המעבדה הוקמה בבניין החדש של בית צים במת"מ חיפה, והיא מהווה פריצת דרך טכנולוגית בכל הקשור לתשתיות חדרי מחשב בישראל.  החווה כוללת בשלב א' כ- 300 שרתים ביניהם שרתי האחסון של חברת NetApp מסוג FAS3000 ו-FAS6000 בעלי קיבולת אחסון של עשרות טרה-בתים.  בשלב הסופי החדר מתוכנן לאחסן קרוב ל 1 מגה-וואט של ציוד IT בשטח של כ-240 מ"ר בלבד ועו שה שימוש חדשני ביחי דות קירור מים המבוסס על קירור שורת ארונות השרתים.

היזמים ומנהלי הפרויקט מטעם נט-אפ היו המהנדסים ארז רוזנטל ואפרים גרינברג. הפרויקט בוצע  ע"י חברת אלכסנדר שניידר משלב התכנון, הבנייה והביצוע . שמנו דגש רב על חיסכון בהוצאות החשמל ויישמנו במידת האפשר כללים של IT ירוק כגון קירור מים ויישום מודולארי והדרגתי. כמו כן ביצענו  את פרויקט המעבר מחדר המחשב הישן של NetApp .

עיקרי הפרויקט:
240 מ"ר
100 ארונות שרתים (בשלב הסופי)
40 יחידות קירור מים - מבוסס לפי קירור שורה Row cooling
תכנון מודולארי ליישום הדרגתי
מיזוג אוויר מתוכנן לחיסכון בחשמל
KW 7 לארון שרתים בשלב א, 10 KW לארון בשלב הסופי
ניהול כבילה מתקדם
תשתית מים, כבילה וחשמל עילית
ללא רצפה צפה
מעבר החדר  - תוך 36 שעות

שלום אביטן-מנהל תחום Data Center באלכסנדר שניידר:
"האתגר הראשון בהעתקת החווה ובתכנון האתר היה לתמוך בציוד IT מתקדם ומגוון הנדרש על ידי מהנדסי החברה בעת פיתוח מערכות האחסון של הדור החדש", "סך הכול קיבלנו כ 240 מ"ר לאחסנת מאות שרתים ובצריכה כוללת של קרוב ל 1 מגה-וואט. נבנתה תשתית כבילה עילית, ויושמה צפיפות מחשוב-הספק ( high density computing ) של קרוב ל 10 קילו-וואט לארון שרתים, הרבה מעבר ל 4 קילו-וואט לארון שהוא הגבול הסביר להספק בחדר מחשב רגיל".

הפרויקט התאפיין בניהול כבילה בצפיפות לא שגרתית.  כבלי נחושת ואופטיקה נפרשו באתר החווה. "לצורך זה התקנו פתרונות ניהול כבילה בצפיפות גבוהה של חברת Panduit והגענו לרמה מאוד גבוהה של נוחות תפעולית למרות עומס הכבילה הרב

Di dalamnya disajikan beberpa topik menarik seputar virtualisasi server sebagai wujud sumbangsih menuju "Green IT" dimana untuk skala tertentu (terutama untuk kalangan enterprise besar dan data center) virtualisasi ini dapat menghemat cost terutama biaya pengadaan server baru, biaya listrik , AC, dan cost lainnya. Virtualisasi juga bermanfaat untuk para developer untuk bikin lab-nya sendiri baik untuk compile software maupun testing tanpa mengganggu sytem yang sudah production.

Selain itu virtualisasi biasanya digunakan untuk disaster recovery just in case server down, maka virtual server adalah solusi untuk bussiness continuity sehingga tidak terjadi downtime yang cukup lama.

