Tag Announcement

Did you hear the announcement?! This is pretty sweet if you ask me! (Ooh! Ooh! Ask me! Ask me! :))   EMC Shrinks Midrange Storage Delivering Twice the Capacity in Half the Floor Space to Optimize Resources in Physical Data Centers  The literal important parts of this announcement are:

EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC), the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today announced new high-density configurations of its market leading EMC® CLARiiON® CX4 and EMC Celerra® Gateway systems systems, delivering twice the capacity of previous systems in half the floor space optimizing precious and expensive data center space and resources. Additionally, the more compact midrange storage systems will support high capacity 2 terabyte (TB), low power SATA disk drives, which consume significantly less power than previous generations.

The new high-density configurations combined with 2 TB SATA drives, high performance enterprise flash drives, and EMC storage efficiency technologies—like disk spin down and EMC fully automated storage tiering (FAST)—enable customers to more easily manage the growth of storage-intensive applications. These comprehensive solutions, unique in the industry, are designed to reduce power consumption and cooling costs, and significantly reduce physical space requirements and satisfy weight considerations in today’s data center or remote office locations. Customers can achieve this substantially greater storage density within their existing datacenter power and cooling schemes.

Key Facts:

• High density CLARiiON CX4 system configurations offer up-to 390 2TB, 5,400 and 7,200 RPM SATA drives and high performance flash drives in a single rack using half the floor space and number of power connections required for the same number of drives in conventional racks. Customers wanting to enable CIFS and NFS can deploy the more compact CLARiiON CX4 systems with high density Celerra Gateway systems.
• The energy-efficient 5,400 RPM 2TB SATA drives provide twice the capacity while consuming over 60-percent less power per GB than 1TB 7,200 RPM SATA drives.
• High density CLARiiON CX4 configurations also support 1TB and 2TB SATA disk drives, as well as enterprise flash drives, which store data on electronic memory rather than spinning disks.
• The more compact CLARiiON CX4 configurations also support EMC spin down technology—which powers down inactive disk drives—saving 65-percent of the power required by traditional spinning SATA drives.
• The high density configurations offer full access to all disk drives from the front of the storage system’s rack. The sliding design enables the front enclosures to be moved forward, providing easy access to enclosures and drives in a second ‘slide out’ tier.

"Physical space constraints present significant challenges to IT administrators facing the task of managing 50-percent or more information each year," said Rich Napolitano, President, Unified Storage Division at EMC. "We’ve developed the industry’s most comprehensive compact storage system. In addition to an innovative hardware solution that reduces floor space requirements, EMC offers software that makes the most cost-effective use of the storage system and ensures that the right information is on the right media at the right time. In doing this, we’re helping our customers address the challenges of managing significantly more information, more efficiently, using less power and with more automation."

Availability & Services

The new high density CLARiiON and high density Celerra Gateway configurations, which are based on EMC CLARiiON CX4 systems, are available today worldwide. EMC will make high-density EMC Celerra unified storage system configurations available later this year.

Additionally, EMC Global Services offers a complete suite of services from assessment to implementation to migration to help customers quickly realize the value of their new high density CLARiiON CX4 and Celerra Gateway storage system. EMC also provides services targeted to help customers fully leverage EMC FAST technology on the new configurations to optimize system performance, further increase capacity utilization and improve service levels.

So, the highlights –

• CX4 and gateways
• Twice the capacity, half the floor space while consuming 60% less power than 1TB 7200
• 2TB disks + EFD = more FAST for your buck!
• Drive Spin down, but we’ll have to see that in action relative to how many drives are in use in this scenario

Oh, and I’m sure you can clearly read the rest! So you tell me what you think? Do you see enhancements of how this will dramatically impact your CLARiiON today on the floor for the future and beyond?   Seriously reducing drive counts has it’s SIGNIFICANT benefits, especially when considering the heavy utilization of SATA 1TB’s and how you’re using them on the floor today.

I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Today was the big day! The launch of the Virtual Computing Environment coalition, also known as the VCE Initiative!

CNN Broke the news as far as the link to the Webinar would go, with announcements being made by:
John Chambers, chairman and CEO for Cisco
Joe Tucci, chairman and CEO for EMC Corp
Paul Maritz, president and CEO for VMware

There has been a lot of chatter about this, over the weekend and even moreso leading into this announcement, with some highlights:

The launch of Privatecloud.com is only the beginning in the mass of places to find out information and content on this amazing initative.

VCE Beats out IBM with Melbourne IT

Cisco and EMC, Together with VMware, Form Coalition to Accelerate Pervasive Virtualization and Private Cloud Infrastructures

In unveiling the Virtual Computing Environment coalition, Cisco and EMC also introduced Acadia, a joint venture focused on accelerating customer build-outs of private cloud infrastructures through an end-to-end enablement of service providers and large enterprise customers. Acadia’s unique “build, operate, transfer” model for delivering the Vblock architecture, addressing people, process and technology, will offer customers further choice, flexibility and cost advantages as they seek to virtualize their IT infrastructures and evolve to private cloud environments. In addition to Cisco and EMC as the lead investors, the build-out of Acadia’s expanded capabilities in 2010 has also been capitalized by investments from VMware and Intel. Because the Vblock architecture relies heavily on Intel Xeon® processors and other Intel data center technology, Intel will join the Acadia effort as a minority investor to facilitate and accelerate customer adoption of the latest Intel technology for servers, storage, and networking.

Cisco, EMC, and VMware join hands and plunge into cloud: Acadia, the power of three

In fact, many partners – both systems integrators, and service providers have all started lining up behind Vblocks.    Here are just a few examples:

Most of the vCloud Express launch partners are using the VCE coalition, and want to move forward with a formal Vblock model.   Examples are Terremark, Alphawest, Savvis, Orange and SunGard. (Thanks for this Chad!)

Virtual Compute Environment – an insider’s take.

Virtual Compute Environment – Vblock Partner Ecosystem

Virtual Compute Announcement – Integrated Sales/Service/Support

Virtual Compute Environment – Solutions Venture and Investment

Virtual Compute Environment – Technology Innovations

Also, looks like there is some Twitter presence too! So, represent! @privatecloudcom

Today, is quite an exciting day, and while all of this is high level, I’d be glad to go into much more depth about this – something I’m sure many of those linked and referenced here can say and do the same.   This is not intended to be a tutorial, but an advisory of what’s new, where to go, and I’ll have separate blog posts to go into the details :) It’s an exciting day! :)