Month: February 2014

EMCs OpenStack strategy

February 28, 2014 Corporate IT No comments

EMC Openstack Like most things at EMC, the OpenStack integration strategy is focused on customer choice. It’s an attempt to meet the customer where they leveraging IT assets, specific workloads, and integration points into all of our products. Additional automation and deeper integration we provided by our software defined storage can control plane software called ViPR. Obviously all of the deep reporting, SRM tools, and storage data protection services will remain and be brought into the OpenStack integration.

To jump right into EMC integration with OpenStack Cinder, we provide native plug-ins for all of our block storage products, iSCSI Isilon and Scale I/O. Several major distributions such as Rack Space, Red Hat, and Canonical distribute the plug-in for VNX and VMAX, and versions of the Cinder plug-in support fiber Channel are available from Github or the EMC web site. Third parties have written the Cinder plug-ins for Isilon iSCSI and Swift support and iSCSI support for Scale I/O.

image EMC’s recommended approach would be to use the Cinder plug-in for our ViPR storage control-plane product, since through that single plug-in iSCSI and fiber channel support are provided across all our products, as well as object storage support for Swift, S3, and our own Atmos APIs. That plug-in is available from Github and will be coming to the major distributions soon. The advantage of using ViPR especially in fiber Channel environments is that ViPR will automate the zoning and the definition of rich service pools that provide fully automated storage tiers, replication settings, and high availability configuration.

Not only is there a single integration point with the ViPR Cinder plug-in for block storage, but with ViPR data services we bring Swift API and Amazon S3 API support. Finally, ViPR brings this automation support to all consumers of block storage, not only OpenStack but VMware and other virtualized or bare metal hosts.

Community for Sharing Storage Resource Management (SRM) Custom Reports

February 21, 2014 Corporate IT, EMC SRM, EMC VMAX No comments

EMC SRM 3.0

EMC SRM 3.0I was in an EMC and EMC Partner training class around SRM 3.0 (Storage Resource Management Suite) today, and came away very excited about one of the latest software assets in EMC’s portfolio (SRM home page).  SRM 3.0 is a comprehensive tool for reporting on capacity and performance of the largest storage enterprises in the world.  Using passive or standards based active discovery, SRM can provide comprehensive capacity and performance reporting and trending across your entire IT stack: VM’s, physical servers, SAN infrastructure, and storage elements.

EMC is becoming very good at providing a simple and easy out-of-the-box experience for its software products while preserving a very rich underlying functionality and flexibility that elevates EMC products above the competition. This balance is very evident in SRM 3.0, where predefined active dashboards show summary data, and allow click-through to the underlying metrics and detailed reports. (Watch a demo video here).

SRM-ReportDuring the class lecture, (and the first hands-on experience I had with the tool) I was able to modify one of the standard storage pool reports to show the data reduction associated with Thin Provisioning on VMAX and VNX. I discussed some of these formulas in a previous post (Some EMC VMAX Storage Reporting Formulas).

One of the best parts of SRM 3.0 is the ability to export and import Report Templates. As such, I exported the report I customized, and posted the XML here for you to download and import into your own SRM 3.0 installation.

I’d like to invite all of you to export reports that you have customized for your environment with the community, so that we can engage the power of everyone to advance the art of storage resource management.