Around The Block Blog

by Nicholas Sweere, Product Marketing Manager, Dell Compellent — July 12, 2011

The release of vSphere 5 and Site Recovery Manager 5 is one of the largest product launches in VMware’s history. This launch adds additional features, customization ability, and provides an even more robust virtualization offering. In support of the launch, Dell Compellent is updating several of its ever expanding list of integrations and will be certifying them with VMware for the launch of vSphere 5:

Storage Center for vSphere 5
With the release of vSphere 5 and Storage Center 5.5.3, Dell Compellent will be fully supportive of all new storage volume/datastore mappings available through vSphere 5. Principal among these new features will be the ability to support and map up to 64TB VMFS datastores. This will allow virtualization administrators to support more, larger virtual machines (VMs) per volume/datastore.

Site Recovery Manager 5 (SRM 5)
Dell Compellent’s Storage Replication Adapter (SRA) for SRM 5 will be available for download when vSphere 5 launches later this summer. The SRA will support new features within SRM 5, like automated failback from a disaster event and the new work flows for planned migration and downtime. This new version of SRM will provide an even more complete solution for planning, automating, and recovering from disasters or planned downtime. Additionally, Dell Compellent will continue its OEM relationship with VMware for SRM 5, allowing all DR recovery hardware and software support to be centralized under a single roof using the Dell Compellent Copilot support organization.

vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) - Block Zeroing
Block Zeroing, part of the server offloading APIs known as VAAI, is supported now through our Storage Center releases. Block Zeroing allows servers and Dell Compellent to do what they do best, manage VMs and storage respectively. Block Zeroing reduces CPU load and IO on the server and reduces time to create and manage storage assets for the user.

vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) – Unmap
The release of vSphere 5 unveils another VAAI offloading API, known as Unmap. Before Unmap, deleting data from VMFS datastores, like a file or VM, did not necessarily allow for that once consumed data to return to the available storage pool. Using Unmap, the server will now notify the Compellent array to free the once consumed storage assets back to the available storage pool. This provides even more storage efficiencies using a Dell Compellent array.

Upcoming Support
We will also be updating the immensely popular and easy to use Dell Compellent vSphere Plug-In, the Enterprise Manager / vSphere Integration, and support for all the vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) primitives. We are working hard to ensure all our offerings continue to offer customers the quality experience with VMware they expect from Dell Compellent Fluid Data. Check back for updates and announcements on additional VMware integrations. In the meantime, watch Darren Thomas, Vice President and General Manager of Dell Storage, discuss Dell’s alliance with VMware — and how it enables the cloud.

by Roger Bearpark, Assistant Head of ICT at London Borough of Hillingdon — November 03, 2010

The London Borough of Hillingdon recently earned a place in the final three of the 2010 Gartner Green Data Center Excellence Awards, to be held on Monday November 22nd. It is an accolade we are proud of, and one we feel can help to dispel a myth that is too widely accepted in the storage industry. Contrary to popular belief, virtualisation can be accomplished without the need to learn a whole new skill set, and going green is less about environmental altruism in business, but more about making shrewd cost savings that directly affect your bottom line.
 
Since virtualising our storage and server footprint through Compellent and VMware, we have:

• Running over 90% of our servers, or 200 virtual machines, on nine physical platforms, including provision for DR,  cutting the ICT space we occupy by 65% and power consumption by over 80%
• Saved > £93,000 on our annual energy bill
• Saved the generation of 171 tonnes of carbon emissions each year
• Reduced the 3 year cost per Terabyte of storage by >70%
• Lowered our carbon footprint by 20% over 18 months whilst accommodating the growth required by the organisation

What is more, our deployment was easy, and that is testament to the quality of the people involved. For such results to be achieved, you need to a mix the right technology with the right support, and Compellent has been there with us every step of the way.

Alongside our VMware deployments, Compellent’s support has underpinned what really counts – results.  Many companies talk about difficult journeys, struggles and competing priorities with their moves to virtualisation. This story is different. For sure, there is some extraordinary technology inside those cabinets, but it is the people who have been inspired to develop it that count.

Working with a team that has the confidence and ability to make the journey a simple one is what makes green storage a reality. It is the people who have shared our ethos to be innovative and unafraid to do things differently who have ensured we have achieved an environment that Gartner deems worthy of excellence.

Flattering praise indeed; but our current results are not a final destination. They are a stop on the way to greater things, and therein lies the real result for a public sector organisation.  What the people from Hillingdon, Compellent and other partners have achieved means that we offer better services at reduced cost to the people that we are here to serve.