Empat komponen syarat penting dalam virtualiasi adalah :

• Processor (disarankan yang hi-end atau yang sudah dual core, quad core atau multi core atau Hyper-V)
• Memory (minimal 1 GB, disarankan lebih besar misal 4 GB atau lebih heheheh)
• Hardisk (ini dia penting juga karena digunakan untukmenyimpan image mesin virtual. Disaranakn minimal SATA; IDE jg masih bisa; atau yang lebih baik semisal SCSI atau SAS dengan kecepatan RPM 10K ke atas)
• NIC

Beberapa point dan pelajaran penting yang saya dapatkan dari hasil mengikuti acara ini :

1. Wah di luaran sana, ternyata di atas langit ada langit lagi. Maksudnya banyak jago-jago IT yang cukup mumpuni dan cukup mampan dalam mengenyam "makan asam garam" menangangi server kelas atas (Blade, Storage server, dll). Sertifikasinya gila-gilaan dan kerjanya lebih gila dibanding eke sendiri.
2. Mulai sekarang eke harus sudah mulai riset untuk implementasi virtualisasi di lingkungan kantor eke sendiri. Targetnya pingin bikin virtualisasi untuk disaster recovery just in case of (amit..amit..)
3. Ternyata software virtualisasi kelas tinggi seperti VMWare ESX server plus appliance software 3rd party seperti NetApp harganya cukup edduuunnn (bisik2 di atas 10.000 USD CMIIW). Hehehehe... pantesan yang dateng ke seminar ini adalah jago-jago IT di kalangan entrprise besar yang duitnya unlimited (Oil, Banking, Telco) krn memang mereka memerlukannya ...
4. Eke jadi tahu sekarang teknologi yang digunakan untuk storage server beserta istilah-istilah protocol storage hehehehe.. sepeti iSCSI, Fibre Channel, NFS, SAS, dll. Padahal eke sebelumnya pake FreeNAS hehehehe cuman make doank...

Moral Story: Ternyata acara-acara ini cukup menginspirasi diri untuk selalu melakukan benchmarking terhadap system yang telah di-aristeki dan sytem yang sedang hot dan update di luaran sana plus juga jadi ajang kenalan dengan temen-temen IT lainnya sebagai ajang sharing ilmu dan pengalamannya masing masing. Go Virtual!

Ok, but on some on the enclosed sheets, you read that you can go to now.netapp.com, register and have full access to the documentation. I have some difficult understanding why you must register to read documentation (which is one of your best marketing agent, if you are confident enough on your product), but I can live with that.

Are you on the Net App website? Ok, now you can create an account. Please choose the level of your account. Yes, you can be a guest, which means you can have very little access, or you can register your product (via serial number) and be a member of this hallowed community.

First, I register myself as a guest, believing that I can upgrade later. No way. As a guest, you can see the astounding home page, where every link you click gives you an "Anauthorized access" courtesy page. Included, the "Register my product" page. I'm sure that the home page looks astounding, because it will be the only thing from Net App that you can see, and they can't be stupid to limit themselves in something less that astounding.

Net App web site is made with the philosophical assumption that "first impression counts", so if you start as a guest ad then spend 1 million on their product you can't upgrade. And we spent a lot less than 1 million, so I'm picturing myself Net App executives angry and furious for a guest that is trying to gain access to the support for the product it has bought: how would I dare?

Ok, let's try another way. We start with a new account, and we immediately choose to register it, because as the web site states, you will have a shorter evaluation phase before being member of the hallowed community of the people that can see the documentation. Indiana Jones, as an example, he's not, but I've heard about a fifth film of the saga, so hold on your breath.

After two working days, we still don't have access. So we have this brand new filer that is sitting idly, because no one wants to try to configure it without knowing how it works (how strange, like we are engineers).

Now, dear Net App executives in charge of the web site, I'd like to address you directly with a quick recap:

1. You don't know how to use a web site to market your product;
2. You don't give access to your products documentations, which means that you don't trust your product and/or your customers;
3. You are not helping your customers in getting the most out of your products, which is really, really, deeply irritating;
4. You are unable to process your customer requests according to the dadaistic workflow you have defined in your web site;
5. If you believe that this will force me, as a customer, to buy your technical services, you are a wrong, wrong way wrong.

I suggest you to see how IBM, Red Hat, VMware, HP (just to name some I know and profitably use in my everyday's work) are dealing with this strange phenomenon called "web". Some of them are even using public-accessible mailing list for their customers. They are fools, clearly.

In the meantime, please believe me: even a good product with a bad or zero documentation won't be good enough. I was tempted to play around with the web interface as long as I would reach a "no more working" configuration, and then send the filer back to you asking for a manual to fix it. Don't tempt me more.

NetApp heeft een 42 pagina tellende whitepaper vrijgegeven over het gebruik van SRM in een NetApp omgeving.

