Alex Almeida

Alex Almeida is a Sr. Technical Marketing Manager, in the EMC Backup and Recovery Systems Division

Las Vegas is certainly the city of choice this spring when it comes to IT conferences! In the past three months, I have visited here twice already. We aren’t even through April! Here is the Best Part, I along with other members of the EMC team will be back here AGAIN in May for the big EMC World Bash (Have you registered?), which promises to wow and awe again this year! But I have to ask, is it acceptable for one to really “become tired” of Las Vegas?

Well, that question would require an entirely different blog post so I will tuck that away for a future write-up. What is more interesting is what I have been hearing here at Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) 2013. Microsoft is clearly demonstrating and talking about its ability to provide consistency of platform between the different cloud models available to you as an IT professional. You may be looking exclusively at a private cloud model to deliver your business application resources. Or, you may have started the investigation or even implementation process of moving to a “hybrid cloud” model and extending some of your data center infrastructure with those provided by Windows Azure. In either case, Microsoft is clearly working to blur these two cloud models from a management perspective. That has to be reassuring if you’re an IT organization worried about the short term investments you make on your cloud journey.

In thinking about why the topic of management and the idea of this conference is so important to customers, I came to one conclusion from all of my conversations had this week. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE DATA! And as Brad Anderson liked to refer to in his keynote, data is important regardless of whether it’s being accessed through database servers on Hyper-V or that hypervisor “Those Other Guys” make.  Clearly its about your end users accessing business data in many different ways, in many different places, and doing so in a manner that doesn’t compromise the ONE THING that is YOUR BUSINESS!

In this same ideology, your data backup solution provider should be fully featured and flexible to provide a robust data recovery solution for your applications regardless of virtualization platform. (Yes, you still need one!  Snaps, DAGs and AAGs are not enough.) Application intelligence is also a key quality to look for in your backup workflow. This level of awareness not only allows data recovery to happen quickly in an application consistent fashion, but it also minimizes errors due to lack of communication between all involved in a typical datacenter/applications team.  Can your backup solution automatically analyze the current state of your Exchange DAG Cluster, and without the need for day-to-day management, perform the backup for minimal production impact?

As Brad Anderson underlined, use the cloud service offerings as a benchmark for implementing your enterprise IT offerings.  Is your backup solution ready and able to allow you to bring those self-service style offerings for your end user’s data recovery workflow? Because in the end, providing efficient and painless access to your enterprise’s backups gets users what they want most…their data.

A year ago we introduced VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, delivering a simple, efficient and flexible reference architecture-based cloud infrastructure to customers.  With 1,300 VSPEX sold in 2012 alone, it’s safe to say customers like what they see – but our desire to keep delivering solutions that make it simpler and faster for customers to adopt cloud computing put us right back into the lab developing, rigorously testing and validating the next set of VSPEX solutions – this time, with a focus on the key business applications customers deploy as part of a VSPEX.  Applications, after all, are what power many customers businesses – so why not make it simpler and faster to deploy them?

 In addition to EMC’s support for Microsoft SharePoint, today, we can announce that we’ve extended the simplicity, efficiency and flexibility of VSPEX to Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle, dramatically reducing the complexity that comes with planning, sizing, and deploying environments supporting these critical applications.  In addition, we’ve doubled the capacity of the VSPEX private cloud solutions – from 250 virtual machines to 500 – to support larger VSPEX deployments.   It is an exciting time within IT.  With today’s announcement, we are extending our market leadership and expertise in  Microsoft application environments and helping customers of all sizes transform  and leverage all of the benefits of cloud computing. 

 With these new configurations, EMC has expanded the breadth of our VSPEX support for Windows Server 2012!  Our latest VSPEX configurations now include expanded VNX support and scale up to 500 VMs!  And, these new configs add even more back up capabilities with Avamar and Data Domain.

VSPEX Expands Support for Microsoft Environments

 EMC VSPEX greatly accelerates the transformation to Microsoft private cloud environments –- no doubt about it –-  but, also just as important is how EMC VSPEX can help customers simplify the ongoing management of your cloud.  Key to successful cloud management is delivering robust end-to-end orchestration and automation.  EMC’s integration with Microsoft System Center enables our customers to leverage the management tools and interfaces that they know and already utilize.  Additionally, EMC Storage Integrator (ESI) enables Microsoft application administrators more self-service and management empowerment.   Did you know that EMC Storage Integrator (ESI) shortens the time to do storage provisioning by 4x for Microsoft applications.   

EMC Backup and Recovery helps Microsoft private cloud customers accelerate deployments with optimized backup and recovery for worry-free protection.   EMC Data Domain and Avamar provide the benefits of integrated deduplicated disk solutions for both onsite backup as well as disaster recovery for Virtualized Microsoft environments.   EMC Backup with VSPEX delivers Microsoft Application-specific plug-ins for advanced capabilities, 81% less effort in backup admin time and also delivers up to 90% reduction in Microsoft application backup times in virtual environment. The benefits continue –- How about requiring 10-30x less storage –- And, then achieving a 7 month average payback!

With VSPEX for Virtualized Microsoft Exchange you get a solution that makes it simple and fast to deploy a virtualized Exchange instance scaling between 1,000 and 10,000 Exchange mailboxes. 

