So it looks like Microsoft has finally found their next CEO after a 6 month search as Satya Nadella is rumored to be promoted to this position shortly. According to many of the articles I have read, Nadella is a true technologist with experience working in Microsoft's Online Services Division, Business Division and most recently the Server and Tools Business. I attended a meeting several years ago in which Satya was present and my memory of him is someone who isn't very loud or overpowering but he was thoughtful, focused and had the attention of the room. Satya has worked... Continue reading

Remember back in the day when you would spend countless hours designing your storage array to determine how many hard drives you would need to meet the performance needs of your applications? In many cases you would design an elaborate storage layout including RAID groups, volumes and LUNS complete with color-coding to keep track of all the different data types and drives that are being managed. EMC's 60,000 Mailbox Microsoft ESRP 2013 Submission It sure looks impressive but your proposed storage layout shouldn't require a degree in graphic arts! In some cases "simple" tools were created to help design storage... Continue reading

I've always liked this time of the year. The weather starts changing and you can feel a cool breeze in the air. Leaves are changing colors and you can reflect on your summer adventures while thinking ahead to chilly evening by the fire and the upcoming holidays. Some people aren't ready to let go of summer but unfortunately change is inevitable. And like the seasons, people must change too which brings me to this blog post. Last month I decided to say goodbye to EMC. This had less to do with my previous company and more about the opportunity in... Continue reading

How do you improve on a free tool that simplifies storage provisioning for Microsoft workloads and already includes many advanced features such as virtualization, clustering and monitoring? You add support for Microsoft Exchange provisioning, Microsoft Database Availability Groups (DAG) and EMC RecoverPoint management…while still being free of charge! If you've read my posts before you'll know that I am a HUGE fan of EMC's Storage Integrator or ESI (see Exhibits A, B, C & D). ESI was originally created as a tool to simplify the storage creation and management in a Windows environment. By answering a few simple questions using... Continue reading

Last week was Microsoft TechEd 2013 and what a show it was! Microsoft announced SQL Server 2014 including in-memory OLTP (or project "Hekaton") in addition to features such as big data analytics. Microsoft also announced changes to their Windows Azure pricing and R2 releases for Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012. What generated the most buzz at TechEd? Significantly reduced pricing for Microsoft Surface tablets (Pro and RT) resulted in very long lines so attendees could get their hands on these hot items and according to a few people I talked to…then turn around and put them on eBay... Continue reading

Next week is Microsoft TechEd in New Orleans, LA and we at EMC are busy planning for a great show! TechEd is my favorite tradeshow because of its large size and the different type of people you can meet including infrastructure managers (virtualization, servers, network or storage), application specialists, developers and even IT management. This year doesn't look like it will disappoint either. Microsoft has 9 different tracks covering everything from Cloud, Datacenter, Collaboration and Social, Windows client and Windows phone. Add in Birds of a Feather, Hands on Labs, Certifications, Ask the Experts, Jam Sessions and much more! EMC... Continue reading

What's blue, has six wheels and delivers highly available virtual Microsoft workloads? That would be the Avnet Mobile Data Center Solution for EMC VSPEX voted one of the Top 10 Hot Products from EMC World according to CRN! What makes the new mobile data center solution a top 10 product? It is pre-configured as a fully functional compute, network and storage solution allowing customers to have a virtual private cloud up and running in no time. It includes high-availability and disaster recovery so applications remain always available. It can be used as a long-term private cloud solution, as a temporary... Continue reading

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