In the last month, I attended two Documentum User Group meetings.  They were very different experiences, beneficial in different ways.  The NY group was fun and was a chance to talk to lots of different users

I am going to do something slightly different this post, I’m going to focus on the positives. Let’s see how that works.

Razmik Grants a Vision of Documentum’s Future

The New York user group was simply awesome. That is not to say that it was perfect or the best I had ever attended.  What made it so good was the level of interaction of, get this, the USERS of Documentum. The presentations in NY weren’t bad either.

Razmik, the VP and CTO of the CMA Division of EMC (Documentum), gave the keynote.  It was very similar to the keynote delivered by Mark Lewis in Orlando, but the message was more evolved.  The important topic within the presentation was Master Content Management, what I have previously referred to Skynet.

The term isn’t as evil as it sounds, or at least, EMC isn’t to blame for it.  In the world of structured data, there is the concept of Master Data Management. MDM is the management of all data in an organization, even when the information is distributed in multiple systems.

Let’s translate this to content. Managing all content in an organization from one central location.  This can be done through a virtual repository or in a federated manor.  The point is that content is managed in-place from a central, controlling, application.

So how does this work? This is where CMIS comes into play. If you can talk to any repository without having to configure a connector or trying to determine the proper API, then you can act as the Master Content Repository.

This is assuming, of course, that the "in-place" repository has the capabilities to perform what is needed. Take eDiscovery. All these great tools for finding content, but what happens when you find something relevant? You have to place a Hold on it.  Well, not every system can support that, so you have to ingest the content into one that does. If the system can support Holds, you can just place a Hold on the content right then and there. Welcome to Skynet.

There are still some other problems to be worked out, like mapping the metadata between systems, and leveraging that through CMIS. It is a vision, and it is something that you can point at as a direction. Is it the right one? Time will tell.

After all of the presentations, there was an experts panel, that included Razmik. I just want to personally thank Razmik for participating. It was nice to see him try and answer every question without avoidance. He was a good sport and I think we all came away feeling a little better.

A Day in the Life of the DC User Group

The DC group is different. It is a user group that suffers from lower "user" participation.  There are no case studies and the expert panel consists of integrators.  To be fair, for many federal agencies, the Documentum expert is an integrator.  The result is that it feels more like an EMC event than a user group.

Of course, no dynamic presentations were given at the user group.  xCP was presented, but being the biggest push by EMC in recent months, very little new was presented.  I would direct you to Lee Smith’s post on xCP from Momentum Athens for insight as to what the future holds in that department.

On the plus side, I know just about everyone at the DC meeting.  It is usually a time to trade war stories and discuss our latest pains with Documentum. Still, I’d rather meet new people and hear about new solutions that people are implementing.

Remember, the user groups are only as good as the number users that attend and participate. So please support your local user group. I promise you will get something useful out of it.

With their recent acquisition of Data Domain, some people at EMC have become table thumping experts overnight on why you it’s absolutely imperative that you backup to Data Domain boxes as disk backup over NAS, rather than a fibre-channel connected VTL.

Their argument seems to come from the numbers – the wrong numbers.

The numbers constantly quoted are number of sales of disk backup Data Domain vs VTL Data Domain. That is, some EMC and Data Domain reps will confidently assert that by the numbers, a significantly higher percentage of Data Domain for Disk Backup has been sold than Data Domain with VTL. That’s like saying that Windows is superior to Mac OS X because it sells more. Or to perhaps pick a little less controversial topic, it’s like saying that DDS is better than LTO because there’s been more DDS drives and tapes sold than there’s ever been LTO drives and tapes.

I.e., an argument by those numbers doesn’t wash. It rarely has, it rarely will, and nor should it. (Otherwise we’d all be afraid of sailing too far from shore because that’s how it had always been done before…)

Let’s look at the reality of how disk backup currently stacks up in NetWorker. And let’s preface this by saying that if backup products actually started using disk backup properly tomorrow, I would be the first to shout “Don’t let the door hit your butt on the way out” to every VTL on the planet. As a concept, I wish VTLs didn’t have to exist, but in the practical real world, I recognise their need and their current ascendency over ADV_FILE. I have, almost literally at times, been dragged kicking and screaming to that conclusion.

