Welcome to Inside the Partnership (EMC/MSFT) Episode #32, June 14, 2012.
Once again EMC is a Platinum Sponsor of Microsoft TechEd. In the last episode of Inside the Partnership I covered the TechEd Keynote and EMCs guest appearance. The keynote featured an EMC VNX with ODX (Offloaded Data Transfer), Microsoft demonstrated a 1GB per second file copy. If you haven’t watched it, take a look.
This episode is a high level overview of EMCs presence at Microsoft TechEd 2012. Including: Avamar 6.1, a Best of TechEd Finalist. I spent some time with Alex Almedia to get a high level overview of Avamar 6.1. Then I visited Txomin Barturen with his “Toys” The EMC Microsoft Fast Track Private Cloud. The customer interest was overwhelming. Txomin spent most of the conference demonstrating ODX and SMB 3.0 support.
VFCache, Server side PCIe Flash IO accelerator, is a key component of EMCs Fully Automated Storage Tiering, extending FAST to the server. I spent some time reviewing VFCache Hardware and Software, for more VFCache info visit www.InsideFlash.com.
Mike Mcghee was EMCs breakout presenter. I spent some time reviewing his session and spent some time with Neil Salamack talking about EMCs latest data protection product, AppSync. More details on AppSync and Mikes presentation on future episodes of Inside the partnership.
Just like last year, the EMC prize patrol was in action, and the EMC grand prize giveaway was HUGE!!! Check out all that EMC Blue… Congratulations to our $1000 winner.
Thanks for watching. To be notified of the latest Inside the Partnership videos, follow me on Twitter @EMCMSFT and check out www.InsideThePartnership.com. You can subscribe to the RSS Feeds for the Blog, the Pod Cast and the Video Cast respectively at www.InsideThePartnership.com and be sure to check out my latest Video cast at www.InsideFlash.com
The Annual SharePoint Conference was held back in October, almost two months ago. I’m a little behind on my blogging After many Microsoft Teched experiences, this was my first SharePoint Conference, so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I had Blogged earlier about EMCs involvement as a gold sponsor and even alluded to EMC being a “Big” part of the keynote. What I wasn’t prepared for was the overall response to EMCs involvement in the Conference. Customer after customer was just amazed at EMCs broad range of capabilities around Microsoft SharePoint.
In all cases, I was able to highlight the event in a single ITP (Inside the Partnership) episode. So I expected the same from the SharePoint Conference. I was mistaken… It has taken almost two months, but I have 3 episodes of Inside the Partnership dedicated to The SharePoint Conference 2011. Here is the overview: (All Three Episodes are at the end of this Post)
As I mentioned, I had alluded to EMC being a part of the Keynote address. What I couldn’t say then I can say now. EMC, along with NEC, simply blew away the existing scalability limits of SharePoint 2010.
To quote Jared Sparato, Director of SharePoint Product Management at Microsoft, "The results from SharePoint 2010 testing with hardware provided by NEC, EMC and Intel shows the high-end scalability of SharePoint 2010 for large-scale document management and records management solutions. SharePoint 2010 can help you scale your document management needs from simple team collaboration to enterprise-wide document archiving and records management needs."
The Keynote Demonstration Highlights included a SharePoint 2010 Cluster Featuring SQL Denali CTP3 featuring a 14.4TB Database (2 Content Databases) with over 108 Million Documents. Microsoft demonstrated a full content search in .23 seconds and a full SQL AlwaysOn Failover. The Keynote is the focus of ITP13, and you can also find the Official Press Release here. This demonstrated a 200% larger content than previous recommendations. Details of the "Scale Test Report for Very Large Scale Document Repositories" found here.
The VNX5700 on stage for The SharePoint Conference 2011 Keynote.
That was the opening keynote. How could it get better? It did. EMC hosted two technical breakout sessions.
Session #1 – Proven Best Practices for Virtualizing SharePoint and FAST Search hosted by EMC Proven Solutions. (#SPC2993) This session is the topic of ITP15. Highlights here included a reference architecture for fully virtualizing Fast Search along with other components of your SharePoint farm. (Move from 5 physical servers, to 2 virtual servers with the same end user performance).