Download het document hier: tr-3671.pdf

Bron: http://www.vm-aware.com/

Paul Shannon poste het onderstaande op zijn blog: http://www.vm-aware.com/.

OSSV installs directly into the VMware ESX service console and acts as a very light-weight interface to backup Virtual Machines on NetApp storage and non-NetApp storage. It works best with NetApp Protection Manager, but works well as a stand-alone product.  There’s also an excellent Best Practice guide for OSSV available here.

Bron: http://www.vm-aware.com/

Dropping in a quick post with some videos of different interesting people who I have met here at the Advanced Learning Institute's Social Media Summit in Chicago...

First, Francesca Karpel from NetApp

Then, Dana VanDen Heuvel, founder of Marketing Savant

And, Chris Heuer, founder of the Conversation Group

Free advice from some of the crew for the Flip Video peeps!

Chatting with Phil Gomes at the Chicago Tweetup

And, to top things off like a little cherry, a back of cab interview with Chris Heuer - anything that starts with a question involving the world's oldest profession must be good, right?

See you 'round, Slice readers! :-)

Generally this is exactly what we expected: to be able to provide good performance to many virtual servers which do network and/or disk-I/O only periodically without overprovisioning the whole infrastructure.

At the moment there is exactly one dual-port 10 GigE card in every VMware server and there are two physical connections to two different switches - a much cleaner setup than the 12 (!) GigE interfaces per server we had before

Lees de rest van de benchmark hier: http://21stcenturystorage.cebis.net

Site Recovery Manager works seamlessly with VMware Infrastructure, VMware VirtualCenter, and replication software from storage partners to provide integrated disaster recovery management and automation. It provides:

• Integrated management of disaster recovery plans. Create, update and document recovery plans directly from VMware VirtualCenter.
• Non-disruptive testing of disaster recovery plans. Execute automated tests of recovery plans in an isolated testing environment using the recovery plan that would be used in an actual failover. Hardware configuration dependencies are eliminated and testing can occur without impacting production systems.
• Automated failover and recovery. Automate execution of the recovery process, eliminating many of the slow and unreliable manual processes common in traditional disaster recovery.

Sonstige Konfig: Zwei Virtuelle Maschinen mittels VMware Fusin auf OS X 10.5 - die eine ist der Simulator von Netapp (in einem Ubuntu Linux) die andere der Windows 2003 Server. Alle virtuellen NICs sind auf das Netzwerk gebridged und bekommen ihre IPs von dem lokalen DHCPd im Netz - genauso wie der OS X Host.

An sich ist die Konfiguration des CIFS-Service am Netapp ein simples Vorhaben, wenn man die Fallstricke kennt:

1. Firewall am Windows Server deaktivieren - sonst keine Nameresolution. Kann man mittels host <dcname>.netapp.test prüfen.

2. Zeiten synchronisieren (am OS X Host wird das wohl der Fall sein, in der Windows-VM und dem Host-OS für den Simulator ist das wichtig - der Simulator nimmt die Zeit dann von seinem Host-OS!)

2. CIFS-Service stopen: > cifs terminate

3. > cifs setup

Den defaults folgen - so weit sinnvoll. Auf die Timeservices habe ich verzichtet - muss in dieser Testumgebung halt selber den Host für den Simulator (ein Ubuntuserver) aktuell halten (# ntpdate -v time.inode.at).

Das wars!

Tijdens het VMUG Event 2007 afgelopen December is aangekondigd dat er gedurende 2008 een aantal kleinere sessies georganiseerd gaan worden. Inmiddels is het zover. De VMUG heeft NetApp bereid gevonden deze bijeenkomst te sponsoren en te organiseren. Jullie zijn op donderdag 5 juni uitgenodigd op de lokatie van NetApp op Schiphol. De meeting begint rond 16:00 en zal eindigen om 19:00.

Let op: Om bij deze meeting aanwezig te zijn moet je je inschrijven!

Klik hier voor meer informatie

Ik ben erbij, dus tot dan ;-)

Blocks and Files points to an Demartek study (sponsored by Pillar) showing that the Pillar Axiom 500 rebuild times are much shorter on high capacity arrays that similar EMC or NetApp systems.

The glaring data beyond Pillar's performance, though, is the teeth-clenchingly long times that data is one drive failure away from catastrophic loss in every case. 

