Edward Branley's blog

El Reg has a quick overview of the upgrades to EMC's Symmetrix VMAX.  Some of it is good stuff:

The Fibre Channel upgrade doubles link speed from 4 to 8Gbit/s and EMC has also announced 8Gbit/s mainframe FICON links and 8Gbit/s SRDF (Symmetrix Remote Data Facility). It has added support for the mainframe zHPF (z mainframe High Performance FICON) protocol which EMC says streamlines the FICON architecture to reduce I/O overhead and improve mainframe performance.

The 8gig ports for remote replication are more of an upgrade incentive than an enticement to convert, but that makes it harder for the competition to steal EMC customers.

(more after the jump)

USP-V Enterprise Storage Array from Hitachi Data Systems

I wrote an article for this blog back in 2006 explaining the sort of thing I teach for EMC, specifically Business Continuity on large-scale storage systems. Since I'm teaching a lot for Hitachi Data Systems now, I thought it would be a good idea to elaborate a bit on their classes.

(more after the jump)

The New York Times has picked up on the concept of virtualization with two articles by Steve Lohr, one on VMware, and the other on the competition between VMware and HyperV.

I had the privilege of being the instructor for an interesting HDS Academy (EMEA) experiment over the last few weeks.  The company picked up a big order from a customer that included some extensive training requirements.  Customer (based in UK) is primarily user of enterprise-level storage arrays, but also purchases modular arrays, for use both in standalone environments and as external storage (UVM).

...in spite of the recession.  A new EMC-sponsored study projects some incredible numbers in terms of storage growth in the next 18 months: The new findings highlight the third update to the groundbreaking Digital Universe study, which measures and forecasts the vast amounts and diverse types of digital information created and copied annually. Calculated to be 487 billion gigabytes² in size, the amount of information created in 2008 is the equivalent of more than:

Something you often see in offices of computer companies is a "museum exhibit." The first one I remember was at the old ComputerLand store in Metairie, LA. When one of the very first IBM PCs they leased came back five years later, they put it out in the reception area, listing what $10,000 bought you at that time. I've always said I'll put out my TRS-80 Model I if I ever have a public office.

Just finished the test. I got an 86%, 52 out of 60This is a totally new revision of the test. With the exception of the Hi-Track question (which has been on the test since the beginning), I did not see one question from last year or the braindump/sample questions I've used in class.This is the breakdown for my set of questions: 1. Storage strategy (7)2. Enterprise Storage Hardware (15)3. Business Continuity Software (15) 4. Storage Management software (12)5. Storage Virtualization (5)

This is the current section breakdown for the HDS Modular Storage Foundations Exam (HH0-120), along with a mini-braindump:1. Storage strategy (4)2. Enterprise Storage Hardware (14)3. Business Continuity Software (15) 1 Question on Business continuity manager4. Storage Management software (12), included 2 question on Hitachi Storage Capacity Reporter5. Storage Virtualization (7)6. Archiving, Backup and restore (3) 2 questions on Hitachi Data Protection Suite,7. NAS (2), BlueArc

The exam was revised around January, and I've gotten some feedback from THI0517 students since then.  Here's a current breakdown of the sections:

Storage strategy 4

Enterprise Storage Hardware 14

Business Continuity software 15

Storage Management software 12

Storage Virtualization 7

Archiving, backup and restore 3

Day 3 of the TCI1535 class.  Day 1 summary here, Day 2 is here.All of the day spent working with SNM2, GUI and CLI. Extensive lab work, good stuff!