 Additionally, for the many customers that have needs in the OLTP space we now offer VSPEX for virtualized Microsoft SQL Server.  This solution provides support for dynamic SQL Server landscapes, and is flexible enough so that the solution can be deployed for small, yet critical database workloads but also large, enterprise-class workloads.

 Of course, choosing the right size of solution isn’t usually a simple task – that’s why we’ve created a tool for our expert channel partners to use when implementing these VSPEX solutions for their customers – the VSPEX Sizing Tool. For each of the application-based VSPEX, the sizing tool can be used to assess the customer’s needs and then identify the appropriate base configuration for the customer to adopt, reducing the solution sizing burden.

 As we developed these new solutions, we also took advantage of an opportunity to work with another industry-leader, Cisco, to certify two special VSPEX configurations as Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track 3.0 solutions.  Now you can get two VSPEX solutions jointly engineered by Cisco, the leader in networking and EMC, the leader in storage that are certified by Microsoft as a “small” or “enterprise” Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track 3.0 solutions.

 These new VSPEX configurations help ensure customers deploying Microsoft  private clouds on Windows Server 2012 can confidently achieve the agility and high quality of service required by organizations of every size from SMB to Enterprise scale environments.  

Stop by and Visit EMC in Booth 425!

EMC is once again a proud sponsor of Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) April 8 – 11 at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, NV.   MMS is Microsoft’s premiere Cloud and Data Center Management show. 

As Adrian mentioned in his blog, EMC is looking forward to all of the sessions, demonstrations and interactions with all of the attendees.

Visit EMC Booth 425 to learn more about how to accelerate the transformation to the Private Cloud and how to simplify the management of physical, cloud and Hybrid environments.  Learn how EMC can help you ensure a higher quality of service and application availability with EMC Backup and Recovery solutions.

 EMC Sessions at MMS will include: 

• “Private Cloud Storage Management Best Practices with Microsoft and EMC Solutions”
  • Session Code WSB-292      (please check program guide for location)
  • Thurs.  April 11, 2013   12:00pm to 1:15pm   

• Attend a Theater Presentation in the EMC Booth #425.

AND PLEASE DON’T FORGET To PICK UP THEIR COOL EMC VEGAS SUNGLASSES* AND GET A CHANCE TO WIN A BOSE HEADSET

*Wear your sunglasses to the EMC booth on Thursday at 2:15pm to be eligible to win a $500 AMEX gift card.  (Official rules available at the booth)

 If you are attending MMS, I would like to encourage you to visit the EMC Booth (#425) to see how EMC can help simplify Microsoft Cloud and Data Center Management. 

VSPEX Helps Customers Tune SharePoint Storage Performance in 80% Less Time, Shorten SharePoint Provisioning by 4X, and Reduce Backup Storage by 10-30X; EMC Announces Enhanced VSPEX Private Cloud and End User Solutions

Press Highlights

EMC^® announced:

• New EMC VSPEX™ Proven Infrastructure configurations for virtualized SharePoint environments accelerate deployment and adoption.
• VSPEX is based on best-of-breed storage, virtualization, server and network technology.
• When used with EMC’s award-winning unified storage and backup and recovery technologies in a virtualized SharePoint environment, VSPEX can help customers tune SharePoint storage performance in 80% less time, shorten SharePoint provisioning by 4X, and reduce time to manage backup by 81%.
• According to the latest end-user study from IDC¹, more SharePoint was deployed on EMC storage than any other technology vendor.
• EMC also announced updates for all 14 of the original VSPEX configurations to ensure customers can choose from the latest technology when deploying their VSPEX, as well as an online education and sales enablement center and simplified technical documentation for partners.

My take on this …. VSPEX delivers simplicity, efficiency and lower costs.

EMC VSPEX has quite the momentum behind it…. and for good reason.    Most customers are under budget pressure and many in fact are facing budget cuts.  IT organizations need to look at how to gain greater efficiencies and lower costs – while still figuring out how to address new initiatives.  We all have heard it.. IT is under increasing pressure to ensure investments and resources are focused on adding competitive and business value – not sure traditional maintenance..  Fundamental and “routine” IT tasks like provisioning new infrastructure and applications has to become more efficient, simplified and streamlined.  EMC VSPEX helps customers achieve this objective.

With this latest announcement,   EMC has extended the breadth of the VSPEX offerings to include configurations that are purposes built for particular application environments – in this case Microsoft SharePoint.

VSPEX is exciting to customers because it enables them to confidently consolidate and virtualize SharePoint environments while simplifying management.  With the application aware tools, EMC VSPEX helps customers more rapidly and flexibility provision infrastructure and application services.  VSPEX also helps customers simplify how they address service level agreements (SLAs) – particularly for backup and recovery.   EMC Backup solutions for virtual environments have reduced backup times by 90%, speed recoveries by 30x,-  saving storage and bandwidth resources and helping to accelerate and simplify private cloud virtualization.

At the end of the day, VSPEX helps customers keep IT simple, efficient and affordable… freeing up resources to help drive business value.

Learn more here about VSPEX:

www.emc.com/vspex

Read the complete press release here:

http://www.emc.com/about/news/press/2013/20130110-01.htm