Today, EMC had launch the VSPEX offering to address the channel market which provide more flexible choice to the partner and users to be considered in smaller scale deployment. vBlock will still be positioned as large scale deployment due to the density of the architecture are design to fit in for different environment.

Below is the high level summary of EMC VSPEX

• VSPEX Is Simple – VSPEX Proven Infrastructures deliver predictable performance that significantly reduces the planning, sizing and configuration burdens of adopting private cloud or end-user computing environments. In addition, EMC’s validation of the VSPEX configuration greatly reduces deployment time. Finally, tight alignment with Windows Server Hyper-V and VMware vSphere cloud infrastructure provide customers a single point of management using System Center for Microsoft cloud and VMware vCenter™ Operations Management Suite for private cloud deployments.
• VSPEX Is Efficient – Built on EMC’s award-winning VNX™ and VNXe™ unified storage systems and Avamar® and Data Domain® next-generation backup products, VSPEX provides customers with unmatched levels of efficiency. Leveraging technologies such as data deduplication, compression and Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST), customers can expect to significantly lower operational costs. By integrating these technologies tightly with the hypervisor and end-user computing environments, customers can also benefit from simpler administration and lower management costs.
• VSPEX Is Flexible – VSPEX allows customers to combine their choice of industry-leading server, network, and virtualization technologies into a proven infrastructure validated by EMC and built on a highly flexible EMC storage and backup infrastructure. Additionally, the customer’s channel partner of choice – who understands the specific customer’s requirements – can customize VSPEX to meet their needs.

For details information, you can refer to the official link from EMC

Hitachi Data Systems announces the availability of specific integration for VMware’s vCenter called “Hitachi Storage
Manager for VMware vCenter”. Hitachi, Ltd. and Hitachi Data Systems jointly developed this functionality in which this will
be installed as a separate plug-in for VMware vCenter. Customers upgrading to vSphere 4.1 and vSphere 5.0 using the
Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage 2000, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform or Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V will
automatically be able to leverage the capabilities of this key integration.

The Hitachi Storage Manager plug-in for vCenter supports both:

• VMware vSphere 4.1 and vCenter 4.1
• VMware vSphere 5.0 and vCenter 5.0

Key features of the plug in include:

• Provisioning of new datastores into the AMS2000 (VSP and USP-V in a future release)
• Capacity utilization for datastores
• Provide a self-service solution that allows customers vSphere administrators to easily manage Hitachi storage through the vCenter Console.
• Enable Joint Customers of VMware and Hitachi Data Systems to provide an end-to-end solution for management of their VMware Infrastructure on Hitachi Storage.
• Close a key integration and competitive gap that other Vendors have existing vCenter integrations.
• Correlation between VMware datastores, ESX hosts, virtual machines and storage resources on the AMS2000, VSP and USP-V systems

Please refer to http://www.hds.com/go/vmware or any local HDS representative for more information about Hitachi Storage Manager Plugin for VMware vCenter.

Related posts:

1. VMware vSphere 4.1 Update 1 on SQL 2008 R2
2. Purple screen for ESX host during vSphere 5 Upgrade

I found some very good post over the internet, you can refer the URL below for more information about the new update provided in Firmware 1.4

Unified Computing Blog

M. Sean McGee

What is unified storage?

A single platform support multi-protocol such as FC, ISCSI, NFS, CIFS, FCoE and etc. It also support file, volume and block level data access.

You will able to get the unified box from either Netapp, EMC and HDS in the market now.

Well, seems like all the major storage players are aligned and agreed with the Unified Storage architecture now. Let’s share some of my personal experiences here. For my pass experience as an end users, I had met up with numbers of Storage experts from different principle. I often received those comments as Unified storage will slow down the performance, not efficient and they are not block base solution from multiple experts. No right or wrong for what they had commented, but with the storage trend today, they may need to reconsider the statements they had put in front to the customers previously.

Personal opinion, the storage transformation majority are caused by Virtualization and cloud computing as you could easily decide the protocol or methodology for different deployment, which had forced the storage vendor to re-consider their approach for SAN offer to support unified protocol in single platform.

Today I had read through Virtual Geek blog about the exciting new product range coming soon in the near future with scale out architecture more than 100 cores for CPUs in storage controllers and more than 1000 Drives in total which call VNX. You can read more details from here. I am absolutely excited about this new product range which will transform the traditional mid-range or enterprise storage to the next level.

You can view the Official VMware Documentation from here.

