Well EMCWorld 2010’s a wrap for me. Some interesting Day 2 announcements included:
- Advanced FAST and FAST cache for CLARiiON were announced which pertain to how SSD storage is used in the subsystem. Advanced FAST provides for sub-lun storage tiering between SATA disk, performance disk, and SSD storage. Such automated data movement between tiers is managed by policy automation. FAST cache converts SSD storage into a cache expanded memory for the storage subsystem. It is not quite a NetApp PAM equivalent because of it’s location at the end of internal FC link, but it’s close.
- Unisphere for CLARiiON and Celerra was announced. This is a combined management administration interface that replaces CLARiiON Navisphere and Celerra Manager and supplies a unified view (single pain of glass) to administer these two products.
- Boost for Data Domain was announced. Last month EMC’s Data Domain rolled out their Global Deduplication Appliance (GDA) which depends on Symantec’s OST API to support a shared or split deduplication process. This capability now supports all other Data Domain appliances and increases the ingestion rate for these systems. Essentially, EMC’s Boost moves some deduplication processing over to Symantec’s Media Server and by doing so reduces the media server processing and bandwidth requirements (as only unique data need be shipped to the DD appliance) and also increases ingest speed by sharing the deduplication load and reducing input data.
We discussed GDA and it’s OST split deduplication processing at length in an EMC announcement summary in last month’s newsletter We will be also place this on our our website later this month if you’re interested in more information.
There was plenty of other announcements while I was there and I heard the technical sessions were great too. We already discussed Day 1 activities in our post on VPLEX surfacing. But I had to leave so I missed all of Wednesday and Thursday.
This year EMC showed many video vignettes on-stage to illustrate IT problems and some of their solutions. In past EMCWorld’s this was done mostly by customers talking about technology problems and there was some of this as well. However the addition of the video segments seemed to help get their point across. How well this succeeded is anyone’s guess but I would say most of it was very entertaining.
Social media seemed even more present this year than last. Twitter was very active and blogging was too. I read one post that summarized Mark Lewis’s keynote session that was just finished – not quite real time but close. Video was being taken on the exhibit floor, live at the blogger’s lounge via “the Cube” and other places as well, most of which is probably still being edited for release I found the bloggers lounge crowded but serviceable. WiFi on the floor could have been better but this was a nit.
Overall the show was put on very well and I look forward to EMCWorld 2011 in Las Vegas next year. See you there.