Designing the Next Generation Data Center #KN EMC
September 17th, 2008 | 
Author: I attended the VMworld 2008 EMC Keynote session at 11:00 am today (Weds), but my battery was almost drained so I took manual notes. This post is a translation of those notes.
Chad Sakac, Senior Director and Mr. VMware at EMC, hosted this session titled Designing the Next Generation Data Center. The session was about how storage and networking vendors must work together to build upon the new features available in the new VDC-OS suite of technologies. Specifically, this session zeroed in on the vStorage group of features. Chad explained that EMC, Cisco, and VMware have been working together for a while and he would demo the results of this collaboration for us. Along with Chad onstage was Ed Bugnion, Cisco VP/CTO Virtualization, and Scott Davis, VMware Chief Architect.
Chad began by providing some opinion on how he felt vendors need to evolve their storage products for the next generation data center and the VMware VDC-OS. Some of the points he made were:
- The storage protocol war is over. Performance differences are minimal so the choice is up to the customer
- The storage product needs to integrate with VMware’s vStorage features and APIs.
- VI storage needs to leverage thin provisioning
- VI storage needs to leverage data deduplicaton
- VI storage needs to use IP multipathing
- VI storage needs to be simple to implement and configure
Chad then talked about a vPod storage device EMC developed for a customer that was VDC-OS ready. It was easily installed in the top of the rack and ready to use. I could not find anything online about an EMC vPod device today.
He then moved on to talk about the Clarion CX4 Series which he described as engineered for ESX and virtual machines. See EMC’s press release from August 5th for more information about these products.
After a brief hardware demonstration and feature discussion Chad moved on to a demo of the VMware API for vStorage. He showed how the API can be used for multipathing and for “I/O Dedupe”. Rather than give you my notes on these demos go to Chad’s Virtual Geek blog post about these new capabilities. Watch the videos of the same demos he gave us today.
Some other interesting things I heard in this session:
- Unified Fabric – the concept of combining the traffic of the LAN, SAN, and Vmotion networks all on the same cables to minimize the administration and configuration needed. 10 GB Ethernet is enabling this transformation
- EMC’s initiative to ship all of their products as virtual appliances – If I heard this right, EMC believes all of their filers can provide shared storage as VMs in the vCloud.
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