The tests were conducted with about 50 500GB drives per system using RAID 5 (RAID 4 for NetApp), meaning the arrays can be rebuilt if one drive fails, but not two.  So during the rebuilds of from 3 to 23 hours, if another drive fails, all data is lost. 

Insert 1 TB drives into the equation, and your rebuild time (and vulnerability) doubles.

RAID 6 and other dual-failure protective schemes make this problem go away, but cost a little in capacity. 

How are you dealing with this?  I've heard that RAID 6 is gaining traction for 7200 rpm high capacity enterprise drives like Seagate's Barracuda ES that are less reliable than 15K SAS enterprise drives (see Seagate's 3.5" Cheetah and 2.5" Savvio for reference). 

Does your RAID vary by drive class?  What other magic do you apply to make this work?

"Catch someone doing something right." This is a credo that Tom has instilled throughout his company. When someone within the company sees another employee doing something particularly noteworthy, they email Tom, who will then call and personally commend that employee on the same day. Imagine working in a 14,000 person company and pulling a few all-nighters to get a project done. Typically, you'd probably get some props from your immediate boss, but to get a call from the Vice Chairman, letting you know that he's heard what a good job you're doing and thanking you for doing so well...that'll leave an impression. Plus, the employee getting the call will spread the word to 20, maybe 30 people about the call he or she got. Tom typically makes 4-5 of these calls a day.

This credo and the is part of a larger theme that I noticed within Tom: he's a natural leader in the sense that when you're around him, when you hear him talk about his business, you can completely understand how he motivates, inspires, and coaches his employees to get the job done.

Im Zuge der Entwicklung von Nagios Plugins für NetApp Speichersysteme, benötigte ich den NetApp Simulator um diese Plugins entwicklen und testen zu können. Da ich hier zur Zeit keinen Linux-Rechner betreibe entschied ich mich auf meinem iMac einen virtuellen Linuxserver zu installieren und dann dort den Simulator laufen zu lassen.

Beim Download des Simulators war eine Anleitung von Paul Hargreaves beigepackt die eine Installation des Simulator auf Windows (als Gastbetriebssystem) und dann einem Ubuntu 6.01 Desktop in einer VM beschreibt. Diese Anleitung ist an sich nicht schlecht, passte aber nicht ganz auf meine Anforderungen:

1. Habe ich OS X und nicht Windows, daher verwende ich VMware Fusion

2. Möchte ich nicht einen Desktop (mit GUI, ...) installieren, wenn ich eigentlich nur einen Server brauche. Obendrein hätte ich die die Server-VM fix und fertig vorbereitet gehabt.

Also entschied ich mich für folgendes: Max OS X 10.5, VMware Fusion 1.1.1 und Ubuntu Server 6.01 LTS, NetApp Release 7.2.4 (Simulator).

Überblick:

1. Einrichten des Gastsystemes
2. VMware einrichten
3. Installation Linux Server in der VM
4. Installation des Simulators

Gastsystem einrichten

Am Mac OS X ist nichts speziell zu tun ausser VMware Fusion zu installieren. Die aktuelle Version (s.o.) läuft gut auf Leopard - aber Vorsicht: Time Machine sichert erst ab der VMware-Fusion-Version 1.1.2 und wenn OS X 10.5.2  oder höher installiert wurde die VMs! Workaround: Gelegentlich ein ZIP von der VM machen - das wird dann gesichert. (Zippen natürlich nur, wenn die VM abgeschalten ist)

VMware einrichten

In meiner Umgebung gibt es einen DHCP-Server auf der Firewall, der für das interne LAN ca. 10 freie Adressen hat. Der springende Punkt war nun - im Gegensatz zur Dokumentation von Paul Hargreaves - die virtuellen Netzwerkkarten als bridged einzurichten. Nur so ist es möglich, dass von Seiten des Hostbetriebssystemes (also OS X) auf die IP und somit den Webserver des Simulator zugegriffen wird. Das ist z.B. nötig, um über die Weboberfläche des Simulators diesen zu konfigurieren.

