their technology and products.

This is not a trade show, a junket, or an analyst day. Rather, the participating sponsors will be engaging the attendees, inviting feedback, and fostering open communication. We were inspired by HP’s series of Tech Days and wanted to broaden the concept, bringing in more products and a broader range of technologies. We also liked the idea of creating and managing a similar event as an independent third party.

Tags: 3PAR, Bhava, Data Robotics, HP, MDS Micro, Nirvanix, ocarina, Tech Day, Tech Field Day, TechValidate, Truth in IT, vmware, Xsigo

It’s official… Data deduplication has been added to ZFS (read the link if you’re new to data deduplication). Hats off to Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore who did a ton of the work in addition to Mark Maybee, Matt Ahrens, Adam Leventhal, George Wilson and the entire ZFS team.  The implementation is a synchronous block-level one which deduplicates data immediately as it is written.  This is analogous as to how DataDomain does it in their dedupe appliances.

What’s interesting about this is now dedupe will be available for *free* unless Oracle does something stupid.  Sun’s implementation is complimentary to the already-existing filesystem compression.  I’m not sure how much of an issue this is yet but the current iteration can not take advantage of SHA256 acceleration in the SPARC Niagara2 CPUs but eventually we should see hardware acceleration implemented.

When will it be available? It should be available in the Opensolaris dev branches in the next couple of weeks as code was just committed to be part of snv_128.  General available in Solaris 10 will take a bit longer until the next update happens.

For OpenSolaris, you change your repository and switch to the development branches – should be available to public in about 3-3.5 weeks time.  Plenty of instructions on how to do this on the net and in this list.  — James Lever on the zfs-discuss mailing list

How do I use it? If you haven’t built an Opensolaris box before, you should start looking at this great blog post here.  I wouldn’t get things rolling until dedupe is in the public release tree.

Ah, finally, the part you’ve really been waiting for.

If you have a storage pool named ‘tank’ and you want to use dedup, just type this:

zfs set dedup=on tank

That’s it.

Like all zfs properties, the ‘dedup’ property follows the usual rules for ZFS dataset property inheritance. Thus, even though deduplication has pool-wide scope, you can opt in or opt out on a per-dataset basis.

– Jeff Bonwick http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/en_US/entry/zfs_dedup#comments

What does this mean to me? Depends.  For people who like to tinker, you can build your own NAS or iSCSI server with dedupe *and* compression turned on.  Modern CPUs keep increasing in speed and can handle this.  This is huge.  Now, should you abandon considering commercial dedupe appliances that are shipping today?  Not if you want a solution for production as this won’t be officially supported until it’s rolled into the next Solaris update.  For commercial dedupe technology vendors, this is another mark on the scorecard for the commoditization of dedupe.

What things do I need to be aware of? The bugs need to be worked out of this early on so apply standard caution.  READ JEFF’s BLOG POST FIRST!!! There is a verification feature, use it if you’re either worried about your data or using fletcher-4 as a hashing algorithm to speed up dedupe performance (zfs set dedup=verify tank or zfs set dedup=fletcher4,verify tank).

How do I stay up to date on ZFS in general? Subscribe to the zfs-discuss mailing list (also in forum format).  It can be high volume but it is worth it if you want to stay on top of all things zfs.

Tags: deduplication, nas, zfs

Simon Seagrave (http://www.techhead.co.uk/) asked, “How long do you think it’ll be before SSD will overtake SCSI as primary tier 1 SAN storage? Giving a new SSD and SATA tiered mix.”

Short answer: Yes, it will be SSDs + SAS and within 2 years.

The real quesion is when 15K RPM highspeed drives will be replaced with SSDs and 7.2K RPM high capacity drives.  SAS will probably end up replacing both FC and SATA in the majority of mid-range storage but the jury is still out on if this will happen in high-end arrays.

What are we talking about here? From an array design perspective, frequently accessed blocks of data should be served from ram and SSD.  SSDs have a much faster response time (microseconds vs. milliseconds) than traditional hard disk drives which enable this possibility.  The Sun Unified Storage platform was one of the first platforms to do this all in one array with their Hybrid Storage Pool design.  There are also some new appliances coming out like the Xcelasan from Dataram.  NetApp offers read accelerationt through their PAM 1 (Performance Acceleration Modules).  EMC will also start the transition at the LUN level with their implementation of FAST as described by Devang Panchigar.  This list is not meant to be comprehensive as I’m sure I have left out vendors and their roadmaps.

When will this happen? I expect the majority of storage vendors to implement this type of solution at the block level within the next 2 years based on current development cycles from most major storage vendors.  It will take some longer than others because of their architectures. It will be a key differentiating feature between vendors.  Beyond basic tiering between SSDs and high capacity disks we should see more advanced algorithms on what data and where to move it to.  I’ve followed journey of Sun’s ZFS  on the zfs-discuss mailing lists over the last year and have noticed that peculiar performance behaviors happen (write-pulsing) have required fine-tuning.

