#SFD16 – Dell-EMC PowerMax and CloudIQ

Since #SFD14 last year, the VMAX All Flash has evolved to the PowerMax, which was announced at Dell Technologies World. PowerMax has advanced the VMAX All Flash architecture with NVMe. A nod to the SNIA session, NVMe-over-Fabrics is on the PowerMax road-map. You can watch the videos below to get all of the details. The synopsis of these sessions is this, the Symmetrix/VMAX platform is continuing to evolve, it is still the best-of-breed storage platform for legacy 3-tier hardware and legacy applications that are mission-critical. Make sure you have budget, because you are going to need it. Dell-EMC considers the PowerMax to be a flag-ship offering and will continue to invest and develop that ecosystem, since their customers demand it (yes, FICON will continue to be supported).

After the session, I mentioned to Vince Westin that within the Tech Field Day family he is considered the gold-standard that vendors should try to meet when presenting to a TFD delegation. Presenters that know their stuff, get to the point, have an opinion and are not afraid to express it.

A new offering, CloudIQ, was also presented, basically a storage administrator’s continuous health check that is offered at no extra cost for customers with active Dell-EMC storage support contracts. CloudIQ gets its data feed from the call-home function (ESRS) and is accessible as a SaaS offering, no on-site resources required. If you are an existing Dell-EMC customer, make sure you talk to your Dell-EMC account executive about getting it enabled with your account for the supported storage solutions you have in your data centers, there is definite value here.

SFD16 Dell-EMC Session Resources:

 

 

Nutanix .NEXT US Announcements

This week, Nutanix .NEXT US is being held in New Orleans. There are five announcements of note:

  • Nutanix Beam: Rebranding of the Botmetric acquisition by Nutanix. This adds Cost Optimization and Visibility, Centralized Financial Governance and Intelligent Consumption Planning to the Nutanix Cloud Management suite.
  • Nutanix Era: Suite of software that adds Database Lifecycle Management to the Nutanix Cloud Management suite. Version 1.0 will support Oracle and PostgreSQL databases.
  • Nutanix Flow: Includes incorporation of Netsil acquisition by Nutanix. Provides micro-segmentation, application traffic visualization and service chaining.
  • Nutanix Xtract: new version will support migration from AWS EC2 to Nutanix AHV.
  • Nutanix X-Ray: Automated test platform will be Open Sourced and the latest version supports testing of Microsoft Hyper-V and Storage Spaces. Continue reading Nutanix .NEXT US Announcements

DECM-EA Overview

Earlier this week I defended the Dell EMC Certification Master – Enterprise Architect (DECM-EA) qualification at Dell Technologies World. Unfortunately, I did not pass. A combination of an old design and not being as well versed in Cloud-native technologies as I believed led to that result. My intention is to use a more recent project as my base when I resubmit in 2019.

Continue reading DECM-EA Overview

Dell Technologies World – PowerEdge announcements

Dell EMC has announced the availability of the PowerEdge “xa” model (Xtreme Analytics, “xd” was Xtreme Density), where the ratio of CPU to GPU can be 1:1. They also previewed the new PowerEdge MX platform, which is slated to be released in 2H 2018. PowerEdge MX is taking the lessons learned from the M1000E and FX2 platforms and ties the emerging technology of Gen-Z to create the next-generation modular platform (Kinetic infrastructure stack – see slides at the end).

Continue reading Dell Technologies World – PowerEdge announcements