Today, on SAN business, they rely on the OEM partner EMC, which also direct compete with many of the EMC partner at the same time. Equallogic became 2nd option to offer to DELL customers, but we do not see huge pickup in large enterprise environment due to limited protocol supported in single platform, as we are heading to UNIFIED Storage era. Overall, I think this could be visionary bid for DELL to move forward to offer more option to their customers.

View the full reports from here.

Traditional legacy or standalone environment, we often realize there are many solutions perform replication from primary data center to DR center via host base, storage base or image base replication. All of them has the pros & cons depend what is the objective of the specified DR project users are looking at. DR consistency and usability during DR scenario & practices always the biggest challenge in every IT department today.

In virtual environment, hypervisor will encapsulate the entire virtual system in to multiple files. These files are usually located on the Shared storage environment & replicated across to DR center via storage replication. Of course, this solution are come with a cost, may not apply to every environment. Well, my intention is to compare the simplicity of DR in virtual compare to physical environment. Since everything are on SAN or NAS in virtual environment, everything could had just taken care by the storage and replicated over to DR center. With VMware Site Recovery Manager solution, extra management capability had built in allow users to predefine the DR policy to ensure VMs are ready to production in DR scenario. The entire state of the virtual machine include operating system, application data, and databases are fully replicated across to DR center in this case.

In physical environment, we always had challenges to maintain consistency on the operating system & application, which may not running on SAN, unless all systems are on SAN boot environment without local hard drive. Due to complexity and cost concerns, not many of the enterprise IT today will have SAN boot environment. For anything is not on SAN, may require 3rd party solution or customize solutions to ensure consistency over the DR.

A re-design or DR solution due to virtualization adoption, may bring more benefits to the IT and business unit by reducing the complexity compare to the physical environment.

As I know EMC have EMC Storage Viewer, EMC Celera SRM Failback Tool & EMC Celera SRM Failback Tool and NetApp have Rapid Cloning Utility (RCU), Virtual Storage Console (VSC), SnapManager® for Virtual Infrastructure & SANScreen® VMInsight vCenter Plugin. I’m not going to discuss about the vCenter plugin features here.

Does vSphere admin really need VMware vCenter Storage Plugin?

For most of the company, they have many IT teams such as network team, storage team, server team or vSphere team. Imagine if you were part of the vSphere or Storage admin team, do you think vSphere admin team should overwrite storage guy job? Frankly speaking, these kinds of politics already happen in many companies today. VMware did a good job by having VAAI API enable. The storage guys should focus on their storage and vSphere admin should focus on their VM environment.

Personally I’m not familiar with most of the VMware vCenter Storage Plugin. Do you think VMware vCenter Storage related plugins is a must? What is the benefit or advantage? Do you think storage vendor should keep working on this? What do you think?

General de-duplication solution:

1. Primary SAN de-duplication
2. Appliance target base de-duplication
3. Host base de-duplication
4. Software base de-duplication

I may had missed out some of them, but these should cover majority of the de-deduplication solution in the market today.

Primary SAN de-duplication allow dedupe happens on the primary SAN,  where most of the active data were stored. This should be the highest cost / GB that running in your environment.  Primary SAN de-dupe happen on Netapp and EMC storage today. While both claim they are doing de-duplication, you may need to take note the block base de-dedupe and file base de-dupe are different approach.

Primary SAN de-dupe allow you to achieve disk space saving up to 50% or more, especially in virtualization environment. As we all are familiar with the virtual machine deployment, most of the virtual machines are usually cloned or deploy from the standard template, which will contains numbers of duplicated block data on the primary storage. De-duplication allow administrator to re-claim more space from the primary SAN, and reduce the TCO of overall virtualization strategy. I will suggest de-dupe to be enable for virtualization deployment and exclude the volume or LUN that require high I/O performance especially for Databases.

Appliance base de-deuplication – example Data Domain VTL, Quantum VTL and etc. These solution will be more specified to backup and recovery. As an example, it allows users to perform daily full backup with minimal disk space consumption with de-deduplication on virtual tape library. This is not on primary SAN as your VTL are not the primary SAN where the data are stored

Host base de-duplication – Avamar. This is another great solution in the market; allow data to be de-dupe before process over for local or remote backup. As an example, it will allow users to minimize the bandwidth requirement for remote office or location, and centralize manage the backup and recovery on primary data center.

Software base de-duplication which allows users to convert direct attach, NAS, tape or SAN attach storage, to be target base deduplication machine. This is heavily relying on the management software to perform the data de-duplication and not the hardware appliance itself.

No right or wrong, just to share the different in general how you should consider about de-duplication solution today in the market. Each of them has the unique position in the market for different perspective.