Anyone going to EMC World?

N

NetJunkie

[H]F Junkie
Joined
Mar 16, 2001
Messages
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Anyone headed to EMC World in Vegas in May? EMC asked me to attend for a special thing so it looks like I'm going to go. It's my first one so it should be fun...I'm also not speaking or anything so I have no real obligations except for probably taking customers and partners to dinner/drinks. My wife is also going to fly out on Tuesday and we're going to stay through the weekend... FUN!
 
Had a vacation already planned so not this year for me.

Looks like just VMworld 2012 and maybe Splunk this year
 
Bump. Anyone else going? Finally got my reg code yesterday and booked it. Sucks that the Venetian and Palazzo are already full. Have to stay at the Cosmo. ;)

If you go don't be surprised to see me on stage during Chad's World Live.
 
Will be interested to see if they announce a new Flare code for the VNX arrays to allow Storage Pool re-balancing. Going to suck for us if that doesn't come soon.
 
RiDDLeRThC said:
Will be interested to see if they announce a new Flare code for the VNX arrays to allow Storage Pool re-balancing. Going to suck for us if that doesn't come soon.
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It's coming. Expected Q3. Got briefed the other day. Rebalancing and mixed RAID groups in a pool. About damn time.
 
Guess that's not too bad. We can hold out till then. Mixed RAID groups will be nice too. Wonder how it would handle a 20 disk SAS RAID10 vs. a 20 disk SAS RAID5 or if it would even treat them differently.
 
I think what you'll see is mixed on disk type..so we can finally do RAID5 for SAS and RAID6 for 2TB/3TB NL-SAS. Not sure it's going to really handle mixed in the same disk type.
 
I'll be there. Staying at Harrahs.

Going to be with a whole slew of people from my company and they're having an exhibit apparently.

Netjunkie, you up for meeting up at some point?
 
So ... time to ask my manager where are the EMC World internal tickets went :p. I'd love to be there but it'll probably be a nogo :(.
 
I just received this Tweet from EMC for those that can't attend...you can attend "virtually."

https://community.emc.com/community/events/live_events?view=overview

Looking forward to some of the announcements and of course Maritz Keynote. I hope he changes it up a bit, though...:) I mean, yes Paul, we know virtual machines are taking over the world.....other than numbers, nothing has changed...lol.
 
Tucci's keynote, not that exciting, Gelsinger's, awesome! Of course i'm an infrastructure guy so of course that would be my view.
 
i love hearing emc talk about how cost effective they are, then they deliver a million dollar quote for barely 100TB usable space.
 
madrebel said:
i love hearing emc talk about how cost effective they are, then they deliver a million dollar quote for barely 100TB usable space.
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I can't believe Ferrari... $300K quote and it only has 4 wheels!

Usable capacity is not a judge of cost.
 
so, emc uses special drives made of pure unicorn horns?

they wanted 45k for a shelf of 15 3TB seagate SAS drives. 57ish for a shelf of seagate 900GB 10k. 330k for a shelf of 200GB SSDs ....i forget who they're using for those.

their margins are criminal.
 
What are you comparing them against? What you can get at Best Buy? If so..I'm sorry to say...you don't really understand what you're buying. I compete against every other storage vendor out there and EMC competes VERY well on price with everyone.

If you want to build a 100TB array using COTS parts go right ahead. You can absolutely do that, but you can't compare that to something like an EMC VNX or VMAX just like you can't compare it to the other players.
 
why can't i?

what can a vnx7500 do that i can't do with COTS+zfs?

i'm currently building an array with 192 3.5" bays. 32 of which will be 400gb SAS STEC maxIOPs, 10 800GB SAS OCZ talos R2, 240 seagate 3TB es.2 SAS (120 in another DC), 6 x zeusRAM drives fronted by active/active heads each with 512GB of ram, 6 lsi controllers, and 4 10gbE ports.

you have any idea what i would have to spend to reach that level of performance with anything from emc, netapp, or crapellent?

i've dealt with emc and netapp for years, they're shysters.
 
Then build it. :) Make sure you charge back all your time to the build/maintain process as well. Can you do FAST VP (sub-LUN auto tiering) and FAST Cache (extended read/write front-end cache) type functionality with zfs?

And honestly..run my prod environment on ANYTHING built by OCZ? hah...no.

Yes, you can absolutely build this. Plenty of people do it. But most people don't want to build/manage/support a home grown array that isn't on the HCL for anyone and doesn't integrate with a lot of other things.
 
the talos drives are for read cache, i don't care if they fail, they're cache. the 800GB drives i can get for under 2500 each giving me 8TB of read cache. at that price have a spare or two hanging around.

ARC/L2arc cache works similar to the fast system and yes, i can add or not add cache on a per pool basis. RAM always acts as a read/write cache and is system wide.

plus i can do compression through the whole stack meaning i only decompress data when i write to the wire which makes the cache even more effective. emc decompresses the moment you access the data on disk so it moves it through the cache in decompressed state.

also fast cache is only available on the 7500 ... or was that fast vp. one of those only on the 7500 and the cost is another retarded super high margin line item on top of the more expensive controller.

as for the rest, all FUD. i'm not in business to support emc's extreme margins. you can't drive your own margin that way.
 