Tags: compellent, efd, emc, netapp, ssd, tiering, zfs

EMC’s Unified Storage and Tiering blogpost @ GestaltIT.com:

Over the last week or two Devang Panchigar (@storagenerve) and I have been collaborating on a post at GestaltIT.com regarding EMC’s storage strategy.  If you have read it already, great but if you haven’t yet there are a couple of things to remember while reading.  First, Devang and I do not have any insight into EMC beyond their public statements and ideas our peers have discussed.  Second, we’re not endorsing their potential strategy over anyone elses but merely stating that it is a step in the right direction.

Hopefully over the next couple of months we’ll continue the posts about other vendors and next-gen storage infrastructure which should serve to enlighten people on where companies appear to be going.

So again if you haven’t read our post, take a look and give us some feedback.

Oracle & VMware and Dell/Perot:

This week I was invited yet again to participate in the StorageMonkeys Infosmack Podcast #21 by the gracious Greg Knieriemen and Marc Farley.  Steve Kenniston, Storage Technologist at EMC and blogger at BackupAndBeyond.com, was also a guest on the show.  I always enjoy talking with Steve because of his experience in the industry and how knowledgeable he is from multiple perspectives.  As always, Greg and Marc do a great job of getting good discussion going.  We discussed the Oracle and VMware spat going on as well as the Dell/Perot acquisition.  If you haven’t had a chance to go listen, go do so now!  Oracle seems insistent on locking people in and Dell is going after the services business with Perot.

Desktop virtualization is one of the hottest topics of interest and a major initiative of many companies. Touted benefits include lower operating costs, simpler management and desktop mobility. Below we’ll explore what the barriers to wide-scale adoption of desktop virtualization solutions are and some approaches to deal with them. It’s not a fit for everyone in a company but it can be for many.

Challenge #1: Assuming desktop virtualization makes sense because thin clients are cheap - Many people assume that virtualizing desktops is going to be magnitudes cheaper because thin clients can be found for approximately $300-400 whereas a PC can cost $500-$1200.

Tip: Client costs are only part of the picture. Desktop virtualization can reduce capital expenditures but do not expect that to be the case in the first year. Building the infrastructure is expensive (storage, servers, licenses, etc.) and may be the same in the first year. Think about using existing PCs as clients instead of replacing them with thin clients. Thin clients are cheaper than PCs but the reduction in hardware costs may not be seen for a couple of years due to the infrastructure needing to be built. More importantly, operational expenses will be seen immediately and that is where the true cost savings can be found.

Challenge #2: Infrastructure people not understanding the desktop people - Server ops are not the same as desktop ops. Users have different behaviors and expectations on how their desktops will function. It is easy to virtualize a windows desktop but delivering what the user expects is not easy.

Tip: Understand your users and identify your use cases - Learn what apps users need to use, how they use them, where they use them and what they expect. Do your users need different apps depending on their physical location? Do they need dual monitors or multimedia acceleration? How should you deliver user profiles? Is printing going to be an issue? Spend a bit of time identifying and categorizing your use cases so you can design your solution around them.

Challenge #3: Bad desktop practices follow into the virtual world - Refreshing desktops will not be any easier if you allow users to install their own applications or store data with a desktop image. Not ensuring good security policies (screensaver locking and passwords) may leave desktops unprotected as users go from office to kiosk.

Tip: Identify unhealthy desktop practices and change what is feasible (in phases) - Start thinking about what makes managing desktops difficult today. If users don’t absolutely need to install their own apps, set policies that stop that behavior. Storage space, desktop refreshes and manageability will all be improved. If security is lax, improve it by doing basic things like auto-locking displays so someone can’t hijack a desktop left logged in.

Challenge #4: Not understanding Microsoft licensing - Microsoft bars OEM licenses from being transferred and they also require VECD (Virtual Enterprise Centralized Desktops) for all Windows desktops that are virtualized. There are additional per seat licenses from VMware and other desktop virtualization vendors.

Tip: Understand the licensing before starting a pilot - At the time of this writing, VECD is a device-based subscription and is $23/seat for SA (Software Assurance) or $110/device/year. An example from Microsoft’s website:

For example, a company with 10 thin clients and 10 laptops (not covered under SA) accessing a VDI environment requires a total of 20 Windows VECD licenses (20 x $110/year). However, if the same company has 10 thin clients and 10 laptops covered under SA, it will require 10 VECD licenses (10 x $110/year) and 10 VECD for SA licenses (10 x $23/year).

Challenge #5: Poor virtual desktop performance - The two biggest challenges after the ops piece is sizing and end-point selection. The desktops take a long time to boot up and flash video is choppy. There are new limitations in a virtual environment that were nonexistent when everyone had their own PC.

Tip: Work with a partner who can help size and architect a system - This is critical because of all the variables involved. Design is dictated by many of the answers to challenge #2. Also, end-points (thin clients, PCs, web-based access) all are unique in the user experience they deliver. If Youtube video is important, get an endpoint that specifically accelerates adobe flash. If users are far and network latency is high, either deploy WAN accelerators from companies like Riverbed or Cisco or use thin clients like Sunray’s from Sun Microsystems.

Desktop virtualization is still rapidly changing. The challenges and tips above are not an inclusive or exclusive list. They are meant to prompt some thought before jumping in if you want a higher probability of success. Don’t take on too much at once, do things in phases. As always, feedback is welcome.