Disk Backup, using ADV_FILE type devices in NetWorker:

• Can’t move a saveset from a full disk backup unit to a non-full one; you have to clear the space first.
• Can’t simultaneously clone from, stage from, backup to and recover from a disk backup unit. No, you can’t do that with tape either, but when disk backup units are typically in the order of several terabytes, and virtual tapes are in the order of maybe 50-200 GB, that’s a heck of a lot less contention time for any one backup.
• Use tape/tape drive selection algorithms for deciding which disk backup unit gets used in which order, resulting in worst case capacity usage scenarios in almost all instances.
• Can’t accept a saveset bigger than the disk backup unit. (It’s like, “Hello, AMANDA, I borrowed some ideas from you!”)
• Can’t be part-replicated between sites. If you’ve got two VTLs and you really need to do back-end replication, you can replicate individual pieces of media between sites – again, significantly smaller than entire disk backup units. When you define disk backup units in NetWorker, that’s the “smallest” media you get.
• Are traditionally space wasteful. NetWorker’s limited staging routines encourages clumps of disk backup space by destination pool – e.g., “here’s my daily disk backup units, I use them 30 days out of 31, and those over there that occupy the same amount of space (practically) are my monthly disk backup units, I use them 1 day out of 31. The rest of the time they sit idle.”
• Have poor staging options (I’ll do another post this week on one way to improve on this).

If you get a table thumping sales person trying to tell you that you should buy Data Domain for Disk Backup for NetWorker, I’d suggest thumping the table back – you want the VTL option instead, and you want EMC to fix ADV_FILE.

Honestly EMC, I’ll lead the charge once ADV_FILE is fixed. I’ll champion it until I’m blue in the face, then suck from an oxygen tank and keep going – like I used to, before the inadequacies got too much. Until then though, I’ll keep skewering that argument of superiority by sales numbers.

L’annonce de “VCE coalition” est liée au fait que la virtualidsation d’un datacenter ne se fait pas simplement en virtualisant chaque ressource d’un datacenter de manière indépendante. La virtualisation d’un datacenter doit tenir compte des intéractions entre les ressources informatiques.  C’est vrai pour le réseau et c’est également vrai pour le stockage.

Vsphere a apporté l’ouveture avec les notions de Vnetwork et de Vstorage favorisant ainsi l’intégration des produits réseaux et stockage avec Vmware.

J’ai plusieurs fois évoqué comment le Nexus 1000 permettait de lever les freins à la virtualisation des serveurs. Dans ce document très complet on voit comment EMC s’intègre , pour la patie stockage, dans un environnement Vsphere.

Hi,

Here the placement for Storage Administrator – Abu Dhabi, UAE.
 

Position : Storage Administrator

No.Of Openings : 2

Experience :3 years.

Qualification :Certification preferred.

Location : Abu Dhabi, UAE

Required Skill set :

• industry standard (EMC, DDN)

Would you be interested ?

Please send us your latest updated profile with contact nos.
current & expected salary details and joining time required toradha@kbsconsultants.com

You may also suggest this opening to your friends who may be interested.

Further Information:

KBS Consultants

Flat H,Kulothungan Apts,
No, 5 Natesan Road
Ashoknagar,
Chennai 600 083.
India
Phone: +91-44 2489 5341 / 2371 9622

Visit Our Sites:

International jobs: http://www.jobsearchworld.com/
SAP ERP Jobs : http://www.jobsvista.com/
Core Engineering Jobs : http://www.gotachance.com/
Technology Jobs : http://www.kbsconsultants.com/
India Jobs :http://www.kbsconsultants.org.in

A couple months ago, Gartner released their annual ECM Magic Quadrant (which I looked at).  Sure enough, being an odd year, Forrester released their ECM Wave.  I see the pros of waiting two years as the larger vendors take that long, or longer, for a significant release.  On the other hand, you have longer to wait for new members to show up.

Well not in Forrester’s world.  Only one new vendor (HP) was added and a few were cut, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

The 2009 Wave

Thanks to Oracle (again), you can look at the Q4 2009Forrester Wave for ECM Suites in detail. For those with less patience, here is a copy of the wave…

Before we talk about the individual vendors, let’s talk about the low number of vendors.  If you look at the 2007 report, many vendors are gone. A couple were acquired (Interwoven and Vignette) and some aren’t what I would call ECM (SAP and Xerox) vendors anyway.