Also richte ich zwei virtuelle Netzwerkkarten auf der VM ein (dazu muss das Gastbetriebssystem heruntergefahren werden) und beide werden über /etc/network/interfaces als DHCP-Clients konfiguriert. (Diese zweite Netzwerkkarte kann man sich auch sparen, dann bekommt man bei der Installation des Simulator eine Warnmeldung, dass der Simulator von diesem Server aus nicht zu nützen sei. Das mag sein, mir war das aber nicht wichtig, denn administrierbar war der Netapp-Simulator jedenfalls.)

Linux Server in der VM installieren

Ich hab eine schon früher vorbereitete Installation von Ubuntu Server verwendet. Auf Updates (apt-get upgrade) und VMware Tools habe ich verzichtet. Aber sehr wichtig: Es wird Perl benötigt, sonst kann man später keine Disken dem Simulator hinzufügen.

apt-get install perl

Dann kopiert man das Simulator-Tar auf die Linuxmaschine - mit z.B. scp. Wenn man dabei nicht noch den sshd am Linuxrechner installieren will (was mit apt-get install open-ssh-server möglich wäre) muss man am Mac den sshd aktivieren. Das läuft über die Systemeinstellungen -> Sharing -> "Entfernte Anmeldungen" aktivieren.

Installation des Simulators

Siehe dem Simulator beigepackte Doku - hier nur ein paar Tipps:

./setup.sh

Im Folgenden sind die Default-Antworten ok. Lediglich die an sich unnötige Frage, ob man die Installation fortsetzen will muss natürlich mit yes statt no beantwortet werden.

Bei der Frage " Which network interface schould the simulator use?" habe ich dediziert eth2 angegeben.

Dann kann man wieder den defaults folgen.

Als Nächster Schritt ist der Simulator mit /sim/runsim.sh zu starten und einige Fragen zur Erstinstallation zu beantworten. Dabei schaltet der Simulator die NIC in den Promiscuity-Mode, was auch das Umschalten des Hostsystemadapters zur Folge hat, weswegen man von OS X um ein Adminpasswort gefragt wird. Das ist lt. NetApp Doku so gewollt und scheint mir auch einigermassen plausibel.

Etwas später kommt die Frage: "Please enter the IP adress for Network Interface ns0". Hier wird dann eine vom DHCP-Server vorgschlagene Adresse als Default angegeben. Das ist ok, nur diese bitte aufschrieben, da wir sie gleich brauchen werden. Der Rest sollte klar sein, sobald man zur CIFS-Installation kommt kann man mit Ctrl+C abbrechen.

Zugriff auf die Weboberfläche vom Simulatir erfolgt dann über einen Webbrowser. Safari ist nicht mit dem Simulator kompatibel - ich habe Firefox verwendet:

http://<ip die der Sim über DHCP bekommen hat>

Dann Klick auf na_admin und root als User und das zuvor gesetzte Passwort eingeben. That's it.

Unlike the previous storage paradigm, which focused on backing up relatively static enterprise data and storing frequently accessed database information, storage today must be more nimble. Everything from photo sites to online email companies are offering and even encouraging consumers to store more and more bits of data. At last count, there were 281 exabytes of data being created each year. Much like cramming clothes into a suitcase, the more information you can store on a given box, the less you have to pay for the boxes -- as well as the infrastructure to keep them running.

Last year, large storage vendors such as NetApp and EMC pushed the concept of de-dupulication, essentially storing only the new files at each backup, rather than the entire system, to reduce storage costs. Ocarina and Storwize solve this problem by going further than ignoring previously stored files, with an appliance that unpacks each file and then compresses it using proprietary algorithms.

The flip side of storing more is accessing that data faster. We've written about Gear6 and Atrato before, which both use caching and software to keep frequently accessed files easily available. The end road for most of these startups, however, is an acquisition, perhaps by bigger storage players such as EMC, or maybe even by Dell, HP or IBM.

Photo of the First IBM disk storage system courtesy of the Computer History Museum

Interested in web infrastructure? Want to learn more about Green Data Centers? Check out our upcoming conference, Structure 08.

I read an interesting profile of Dave Hitz, founder and EVP of NetApp in the latest ComputerWorld magazine.  (yes, the actual magazine, made from real paper products!).  Great perspectives on the growth of information and storage.  I recommend you take a look, even electronically.

