What can i say about EMCWorld 2012? a lot.
I spent a lot of time with Atmos crew (Engineering, marketing, developers, support, etc). I cant talk about all the things that we discussed. BUT. cool things are coming including full Amazon S3 api support. WIN!
to all of the Atmos crew, thank you for spending so much time with me.
I love the mighty might VMAX. it is a storage platform that does what it says and does it well. they are built like Russian tanks. you can beat the living daylights out of them, and they still just run.
VMAX FTS is a win for a lot of people that want to migrate from non-Symmetrix/VMAX to the VMAX (must be running 5876 code). With minimal downtime (basically long enough to point them from old storage array to new one) you can start the migration. going through this with ENG just make be feel all warm and fuzzy on the inside.
of course they released the next generation of the hardware (10k, 20k, 40k). monsters.
Isilon released new hardware also. faster, more dense, etc. yeah baby, we can get more NFS in a smaller footprint. now that with the HDFS support, that makes it a big win for customers. you can grow your hadoop and your NFS as you see fit. you are not bound with separate pools of storage.
this software package written inside of EMC, allows you to run hadoop jobs across multiple hadoop clusters. even clusters that aren't geographically local to each other. it is basically allowing you to do hadoop onto hadoop clusters. So you Map out to the hadoop clusters that do MapR within their cluster. Then the results are reduced back up to WW Hadoop. looking in hindsight it makes a lot of sense. Thanks to people like Dan (@dbbaskkette) for this awesome software.
Nick (@lynxbat) with PuppetLabs tools puppet to the next level with Razor. Razor allows you to use puppet do deploy to servers without having to go in and manually setup the hardware information before kickstarting the host. I know I am not doing justice in my description of Razor. people are using it to deploy huge amounts of servers without first probing the hardware for its information (MACs, iQNs, WWNs, etc). Amazing stuff! Plus EMC is has open sourced it. WOW!
EMC announced that they acquired Syncplicity at the beginning of the conference. Syncplicity is similar to OxygenCloud but is designed for Enterprise or "Big Business" customers. Based on what I saw, I am keeping OxygenCloud for my personal cloud (yeah I run OC out of my house for my files… see previous posts about OC).
the vSpecialists setup and ran the labs again this year. Most labs offered and more taken. a lot more taken. They even made a VMAX VSA for the VMAX labs. WOW! thanks david (@daverdfw) for it! I tried breaking the VMAX VSA but it took everything I threw at it. Now, could I have done something very odd or edge case to break it, sure. But nothing I did from the commands I could remember off the top of my head broke it. the only lab that I was not able to do that I really wanted to was the Atmos lab. it is alright since I will work with EMC to get access to the lab at some point.
bloggers lounge vs alumni lounge
thank you EMC for the bloggers lounge. thank you very much. had comfortable places to sit and blog/twitter from. had plenty of power as long as the circuit break doesnt trip (one powerstrip had that issue a lot). plus it had a coffee bar with barista. and he made one hell of a espresso.
the alumni lounge had a nice selection of soft drinks and juices. hmm maybe the bloggers lounge had some of that too? maybe. alumni lounge had places to sit and work but not nearly as comfortable as the bloggers lounge. So I ended up grabbing drinks from the alumni lounge and going over to the bloggers lounge.