Clearpath's Blog on the In's and Out's of Virtualizing IT

We recently covered the launch of VMware’s Horizon Suite of End User Computing (EUC) products, including VMware Horizon View, VMware Horizon Mirage, and VMware Horizon Workspace.  The products present a set of tools that enable IT to exercise comprehensive end-point management while delivering a unified user experience across a variety of devices and access methods.

EMC showed off ViPR (previously known as Project Bourne) at EMC World 2013. ViPR is EMC’s solution for Software Defined Storage (SDS), helping to round out the EMC² family’s (EMC, VMware, Pivotal, RSA) Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) vision. Dave provided our introductory coverage of ViPR here. Since being unveiled at EMC World, I’ve heard some confusion in social media circles over what exactly ViPR is – along the lines of ‘ask 10 people what ViPR is and get 10 different answers’. To try to clear up some confusion, here is a brief overview of ViPR.

On April 30^th, EMC announced an update to their popular array-based replication technology RecoverPoint to software version 4.0 from 3.5 that will be released this coming week and I was able to get all of the details at an EMCWorld session.  It is important to remember that RecoverPoint up until the new release was a hardware + software solution with the hardware version not always truing up to the software in name.  The current version of the RecoverPoint hardware is referred to as Generation 5, but that is largely immaterial in that as long as your RecoverPoint appliances are refreshed periodically they will remain compatible with the current software code.  But as you may have noticed I said “until the new release” because in the most evolutionary change yet for RecoverPoint, the RecoverPoint Appliance (RPA) is now available in a virtual format that can be easily deployed from an OVA.  This new deployment option can be a cost effective option for some customers but it does come with some important caveats:

Yesterday I sat through what I think was the best session I have attended at EMC World so far. The session was focused on ViPR. You may have heard previous mention of this technology by its code name “Project Bourne”. I had heard a lot of buzz about it so I was certainly curious to find out what it was all about. Here is my short summary, but believe me there is a lot more to it so I suggeest checking out EMC’s website for more information.

EMC Isilon is a scale out NAS solution that can grow from 3 to 144 nodes and up to 20PB in a single File-system. In my experience it is also the easiest platform to install, and configure, and customers tell me on a regular basis they feel the same way about the day to day operations. It already expands on the fly when a new node is added the system. The system will automatically recognize the node in the cluster, assign it an IP address, rebalance the data in the background,  and capacity is immediately available. System cache is globally shared, and protection overhead decreases as the cluster grows. This all means that the more you grow the cluster, the faster and more efficient it becomes. All in all Isilon was already an impressive soluition and yet it is going to get even better.

At EMC World yesterday, the newly formed joint venture between EMC and VMware, along with a strategic investment by General Electric (GE) was discussed by Paul Maritz (former VMware CEO) in the morning’s keynote address.  Pivotal combines intellectual property and engineering resources (1200 employees) from both EMC and VMware to focus on solving big and fast data problems.  Pivotal combines solutions such as EMC Greenplum and VMware Cetas to serve and analyze ‘Big Data’, VMware Gemfire to rapidly ingest ‘Fast Data’, VMware’s Spring and vFabric technologies, and Pivotal Labs software for rapid application development and integration, with the underlying support of VMware Cloud Foundry.

EMC has announced the latest software update to its Data Domain platform – DDOS 5.3.   It seems like there is something for everyone in this upgrade, so make sure to review the new functionality to see if there is something there for your environment.  I’ve listed out some of the highlights below.

VMware has released updates to several products over the past couple weeks.  Many of the updates take the version 5.1 products announced at VMworld 2012 to Update 1 (i.e. the first major service pack).  The updates include bug fixes, security fixes, and functionality changes.  Here’s what you need to know about the updates:

RecoverPoint was already one of EMC’s most advanced replication technologies and now it is available as a virtual appliance. Before we get into the details of the virtual edition lets first review the basic capabilities of this impressive technology. RecoverPoint already provided companies with several advanced features that traditional replication technologies do not. For example, in a single solution it offers both local and remote replication, and remote replication can be either synchronous or a-synchronous. Remote replication can also dynamically switch between synchronous and a-synchronous modes based on the change rate and available bandwidth. In addition to those impressive features, RecoverPoint provides more granular restore functionality than traditional array based replication through the use of its journal. The best comparison for this would be your DVR. DVR allows you to rewind to literally any point of the show you recorded. This is what RecoverPoint brings to your Data Center. As opposed to traditional replication methods which would be like only being able to chose chapters on a DVD for example. 

Released on April 4, 2013, vCenter Operations Manager makes the next step forward in managing your vSphere environment.