Earlier this week, EMC's Sam Marraccini wrote a guest blog on Microsoft's SQL Server team site highlighting the benefits of Flash technology with Microsoft SQL Server. In short, flash continues to be a game changer and with the introduction of EMC Xtrem products including XtremSF (PCIe server flash), XtremSW Cache (server side caching) and XtremIO (all Flash array) is helping to improve performance for key application workloads. When using flash technology to either extend the cache of the storage array or using flash PCIe cards in the server itself (or even better, using both!) – you can dramatically increase the... Continue reading

EMC World is just around the corner (May 6-9) and we are busy behind the scenes preparing for a big week! As part of EMC's Solutions Group (ESG), my team is responsible for helping to educate and promote EMC's many Microsoft solutions. As you might imagine, there is a lot to talk about so the hardest part about something like this is how to cover everything (for a full listing of our Microsoft activities, be sure to check out this great overview on the Everything Microsoft at EMC Community)! For starters we will be showcasing some key recent EMC solutions... Continue reading

Guest blog post by Roberto Mendizabal, EMC Corporation During the last several years virtualization has taken the center stage and become one of the key enabler technologies for private cloud deployments across many different IT shops. From customers who prefer to deploy their services in-house, as there is still much reluctance to embrace public clouds, primarily due to the short comings in public cloud SLAs, to those customers who need to have full control over their data. While virtualization does facilitate asset consolidation and provide great hardware ROI, it does bring many new challenges such as management and monitoring. As... Continue reading

Wow, what a week! Amazing how fast the time went by this week at Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) 2013 but that's what happens when you are busy and having fun! We at EMC had a great show and hopefully those attending had a good time as well! A few things I learned this week is that a lot of customers are using System Center 2012 even if they are just kicking the tires and the response has been that the product looks great! We had many people come by the booth to learn about EMC's support for Microsoft System Center... Continue reading

Yesterday kicked off Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) 2013 with a keynote from Brad Anderson, Microsoft's VP for Windows Server and System Center. The keynote started with pumped up music from a live DJ during a 25 minute delay leaving the crowd wondering with anticipation, are they building up to something big? And then the show started with a big…thump. The delay? Well that was caused by an Internet outage which was going to make Microsoft's live demos a bit problematic (which also kicked off a series of jokes about availability of the cloud and a solid backup plan. Unfortunately for... Continue reading

Earlier this week I blogged about all of the great Microsoft Virtualization and Management integration that EMC has been developing and that will be showcased during Microsoft's Management Summit (MMS) next week. But don't take it just from me; here are some articles, blogs, white papers and videos from EMC's Microsoft Specialist and EMC's Solutions Group community highlighting EMC technologies and our support for Microsoft management technologies: How can I not start with Karsten Bott's ESIPSToolkit Series?? Karsten has written a series of Powershell cmdlet blogs showing how to write scripts using Powershell to manage EMC storage arrays. His blogs... Continue reading

Spring is here which means warmer weather (well maybe not for everyone just yet), the start of baseball and the start of something else - Tradeshow Season! This year we will begin with Microsoft's Management Summit (MMS) 2013 which kicks off in just a few short days running April 8th - 12th in Las Vegas. For those of you not familiar with MMS, it is an annual Microsoft tradeshow focused on management, automation, virtualization and orchestration. Many attendees of MMS are focused on software packaging and deployment, virtualization concepts, overall management and orchestration of key datacenter technologies or in other... Continue reading

Last night I was reading Michael Otey's blog entitled Mission Critical Application Virtualization. The timing of this couldn't have been better as I was reviewing my own slides for a webcast I participated in this morning discussing Virtualizing Microsoft workloads along with one of our customers (replay is available if you're interested). In Michael's blog he talks about many of the same things I was preparing to discuss including that virtualization is no longer just a technology that you may run across when talking to customers but it is an IT staple. Instead of asking, "do you virtualize"? I find... Continue reading

What can be better than a free tool such as EMC's Storage Integrator (ESI) software? The fact that it continues to get better! Last week, EMC released ESI version 2.1 which includes EMC management packs for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM). So what is ESI? If you're not familiar with EMC's Storage Integrator software, it is an easy to use wizard based MMC tool that allows you to easily provision EMC storage for a Windows environment. By answering a few simple questions such as providing a LUN name, selecting a storage pool and choosing a drive letter – ESI... Continue reading

