Storage @ Work

I thought people would be interested in meeting some of the folks who work at EqualLogic. Who better to start with than Jennifer, who runs our web-marketing events. Take it away, Jen....

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Todd Barton stopped by EqualLogic's San Jose office this week. He's a great guy and I thought I'd introduce him to the blogosphere. After helping customers for the last couple years as one of our superb systems engineering team, Todd is now starting a new role as our Worldwide Director of Sales Training. Road Warriors R us.

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Kirk Goodwin the IT Manager at Unicity - and James Rupprecht, the Storage SE at Valcom in Salt Lake City talk about their success working together on the installation of an EqualLogic iSCSI SAN.

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A couple weeks ago the RupturedMonkey blog site asked blog readers about the television show Heroes. While Ruptured Monkey expressed the belief that this is off the storage topic, I'm not so sure. It seems from reading the comments to that post that lots of storage geeks have a hankering science fiction shows. I think it has something to do with our livelihoods being based on the strange phenomenon of data, its abstract relationship to our world, as well as it's storage and "livelihood". Let me know what's up - what sci fi shows can you never get enough of. Anybody besides me like Threshold?

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Earlier today Chuck Hollis from EMC wrote on his blog about the advantage of using service providers for things like storage. While I agree with him about a number of things such as taxes, I tend to think that outsourcing your own job is a bit of a career limiter.

In the video below, I ask IT professionals why they would abdicate storage management when it is relatively easy to get the satisfaction and accolades of having done it themselves. Like any type of work, the tools employed for storage management make a huge difference. iSCSI SAN storage tools from EqualLogic are true storage power tools.

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Here is a little tech highlight from the Birds of a Feather session at VMworld. In this video, Eric Schott, our director of Product Management discusses how remote replication works using EqualLogic iSCSI storage arrays.

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I finally got around to mixing up some of the video from our customer appreciation party at VMworld. Like I always say, we have the greatest customers - it's nice to be able to kick back with them.

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We had special guests from VMware for this event too. Preceding the party was a birds of a feather session where we explored VMware's newly announced Site Recovery Manager (SRM). Very cool.

Ezra Wiesner from the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia talks about using EqualLogic iSCSI SAN storage for their SQL server and video applications. The audio on this interview is a bit screwed up - my apologies.

Check out their online media player for events and artists appearing during the 2007-2008 season. Extremely cool!

Note: The web video service I use for this blog appears to be having some performance problems - I don't know how long this will last.

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Chuck Hollis posted on a video he saw on YouTube about EMC. It was made for a website called Wallstrip. While most of the video is a whimsical report on EMC, there is a short reference to EqualLogic in it.

I looked into Wallstrip and found they have a show on BlipTV. The description on BlipTV says: Wallstrip is where pop culture meets stock culture. Each day we take at a company who's stock is trading at or near an alltime high, and try to find the real world trend that explains why the stock is doing so well.

Its like something you'd see on the Daily Show or SNL. Be warned; there is an amazing amount of material here to divert your attention.

Marc Farley is working on some new things and some old things in a new environment. He shares a little of his experience with blog viewers here.

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In an interview with Uberpulse earlier this month following the announcement of the Dell EqualLogic PS5000 storage arrays, Eric Schott our Director of Product Management talked about the differences between server and storage virtualization. He does an excellent job here explaining why the virtualization in Dell EqualLogic arrays is complimentary - not competitive with server virtualization.

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Tim Sherbak has always been one of my faves at EqualLogic. A true beast of burden in the marketing department and our VMware champion.

Here he is commenting from VMworld Europe 2008 with John "Homey" Joseph on server and storage virtualization.

The camera angle adds interest. Tim's right hand gets gigantic in a couple places. Yo!, Tim! We always knew you had it in you!

Loren Feldman of 1938 media has to be one of the funniest guys making web videos.

There are no sacred cows in Loren's world. An entertaining review if there ever was one.

Here is the Scoble video he cracks on in his review.

So Loren, U B de eggman?

John Joseph, our fearless marketing leader at Dell EqualLogic, was interviewed by Carryl Roy at Virtual Strategy Magazine. They talk about the history of the company, its acquisition and integration by Dell, product architecture and features of the PS5000 product line, the customer experience, pooled storage, business plans and a glimpse into our technology futures.

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Chuck Hollis and Stephen Foskett have both blogged recently about storage protocols. I've certainly done my fair share of it too in the past. I'm not convinced people want a single network for all traffic - even if that's what they think they want today. Here's a one-handed vid of me rambling about it.

By now, Netapp's new identity isn't exactly "new" news but it's about as good as it gets in the storage blogosphere. So I was trying to figure out today what I didn't like about Netapp's new logo and it finally occurred to me that it reminded me in some incomplete way of the EqualLogic logo. What's with that? Anyway here is a video I shot last night about it and a few links to other people's comments.

