84 lines
4.6 KiB
Markdown
84 lines
4.6 KiB
Markdown
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date: 2013-03-01
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title: Thoughts on the shiney new VMAX
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category: Opinions
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---
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{% img right
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[https://www.emc.com/R1/images/EMC\\\_Image\\\_C\\\_1310593327367\\\_header-image-vmax-10k.png](https://www.emc.com/R1/images/EMC\_Image\_C\_1310593327367\_header-image-vmax-10k.png)
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%} I've spent a significant amount of time recently swatting up on
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EMC's new [VMAX Cloud
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Edition](https://chucksblog.emc.com/chucks_blog/2013/02/introducing-vmax-cloud-edition.html).
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It has to be said that this looks like one of the most interesting
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storage announcements I have seen in a long time. In fact I have a
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project coming up that I think it may well be a perfect fit for.
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First a massive thanks to EMC's Matthew Yeager (\@mpyeager) who
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answered a couple of questions I had. He really went the extra mile to
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clarify a couple of things and the
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[video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoElTAevLDs) he made is well
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worth a watch. Also Martin Glassborow (\@storagebod) has [interesting
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things to say](https://www.storagebod.com/wordpress/?p=1293) as well.
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This is a product that could put a lot of people out of a job. If you
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are the sort of person who likes to keep hold of your little castle's
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of knowledge then you will not like this from what I can see. Finally we
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are able to be truly customer focused, balancing cost, performance and
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capacity to give them exactly what they want. EMC claim this is a world
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first and to my knowledge they are right.
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{% pullquote %} Storage architects put a lot of time and effort in to
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tweaking quotes and systems to balance price, capacity and performance
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for a given work load. However, most of this is just reading up on the
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best-practises for a given array and situation and applying them. There
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is nothing that clever to it - reading and practise is what it comes
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down to. However, it has alway been as much an art as a science because
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an individual architect does not have a very large dataset to refer to.
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On the other hand EMC have got 60 million hours of metrics across more
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than 7000 VMAX systems out in the field. {" With that amount of data
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the amount of art involved diminishes "} and it becomes purely a
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science. {% endpullquote %}
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What you get is a [VMAX
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10k](https://www.emc.com/storage/symmetrix-vmax/vmax-10k.htm), but
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instead of defining storage pools, tiering policies, RAID levels etc you
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balance 3 facters: Space, performance and cost. Need a certain
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performance level for a certain amount of space no matter the cost? Just
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dial it in and mail EMC a cheque. Have a certain budget, need a certain
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amount of space, but performance not a problem? Same again.
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No longer will we be carefully balancing the number of SATA and FC
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spindles and the types of RAID level. No longer will be worrying about
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what percentage of our workload we need to keep on the SSD layer to
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assure the necessary number of IOPS. We will not even be calculating how
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much space we have after the RAID overheads.
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{% pullquote %} That is all very interesting, but so far it is just a
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new approach to the UI. It is an excellent approach, but nothing
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especially clever. One of things I gravitated towards was the white
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paper about integrating with
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[vCloud](https://www.emc.com/collateral/white-papers/h11468-vmax-cloud-edition-wp.pdf).
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Despite it being geared toward VMware (I wonder why? - not!) the
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principles equally apply to any situation where automation is required.
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I am a huge DevOps fan (Puppet in particular). Storage arrays have never
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been particularly automation friendly. In addition to the cloud portal,
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the VMAX CE also has a RESTful API. Now that is awesome! {" Here we
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have the abilty to easily integrate a VMAX with the likes of OpenStack
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Cinder, Puppet, Libvirt, or whatever "} you want. {% endpullquote %}
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Finally [Chad Sakac](https://virtualgeek.typepad.com) informs me that
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VMAX CE is just the first. EMC intend to roll this management style out
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to other product lines. Personally I think this would suit both Isilion
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and Atmos lines very nicely.
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I am really excited about this product. It brings a paradigm shift in
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storage management and automation. Also I am led to believe that the
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price is exceptional as well, to point that it seems EMC may even be
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pushing VNX down a market level (to where it should be perhaps?). I have
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been [a bit nasty](%7B%7B/blog/2012/12/10/emc-extremio-thoughts/) to EMC
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in the past, but recently they are doing some stuff that has really got
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me interested. This and [Razor](https://github.com/puppetlabs/Razor) are
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2 projects that are definitely worth keeping an eye on.
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<iframe width="420" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/WoElTAevLDs" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
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