Two weeks ago today EMC held our annual EMC Microsoft Specialist (or "MSpecialist") Technical Summit in Santa Clara, CA. This year's event was held over the course of three long days and brought together approximately 100 of EMC's Microsoft Specialists (considering this was the week following Thanksgiving holiday and the start of EMC's last month of our fiscal year - the turnout was amazing!). During the course of the Summit EMC and Microsoft presented deep technical sessions on topics such as: Windows Server 2012 new features including Hyper-V 2012 SQL Server 2012 including EMC best practices and integration System Center... Continue reading

This past week we just finished attending and supporting Microsoft SQL PASS Summit, the largest gathering of SQL Server professionals. SQL PASS was a big success with over 5000 attendees and there was a lot of buzz over SQL Server 2012 as well as Windows Server 2012. At the EMC booth I had the chance to meet with many different people from all different sized customers over the course of several days! It was great meeting people and talking to them about their questions and issues. Overall most people were interested in EMC's VFCache technologies to significantly improve database performance,... Continue reading

SQL PASS Summit is the single largest gathering of Microsoft SQL Server professionals in the world and brings together a significant community of SQL Server DBAs and BI architects and users. This year SQL Pass Summit will be held November 6-9, 2012 in Seattle, WA. EMC wouldn't miss it again this year and will be a Gold Sponsor for the show! Come by our booth and meet EMC experts (and me) to learn about EMC and MIcrosoft technologies. We'll be showcasing our SQL Server solutions focusing on how we Optimize and Scale SQL Server, how we Protect SQL Server environments... Continue reading

Have you had a chance to learn all about the new features in Windows Server 2012? All the changes to Hyper-V? Virtual FC? SMB 3.0? ODX? Storage Spaces? Powershell enhancements? SMI-S? It's ok if you're still learning...we get it, there are a lot of changes! Join EMC and Windows IT Pro for a 3 part webcast and get caught up on all the new features of Windows Server 2012 and learn about how EMC is supporting and integrating with Microsoft's new operating system! Earlier this week I joined Mike Otey from Windows IT Pro and Mike Truitt from Microsoft to... Continue reading

Big Data is one of those industry buzz words that a lot of people talk about but what does it really mean?? Big Data is in everything we do including data collected about our buying habits, our online profiles and what we search for or where we've been. Many companies use this information to customize coupons, websites and other things tailored to our buying habits but what does this data mean to us? What do we look like when we put a face to big data? There is an effort currently underway called the Human Face of Big Data and... Continue reading

Earlier this month I blogged about the launch of Microsoft Windows Server 2012 and some of the new features that are relevant to the storage industry. Windows Server 2012 has many enhancements that help bring storage concepts natively to Windows users as well as offering the ability for SAN storage to leverage these new features to provide additional benefits to the customer (ODX for example). Following up on this new product launch, EMC issued a press release last week announcing broad support for Windows Server 2012, demonstrating EMC's continued leadership in the marketplace for supporting and integrating with Microsoft technologies!... Continue reading

On Tuesday Microsoft released Windows Server 2012, the latest version of their server based operating system which is also being called the "Cloud OS" by Microsoft. Why the Cloud OS? Because the scalability, performance and flexibility enhancements found in Windows 2012 are core components for cloud computing. Well that and the significant improvements to Hyper-V probably have something to do with it as well. But I think they just as easily could have called it the Storage OS. As Microsoft themselves state on their Server and Cloud Platform website "Storage plays a critical role in cloud and datacenter services." It... Continue reading

This week at Microsoft TechEd 2012, EMC's Avamar 6.1 has been nominated for a "Best of TechEd" award. What makes Avamar such a great product for Microsoft environments? For starters, Avamar 6.1 has full support for Microsoft Hyper-V. By installing the Avamar software on a Hyper-V server, you can provide backup of the VMs on that server. This includes full backup protection of your virtual machines or the applications running in that VM including support for Cluster Shared Volumes (CSVs). Avamar also allows you to restore VMs to the original server or to another server. This addresses several scenarios such... Continue reading