FAST Cache and FAST VP are available on the 5300 up to the 7500. There is nothing that the 7500 can do that the 5300 can't, except for scale.

Hanging in the blogger's lounge waiting on the expo center to open...was in there earlier filming a Cisco TC Tech Minute. Should be good.
 
It's a good show. So far the sessions are "okay". As usual, not deep enough. I should probably flip over and do the TC sessions. Got an awesome room at the Cosmopolitan. Sitting out on the balcony right now directly overlooking the strip and the Ballagio. Great way to watch the fountains. :)
 
Looking forward to Maritz's keynote tomorrow.

BTW, I linked up with Chad Sakac over twitter and exchanged some emails. I sent him my information/resume and he was very helpful. Basically included some of the pre-sales mgmt team, and vSpecialist teams in my area and basically an email greet with the team leaders. I did exchange emails with the vSpecialist MGR in the NYC area so that's a good start.

I'm very hopeful something fruitful will come out of it. I'll be following up next week after EMC world.:)
 
View from the balcony:

vegas-night-small.jpg
 
We've seen it discussed several times but not as blatent as i've seen it today in Maritz's keynote. What's to become of the DC Infrastructure Engineer? I'm not saying that it's going to happen quickly, but it certainly is a priority to have a "self-healing", "self-provisioning' DC. I hate fear mongering but where does this leave us? Is it going to push our types into the application arena? I hope not. I do believe, that we need to become more understanding of applications, but I certainly have no interest in development..etc.
 
You really think all that will happen? IBM has been pushing self-healing everything forever. Infrastructure is getting more and more complex, not simpler. You can "self heal" to a point....my body self heals but doctors are still needed.

I missed the keynote this morning..had breakfast with the Varrow founders instead.

/me is now sipping a latte in the bloggers lounge....
 
NetJunkie said:
You really think all that will happen? IBM has been pushing self-healing everything forever. Infrastructure is getting more and more complex, not simpler. You can "self heal" to a point....my body self heals but doctors are still needed.
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it is already happening.
 
Anyone else having trouble with wifi? Can't connect to EMCWORLD2012 and even the 1 time I did it was unusable. Plus there are adhoc networks pretending to be EMC world wifi.
 
Child of Wonder said:
Anyone else having trouble with wifi? Can't connect to EMCWORLD2012 and even the 1 time I did it was unusable. Plus there are adhoc networks pretending to be EMC world wifi.
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For some dumbass reason they changed the SSID to EMC2012 today. There is also no Wifi on the 5th floor in the big Palazzo rooms. I've been off/on my Mifi all week to fill the gaps.
 
because everything is in flux right now. it takes lots of bodies and lots of PMs to convert from prem > hosted VDC. once converted though, all those FTEs at whoever you moved into VDC aren't required anymore.

i'm seeing a lot of that right now actually. kind of sucks working with these guys who many of them are good engineers knowing i have no place to put them and they won't be needed after the migration is done.

that is what they're talking about.

put another way, what if every fortune 1000 company today decided to get out of on prem hosting entirely. lets skip over the 'well that might not be possible for x,y,z reasons' point and just presume it could happen. in 5 years, what happens to their existing IT?

they'll still need some on site guys to fix printers, swap out zero clients, etc. those same guys can probably be taught to operate VDI well enough that day to day break fix install is handled. net management can be entirely handled by the DC partner and all the gear is either purchased with/through the DC or completely handled by the DC.

at the DC the shit just runs right. you have a few really high end guys around to run the network, storage, power etc. Those same guys likely double dip as sales engineers explaining to potential new clients why the in house tech does what it does. Below those guys you have the NOC guys who drink lots of caffeine and watch dashboards and also handle break fix/swapping of COTS failed components.

in this IaaS/cloud compute model you're either wicked smart and one of the high end guys or you're a NOC guy. there is little requirement for middle of the road.
 
You assume that there is no "next big thing" that completely destroys that model and makes the cost model unworkable. I'm not convinced by any stretch that it will happen like that AND I SELL "CLOUD" EVERY DAY. The boring/basic things will get off prem...the backup, the email...the stuff that shouldn't be taking up valuable human resources anyway.

Even as Tucci said yesterday..to which I completely agree....in 3 years there will be hundreds of thousands of private clouds...and tens of thousands of true public clouds.

We can't just assume that this utopian cloud model will happen..it won't...not for the vast majority of people for a large number of reasons. My suggestion for anyone concerned about this..get smart. Get a good mix of skill sets. Stay current. The people I see struggling are those that stick to one thing and don't constantly challenge themselves. The other people....well..they turn down two offers a week.
 
NetJunkie said:
For some dumbass reason they changed the SSID to EMC2012 today. There is also no Wifi on the 5th floor in the big Palazzo rooms. I've been off/on my Mifi all week to fill the gaps.
Click to expand...

Yeah I noticed it disappeared on level 5. Now I have no choice but to listen to my FAST VP session! :)
 
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