 Takeaways:

• Deleting data is more difficult for most companies than finding room to save it. A customer CIO quote: "There are two kinds of data: information deleted within a week and data kept forever."
• Data rarely ever disappears.  Deleting an old email doesn't protect one legally if the receiver has a copy.
• Flash and SSD will start to have an impact in the enterprise, even though many supposed storage alternatives to disk never made it.  Flash is different because it's a classic come-from-below disrupting technology.
• Flash will also find a place displacing/expanding RAM cache.  It's 10X disk price, but 100X random read speeds vs. disk.
• His favorite foods are those you can eat without a fork.

There has been a great response to my earlier posting on Free Cisco Product Icons, so I thought I would share another good drawing resource with readers. Even if you spend MOST of your time working with Cisco gear, it's not the entire universe of IT.

For those of you who also design storage networks, or need to incorporate storage network components into your Cisco Visio drawings, you'll be happy to learn about VisioCafe. At VisioCafe, you will find Visio stencils for well-known storage networking companies such as NetApp, HP, Hitachi, IBM, Dell and EMC. There are also stencils for a host of smaller players.

I hope you find this useful.

Turns out that HP has decided to buy their way into the market, but only with a single product, Tower Software. Like EMC, HP is looking to broaden their Information Management offering by adding Records Management and eDiscovery. If that is all they were looking to add, then buy Tower was a great move. I have always heard good things about their software for those purposes, though I always had doubts as to their complete ECM capability.

Alan Pelz-Sharpe makes the same assessment and adds some more useful insight. However, I think that HP's competition for comparison is more EMC than IBM. EMC and HP are both from the world of hardware, acquiring Information Management related software to manage all of the data sitting on their hardware.

Alan states that they still need a better search component. Welcome to the world of EMC. Will EMC or HP add it first? This is a two-stage race. The first one to buy has more selection. However, the integration of said software is the second-stage. Integration is important and not to be over-looked. Just ask Microsoft.

What is Next?

The Big Men then enter a fun debate on the merits of the acquisition. I think that HP's acquisition actually makes things harder to figure out. I can't see HP buying any other ECM vendor, unless they are looking for a place to spend R&D money. Multiple solutions make life complicated. Just as IBM and OpenText.

The thing to consider in future acquisitions for HP is Tower's architecture. They are heavy into Microsoft technologies. This isn't a bad thing, unless you happen to be working for an anti-Microsoft IT shop. What this does do is lean future acquisitions to platforms that are, at a minimum, well tested on Microsoft.

That leaves OpenText. They can make it on their own, but they need to actually consolidate things if they are going to pull things out. After acquiring IXOS, Hummingbird, RedDot, and Artesia, putting everything into one place still isn't easy. If I had to pick a buyer, it would be NetApp or Microsoft.

To be honest, I wouldn't want to acquire OpenText if everything wasn't consolidated. Of course if I bought them for 3 of their platforms, sold one off on its own, and just provided a migration path for the one that was left, that might work. Don't you think that Artesia and RedDot would each make a nice CEVA?

VMware will have two sessions. The first, presented together with HP, provides a lot of great information resulting from an 'SAP on VMware' workload characterization study with HP. Test scenarios cover multi 2-tier and 3-tier scenarios of ECC 6.0 on NUMA and UMA based HP X86-64 ProLiant servers with results demonstrating scalability, ESX NUMA optimization and performance improvements from ESX 3.0.2 to ESX 3.5. Really good stuff.

In the second presentation, they will discuss service automation provided by VMware technologies. Very specifically, with NetApp as co-presenter, we will talk about disaster recovery facilitated by the upcoming VMware Site Recovery Manager, which will simplify protection against disasters by leveraging and extending the VMware virtualization framework.

And, yes, NFS works nicely for Oracle Database.

The newly-branded NetApp

Maybe Oracle should be renamed/rebranded to "scott/tiger?"

One failure in a million hours?  It's claims like these that seem extreme to some people when they look at enterprise disk drives.  Yet a study of 39,000 NetApp systems by a researcher have found that these drives fail at a 1% annual failure rate (AFR).  Robin Harris summarizes the study in his blog.

The translation from AFR to MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) is not exact, but this AFR number puts MTBF in the million-hour ballpark,  showing that disk drive specifications do indeed portray actual reliability performance.

It's hard to test for a failure every 1.6 million hours

This is not an exact science, because to prove that any one drive will only fail on average every 1.6 million hours (the spec for the Seagate Savvio drive), you'd have to run a whole bunch of drives a whole bunch of years.  This study is a nice real-world validation!

