EMC had announce VSPEX offering days ago. What is VSPEX? vBlock and Flexpod had been in the market for years which focus on highly integrated, tested and proven technology to bring Virtualization solution as a single solution stack to cover Networking, Storage and Compute. EMC had partnered with VMware and Cisco by offered vBlock to the market to simplify the ordering and deployment cycles to the user who want a reliable system with simple ordering method. At the same time, Netapp  had partnered with VMware and Cisco to provide Flexpod offering to the market. Flexpod are more focus in reference architecture and channel driven business by the Channel Partner. The approach is another way round if you compare vBlock with Flexpod. Client and partner have flexible choice to choose the solution.

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

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.

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.

Here is the option to turn on or off the VAAI, Value of Zero meant off, and 1 refer to ON.

CMD/s spike up to very high without VAAI while executing storage vMotion.

With VAAI, it reduce the CMD/s to < 100 per second

Performance chart been captured from vCenter for Storage vMotion with and without VAAI. Huge different shown.

In general, VAAI help to offload the workload require during storage vmotion back to the array directly and help to save more resource on the ESX host.

Here show the plug-in which integrated the the vi-client directly

The plug-in support all the EMC SAN product range from Clariion, Celerra to Symmetrix

Beside this, there are also the configuration wizard allow you to provision the datastore from the default storage pool which had been pre-assign from the SAN. The automation wizard will simplify the Datastore provisioning to the administrator. You will no longer require to rescan all HBA for every single host as the wizard will help you to do so during the provisioning process. 1 of the big improvement are the NFS datastore. Without the provision wizard, you may require log on to multiple console to export the NFS path and mount it to every single host 1 by 1, unless you do it with scripting method previously. You will no longer require to repeat the tire process of doing this as the automated wizard will help you to mount the NFS datastore to the cluster group automatically on the ESX host level.

Here is the NFS provision wizard. This is really helpful to simplify the process of NFS datastore provision on the ESX host.

The EMC plug-in is really helpful and I believe many of us will include this in our deployment in the future.

I have couple of deals dealing with Ionix before, I believe the issue here is not the owner of the products, and they should focus to improve the knowledge of the sales and technical guy to brief the partner more. No doubt, Ionix is 1 of the greatest product out of the market, but in order to success, the education pieces to partner and users are important.

I will say is an ambitious move for VMware this week towards the cloud computing. Remember Ionix suppose to release the automation and management pieces for vblock, I am not sure whether it will still continue or they are some changes going to happen soon.

You can refer to the official link here for more information.

Beside unified storage, we are looking forward for unified computing system for the server compute platform too. Cisco had moved ahead of their competitor to bring this to the world and it is 1 fo the great platform that get attraction and adoption worldwide. Cisco UCS or Nexus 5000 both provide the unified I/O capabilities and allow us to transform the data center architecture today. Beside consolidating LAN and SAN into 1 with FCoE, the more interesting capabilities that get attention by us are the switching capacity.

The Nexus 5000 or UCS 6140 switches supported up to 1.14 Tbits/s and this number are more than enough to consolidate all the necessary traffic it need to be delivered by the LAN & SAN. If you have this solution in place today and well integrated with the unified storage as well as the core networking environment, you can easily choose to run NAS, ISCSI or FC through the same Unified frabics and Unified Storage you have. As everyone know, there are no perfect solution or protocol for every scenario, but now, you will able to choose the right protocol for every different computing system, application and database requirement without implementing separate ISCSI, NFS or FC physical infrastructure.

This is a nice picture to summarize the description about Unified Platform which I get it from http://viewyonder.com