What another great day at Microsoft TechEd 2012! Yesterday I spent most of the day at our booth talking with customers. People were interested in data protection, storage topics such as data tiering and deduplication, Windows Server 2012 features like ODX and the EMC Microsoft Private Cloud (be sure to check out the new solution briefs which have now been published! We also held several customer meetings including talking to a customer who had a large SharePoint deployment and was interested in remote blob storage and another large customer with a SQL Server environment spread across the globe with high... Continue reading

UPDATE - 06/14/12: EMC's Microsoft Private Cloud Solution Briefs are now posted! Here we are in Day 2 of Microsoft TechEd 2012 and another busy day! There have been many great sessions including overviews of Windows Server 2012 features, changes to Active Directory, new Hyper-V features and more about Powershell cmdlets than I thought was possible to know! At the EMC booth (205), we continue to be busy with discussions about EMC hardware, how we integrate with Microsoft System Center 2012 for enhanced management of EMC devices as well as discussions about protecting key applications and providing data deduplication for... Continue reading

6/13/2012 update: For a great overview of Microsoft TechEd 2012 and a video clip from Microsoft's opening keynote, be sure to check out EMC's Inside the Microsoft Partnership!! Here I am at Microsoft TechEd 2012 and while it is only the first day, what an amazing day it has been so far!! WOW!! The keynote started with Satya Nadella, President of Microsoft's Server and Tools Business where he discussed the needs for the modern datacenter including scalable, elastic, always on and up, shared resources, automated and self service. These are all foundations of Microsoft Windows Server 2012 which is due... Continue reading

After months of planning and supporting Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) and EMCWorld, we come to the Grand Finale – Microsoft TechEd 2012! Microsoft TechEd (June 11th-15th in Orlando, FL) is THE biggest technical conference for Microsoft technologies and so it is only fitting that it will be our biggest presence of all three shows! So what's on tap for this year? EMC is a platinum sponsor for Microsoft TechEd and like year's past, we will have a lot going on. At our booth (#205) we will have over 30 EMC Microsoft Specialists, Engineers and Product Managers available to talk about... Continue reading

Coming to you live from EMC World…what an amazing show so far! Yesterday the conference opened with EMC's Mega Launch II – a wave of new products announced including an update to the Symmetrix VMAX family, Isilon's OneFS and their X400 node as well as updates to VPLEX, VNX, Iomega and more! What do these announcements have in common? EMC products are faster, scale higher and are more cloud ready than ever before!! To see the full update, keynotes and other information visit the Mega Launch home page! You can also visit Virtual Geek's excellent blog recap of many of... Continue reading

"Would you Believe".. EMC World (EMC's annual technical conference, May 21st-May 24th in Las Vegas) is right around the corner and we are all busy getting ready for another big show! At the EMC Solutions Booth (112), we'll be running a twitter challenge called #GetSmart… about Everything at EMC. By attending sessions and visiting booths and then tweeting about them using the #GetSmart hashtag, you'll be eligible to win an iPad, an Iomega PX4 and many other prizes! This twitter challenge will drive awareness around the public communities we created last year called Everything insertpartner at EMC. For instance, Everything... Continue reading

Last week was the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) in Las Vegas and what a show! Microsoft took the full wraps off System Center 2012 with a week full of sessions showcasing how Microsoft management can simplify administration for physical and virtual environments as well as infrastructure monitoring, desktop management and tools for the public and private cloud. Microsoft also officially named the next version of Windows Server to Windows Server 2012. Overall EMC had a great week with thousands of attendees at our booth (check out this crowd below!) engaging with our many specialists in conversations about System Center integration,... Continue reading

The Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) is right around the corner (April 16th-20th) and EMC is busy preparing for the show with plans to top what we did last year (if that's even possible)! MMS 2012 looks to be even bigger and better than in years past considering Microsoft plans to launch System Center 2012 with a heavy concentration of sessions and information on the new System Center features as well as private and public cloud updates. Also, a glance at the agenda indicates that the much anticipated next version of Windows and Hyper-V due out later this year will be... Continue reading