It sort of reminds me of Churchill's quote... how did that go... "never was so much owed by so many to so few". We keep giving our blood sweat and tears to a handful of enterprise storage vendors. We are served the same old commodity hardware and complicated software. Let's face it. Almost everyone is selling the same disks on the same chassis and touting the same features.

The storage sales guys by-and-large are marketing droids that don't understand a damn thing about what I need and probably wouldn't care if they did. Oh, I'm not saying they are bad people. They have to earn a living like everyone else. My beef is that they always have an agenda that includes finding my wallet and removing my money. When they tell me that they want to meet to better understand my infrastructure it feels like they are just snooping around for more business. If I have a real storage project believe me -- I'll find you.

My company primarily buys netapp storage. Most of the netapp sales guys are okay -- certainly a little better than some vendors I've dealt with. The gear works. That's certainly a positive. On the other hand it is really expensive. It is a limiting factor for growth in our business. It harms our competitiveness. Netapp wants to license every cock-a-mamy protocol and service separately. Need iscsi? cha-ching. Dedup? cha-ching. Oh, now you need replication? cha-ching cha-ching. You won't know the true cost of your netapp infrastructure until a year down the road when you need to start adding expensive features. And here's the real rub. You end up paying about 20% annually for service and maintenance on the hardware. So basically over five years you have just paid 2X for your storage. It's such a great scam I'm kicking myself for not inventing a storage company.

I want google storage. No, not some kind of remote data storage service like Amazon S3. I need more performance than those storage services can offer. I want storage that scales like building blocks. I want to be able to plug in storage blocks and gain more space and more performance. I want the storage scaling to be automatic and dummy-proof. I don't want a solution that simply mirrors raid10 disk on vaultA to raid10 disk on vaultB. That's trivial and a waste of resources. I want true distributed storage with outstanding performance. I want redundancy if building block nodes fail. I want to replicate data to multiple datacenters. I don't want to license separate features. Give me the whole enchilada. Netapp, if someone else steps up to the plate and is able to provide me with this type of storage solution, it's... buh-bye.

Navigating EMC.com

Well, navigation is okay. A lot of content has to be searched for now though. User Groups are hidden away. I only found them because I knew what to search for on the site. The pages are also still boasting the old look-and-feel.

I also can't seem to consistently get to Mark Lewis's blog since the change either. I hang quite a bit. I can only find the link on the Site Map (or in my personal links). On the page listing the blogs is a link to an article he has written on Information 2.0 (which may get a post later). On the same page though, there is a link to the neglected blog of Cornelia Davis. It hasn't been updated in four months and the link is to a post five months back.

I will say that it is fairly simple to find product information, but that is as far as I am willing to concede.

EMC Competes Against Who?

Here is where I really get disappointed. There is no vision for Enterprise Content Management. There are products, but any vision seems missing. There are things on the overall vision of EMC on their new Leadership and Innovation page. You can't get to all of the articles without mining for them. This is very frustrating. I want to work with a Leader in ECM and Information Management, not someone that appears to just have it listed.

Let's take IBM. With one click, I got to their Information Management page which tells me what they are doing in Information Management. One more click and I'm on their ECM page, complete with vision, sub-solutions, and just about anything else you might want to learn about IBM and ECM.

I know that EMC has one vision for Enterprise Content Management, or at least they did. I've seen it several times in the last year. This new design left it out. Are they going to depend on their sales guys to deliver the vision. Not a good idea without the online presence to back it up. I'm not calling out one company's reps over another. I just know that after getting a spiel from a sales guy, I like to check facts and get more details online.

I'm sorry, but the site seems more targeted at people comparing EMC to Network Appliance (NetApp) than any of the vendors that the ECM world tracks.

eRoom and the Map of the Ancients

One surprise, eRoom is not that hard to find on the new site. You just have to know if you want Documentum's Collaboration eRoom or eRoom product family. Really, the content overall is the same, just some context variables that mix it up. Shame that it is basically the same product as 3 years ago.

Actually, this was refreshing. If they gave it that much visibility, maybe they really are investing in it. I'm hoping to find out in the near future. I can tell you that I love that little product, as do people that are just getting to know it. It just needs some love. If it is getting the love, then that love should be broadcast.