Stephen Foskett - Pack Rat
Dave's Blog (inside out Dilbertization - a techie talking marketing)
The Register and it's hilarious reaction
Zerowait High Availability
The Occasional blog
Inspired by Foskett (see his link above)
Mojo-man

In the video below, Scott Reynolds, an attendee at the Data Protection Summit tells Storage @ Work that the sessions at the conference were awesone. Too bad the conference was sparsely attended because the content was top-notch, great stuff. Even if the cake was B-grade. I don't know why, but conference interviews often involve chow.

FWIW, this is the first of three discussions with Tom Coughlin, an expert on storage devices technologies who covers the gamut, from consumer to enterprise applications. In this video he sagely reveals that "they can't smell your breath on a video". Thanks Tom for the confidence builder.

In this interview Marc Farley talks to Tom Coughlin about the world of storage for consumer electronics, including flash, disk drives, low cost computing and automotive applications. Some viewers will appreciate his analysis of the economic advantages flash has over small disk drives as the price of consumer products decreases.

In addition to being a brilliant guy and a true industry expert, he has also recently had a book published titled, Digital Storage in Consumer Electronics: The Essential Guide.

Interested people can get it here on Amazon.com.

The second of two interviews with Tom Coughlin at the Data Protection Summit about the world of storage devices - this time getting his perspective on emerging disk drive technologies used in enterprise applications. Among the topics discussed are drive encryption and secure erase.

Storage @ Work rants about the status of digital security and launches off for a few seconds when another driver cuts him off on Highway 280 in San Jose.

The security industry likes to characterize the situation as an arms race, but that's mostly because they are developing digital protection technology. I think its much more like a siege, where our digital resources are mostly sitting waiting for hackers to attack, with very little means to attack the hackers in defense. It's the ultimate rope a dope, but without a jab, hook, uppercut to go with it.

Marc Farley talks about running an "air gap" network for your iSCSI SAN. (Thanks to Dave Siles for that analogy) . This advice holds for any iSCSI SAN, whether or not you are using Dell EqualLogic PS5000 series storage arrays or some other vendor's equipment.

A new roadrant where I bust a knuckle, avoid another bad driver and recall a childhood fear, thanks to the beating heart graphic that Netapp is using.

In case you didn't see it, Dave Hitz posted again on their logo story. He doesn't sound too defensive, in fact, I think he shows some pride - maybe he designed it himself?

Will Urban, one of the Dell EqualLogic team members has an amazing pitch around Dell EqualLogic disaster recovery for VMware environments. A video of Will from VMworld was posted on the Direct2Dell site this morning. If you are interested in how site recovery manager (SRM) will work, this is a great video to watch.

Wow, Will, that was some fast talking, but not as fast as this guy. I guess you picked a bad day to give up coffee!

With SSDs coming on fairly fast and products like Dell's RD 1000 now available for removable disk drive backup, the question is what or why are you using tape. I really want to know.

Questions about the future of both iSCSI and Fibre Channel. are popular with analysts and the press.

Eric Schott, Director of Product Management gives his opinions in the interview below, which was filmed by UberPulse. Many readers will likely be surprised by what he has to say, although to me it just demonstrates the kind of clear, realistic thinking he always has.

If you want to catch Eric in person, he will be presenting at SNW next Wednesday. Here is a link to a description of his presentation.

BSG (BattleStar Galactica) starts up again tonight. Oh Frak!

R we all Cylons?
Does everybody die and get downloaded and re-made in a bathtub full of Vicks?
If my wife finds out I'm watching old episodes on my computer, how much grief will I take?
Do you get the support you need at home to be a true devotee?

The Server Room has to be one of the best forums I've seen. So if Dell EqualLogic people go there, lets make sure we don't trash it. Put the Name Dell in your sign on to avoid being poachers and don't pimp our stuff. It's fine to talk about experiences and what we know and all that, but its a tech forum not a drop box for hype - perbole.

And the rest of you too. Do your thing and back up your blood type. Somebody might need it for the ultimate restore.

Finding my stuff - real, physical stuff, not data stuff - seems to get more difficult all the time - especially the real stuff. Oh yeah and I can't find my things either. When Google House is invented, I'm buying.

The newest rev of (FREE) Dell EqualLogic software is coming out and it includes application-aware snapshots for Microsoft Exchange (we already had application aware snaps for SQL Server).

This is an amazing value for our iSCSI SAN customers, many of whom are already storing their Exchange data on Dell EqualLogic PS Series storage arrays.

StorageMojo got hacked recently and talks about it on his blog. Of course that all happened in cloud space, but it made me think about the situation closer to home.

But we did really kick butt last year. So, I'm supposed to talk about the awards that Don Bulens and EqualLogic won. OK.

We shot this video during a birds of feather during VMworld in San Francisco last September. Eric Schott (Director of Product Management, EqualLogic) and Kiran Ranabhor (Technical Product Manager for DR, VMware) has presented SRM and were asked what kinds of storage provisioning (or access modes) SRM would support.

In short, the answer is VMFS. Raw device maps and iSCSI software initiators running in virtual systems were not slated for the first release. I assume nothing changed there since September.

Last week was a big week for virtual server data protection with the introduction of VMware's Site Recovery Manager (SRM). I got a question over at my InsideIT blog that asked if linux would be supported as a guest OS for SRM functionality. Yes, it is.