Editor’s Note: Roger Bearpark of London Borough of Hillingdon is a Compellent customer and the contributor of this blog post. To learn more about London Borough of Hillingdon and its use of Compellent systems, please read this case study. Mr. Bearpark is one of the three finalists for the 2010 Green Data Center Excellence Award; if you plan on attending the Gartner Data Center & IT Operations Summit on Nov. 22, please come and support him at 17:40 – 18:30 in Park Plaza Westminster Bridge – Westminster B+C.

by Liem Nguyen, Director of Communications and Social Media, Dell Storage — October 14, 2010

As VMworld Europe 2010 comes to a close, I wanted to highlight interesting discussions from Copenhagen this year. Compellent was at the Bella Center in Copenhagen with more than 6,000 attendees from 82 countries and one of 113 exhibitors. News highlights include the VMware View 4.5 iPad client, vCentre iPad application and VMware’s Project Horizon, which was announced last month at VMworld in San Francisco but continues to generate excitement.

Much of the buzz has been around the keynote speakers and hands-on labs taking place throughout the course of the show. More than 2,150 labs have already been completed and 19,400 virtual machines have been deployed. The labs have been so popular that blogger Christian Mohn of vNinja.net proposed holding them year-round for customers and partners – I think that’s a pretty cool idea and hope our friends at VMware seriously consider a way to pull this off. There’s been so much hype about cloud computing that it’s important to showcase some real and practical ways to design and create pragmatic solutions. That’s why Compellent is working with Intel and VMware on the “Cloud on Wheels” project.

Matt Roblin of Breathalize.co.uk blogged that VMware’s October 12 keynote from Paul Martiz and Steve Herrod was filled with positive messages, and is happy to see that the company is attacking on a lot of new fronts across the ‘New Stack.’ According to Matt’s post “Thoughts on the ‘New Stack,” VMware is clearly hungry to keep innovating and has a degree of confidence that can help support the company’s expansion.

There’s also a great summary of the Paul Martiz and Steve Herrod keynote from Mike Laverick of www.vibriefing.com, who said that while the keynote was basically the same as the one he’d seen from San Francisco, it was interesting to hear it again for nuances and additional details. That’s sort of like re-reading a great novel.

For on-the-floor sights, check out the VMworldTV YouTube page for video compilation of the first and second days of the show, as well as other tidbits like an interview with VMware’s new European CTO, Paul Strong. There’s also a great social media hub on VMworld.com, where you can get the latest feeds on blog posts, tweets, photos, and videos.

And last, but certainly not least, the Best of VMworld 2010 Europe User Awards were announced, and I'm thrilled to report that one of our Italian customers, Bankadati Servizi Informatic, was named Best Virtualization and Server Consolidation Project. Congratulations to Christian Manzia of Bankadati, Compellent’s channel partner Gruppo Reti S.p.A. and to all the winners. Here's the complete list of the award recipients from VMware’s Tony Dunn: 

• Simon Gallagher, vinf.net - Best of Show
• Simon Gallagher, vinf.net - Best Remote Office/Home Office Virtualization Project
• Benny Goedbloed, Belgian Department of Justice - Best Desktop Virtualization Project
• Paul Maddock, Warwickshire College - Best Desktop Virtualization Project Honorable Mention
• Christian Manzia, Bankadati - Best Virtualization and Server Consolidation Project
• Richard Nunan, DNM Technology - Best Private Cloud Computing Project
• Daniel Pfuhl, University Hospital Leipzig - Best Virtualization for Disaster Recovery Project

Over at Tech Target's SearchVirtualDataCentre.co.uk, Lauren Horwitz and Kayleigh Bateman report on all six award winners and document Bankadati’s integration of Compellent Fluid Data in this slide. In honoring Christian, judges said, “Bankadati created more room for applications and data that really need the performance."

Another Compellent end-user, Kim Deleuran, CTO of IT Gaarden, based not too far from Copenhagen, was interviewed by Kayleigh for her cloud computing article on two different viewpoints on creating and managing virtual and cloud data centers: using products from multiple IT vendors or from a single or fewer sources. IT Gaarden, for instance, chose Compellent, VMware Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. for its infrastructure. 

What stands out the most to you from VMworld Europe? Do you agree with using best-of-breed solutions for virtualized or cloud infrastructures? Let us know your thoughts.

Sounds like if you didn’t go to Copenhagen you missed a lot. I’m already trying to talk my boss into letting me go to both US and Europe VMworlds next year!

If you want just the links, here they are:

vNinjanet: http://vninja.net/virtualization/extending-vmworld-labs/

Breathalize.co.uk: http://breathalize.co.uk/2010/10/12/thoughts-on-the-new-stack/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Breathalize+%28breathalize%29

VMworld Youtube: www.youtube.com/VMworldTV

VMware community page: http://www.vmworld.com/blogs/vmworld/2010/10/13/best-of-vmworld-2010-europe-user-awards

Search Virtual Data Centre:

http://searchvirtualdatacentre.techtarget.co.uk/news/article/0,289142,sid203_gci1521802,00.html

http://searchvirtualdatacentre.techtarget.co.uk/news/article/0,289142,sid203_gci1521802,00.html

http://searchvirtualdatacentre.techtarget.co.uk/news/article/0,289142,sid203_gci1521812,00.html