Session #2 – “Searching Video with FAST Search for Sharepoint 2010” (#SPC384) was hosted by EMC Consulting and featured in ITP16. It’s amazing to me how many people commented, to me, “Wow, I didn’t know EMC could to that”. Time coded video meta data extracted from video source files, into SharePoint, indexed with Fast Search and retrieved via a custom search!!!! Seeing is believing.
In addition to the sessions, EMCs Gold Sponsored Theater in the Exhibit hall included EMC experts specifically addressing EMCs extended value prop for Microsoft SharePoint including:
Leveraging SharePoint Data for Business insight and Advanced Collaboration (Demos include: Upgrading to SharePoint 2010 and Fast Search, Managing Sharepoint as a shared service)
Managing Data and Enterprise Content (Demos include: Captiva and Documentum integration)
Simplifying Storage Management of Virtualized SharePoint Environments (Demos include: Performance and Storage Planning, EMC Storage Integrator for SharePoint. SourceOne Archiving and Remote BLOB)
Ensuring Data Protection for Virtualized SharePoint (Demos include: Replication Manager, Avamar, Networker, Data Domain)
Ensuring High Availability for virtualized SharePoint (Demos include: Disaster Recovery and Security, Recover point Cluster Enabler.
Kudos to all of the unseen EMCers behind the scenes of the “The SharePoint Conference 2011”, and on another note, I absolutely loved the Windows Mobile 7 Conference App. Great job Microsoft!!!
I recently had the opportunity to talk with John Moran, EMC Principal Software Engineer for Microsoft Solutions. John is one of EMC’s leading Solutions Engineers focused on validating EMC’s Proven Solutions for Microsoft. He has recently spent quite a bit of time developing and validating VNX based Unified Solutions for Microsoft applications.
Karen:
John, how do you see Unisphere and EMC’s new storage platforms making an impact on Microsoft environments?
John:
The Unified platforms, VNX and VNXe, are great for Microsoft environments. My team has been working on deployment guidelines for Exchange using the new wizard based provisioning the VNXe Unisphere GUI. We worked with EMC developers to integrate application best practices into the provisioning logic, and they produced a tool that provides storage for your Exchange environment that follows all of our best practices, and is tested to meet Microsoft’s guidelines for deploying either Exchange 2007 or Exchange 2010.
For SharePoint environments the Unified platform allows you to store data more efficiently. Using Binary Large Object (BLOB) externalization you can move up to 90% of your SharePoint data into the VNX OE File environment and leverage Nearline SAS drives with compression and deduplication while retaining the quick access times that users expect from your SharePoint metadata. The Unisphere interface allows you to manage both the BLOB file storage and database block storage from the same place.
Karen:
John, what is your perspective on how the role of Infrastructure is changing the role of IT? Do you see a convergence between application IT and infrastructure IT and what does that mean for the cloud?
John:
Customers want things that make their lives easier. They don’t want to worry about which RAID group a lun is in, and how to break data up between types of storage for optimal performance, they just want it to work. Unisphere and Unified Storage help you do this by creating a single place to manage storage, and where possible wizard based provisioning to automatically handle best practices letting the administrator be more productive. From wizard based provisioning to storage pools and automatic tiering with FAST-VP the VNX family of products is designed to just work in the vast majority of situations, and with FAST Cache and FAST-VP to adapt to changing workloads with no administrative effort. For users that want to manage all the settings themselves you can still do it, but for those who want the system to just work VNX represents a big step forward.
You will be hearing more from John as EMC develops more Microsoft oriented solutions based on VNX. To learn more about the solutions John referenced above, please click:
After many Microsoft Teched experiences, this was my first SharePoint Conference, so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I had Blogged earlier about EMCs involvement as a gold sponsor and even alluded to EMC being a “Big” part of the keynote. What I wasn’t prepared for was the overall response to EMCs involvement in the Conference. Customer after customer was just amazed at EMCs broad range of capabilities around Microsoft SharePoint.