The question is, where is Autonomy?  They bought Interwoven and weren’t new to the content space.  They aren’t mentioned anywhere.  Nuxeo got a mention as one of the two open-source vendors in the “reduced footprint” category.  The SaaS focused SpringCM (under “reduced footprint”) and emerging Laserfiche (under “process-focused” and “SMB”) both got a nod as well.

All of those got placed on the Quadrant, as did SAP and Xerox.  I wouldn’t be upset, except I like how Forrester structures the wave more than Gartner’s MQ.  I want to see more vendors in here.

Breaking it Down

Let’s look at some of the vendors…

• Alfresco: Forrester thinks they are losing ground.  They didn’t say as much, but last time they were on the verge of making the Strong Contender  classification.  Now they are just strongly a Contender.  I understand raising the bar as the market evolves, but Alfresco hasn’t been sitting on its laurels.  They lost a lot ground in Strategy according to Forrester. As for the Current Offering, looks like the increased focus on integration in this Wave hurt Alfresco.
• HP: Welcome to the Wave.  Still the only major vendor that I haven’t heard connected to CMIS in any way.  I’ve even heard that Hyland is working on it.  Forrester has noticed and made note.
• Microsoft: Love the realism.  There are gaps, but less this time around than two years ago.  Microsoft  has a vision.  When 2010 comes out, they should push their way into the Leaders.
• Open Text: Getting hit on their Strategy.  Constant acquisition of the competition can do that.  Getting things integrated, as always, remains their biggest hurdle.
• EMC: Not much to say, except they got dinged for their poor WCM.  This is a growing trend.
• IBM/Oracle: Feel the love, especially with IBM.

To be honest, nothing surprising, just reinforcing.  I like how Forrester has the Leaders spread a little and how getting closer to the upper-right corner is rewarded.  You need a strong Strategy and solid Offering to get rated well.  Market Presence is measured by the size of the dot.  It just makes a lot more sense to me.

You know what is missing this year?  The score weighting.  Smart move as I trashed it last year and it gives people something extra when they pay for the full details.

Overall, the scoring had nothing massively off, though I’m not sure why Alfresco took so many hits.  The next couple of years is going to be critical for Alfresco as they start to hit middle-age and strive to be more.

These are this mornings top 10 analyst upgrades, downgrades, and initiations seen from Wall Street research calls.  In fact, because today is a short day or partial off for most, there are not even a full ten impact calls:

Brocade Communications Systems (NASDAQ: BRCD) Cut to Hold at Canaccord Adams.
DragonWave (NASDAQ: DRWI) Started as Overweight at Piper Jaffray.
EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) Started as Buy at UBS.
JDS Uniphase (NASDAQ: JDSU) Started as Buy at Citigroup.
Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) Reiterated Buy and $33.50 target at Auriga (on CFO departure).
NRG Energy (NYSE: NRG) Cut to Neutral at UBS.
NetApp, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTAP) Started as Buy at UBS.
SAVVIS Inc. (NASDAQ: SVVS) Started as Market Perform at Wells Fargo.

You can join our open email distribution list to receive daily emails with analyst upgrades and downgrades, top day trader alerts, market rumors, merger activity, IPOs and secondary offerings, Warren Buffett and guru activity and more.

JON C. OGG

Entre administradores de entornos de almacenamiento en fibra es conocido el problema que hay con la compatibilidad entre dispositivos de proveedores diferentes, por ejemplo, al añadir una cabina de discos  a una SAN y que no funcione con el failover (multipath) ya existente en el servidor porque no están en la matriz de interoperatividad de fabricantes. Dejaré en este post unas notas relativas a estos problemas.

Primeramente definiré Interoperatividad:

La Interoperatividad es la condición mediante la cual sistemas heterogéneos pueden intercambiar procesos o datos ( procedente de la Wikipedia ) o la capacidad de los productos de diferentes fabricantes puedan operar conjuntamente ( procedente de BNET).

En entornos de almacenamiento en fibra la Interoperatividad es bastante compleja, cumpliéndose que si toda una red SAN no está en la lista de compatibilidad de hardware de los vendedores no operará de la forma esperada. Hace algunos años, el acceder a información de interoperatividad era un trabajo frustante debido a que esta información no era pública por parte de la mayoría de fabricantes y por lástima en muchos casos usada de forma interesada comercialmente. En la actualidad se ha realizado un gran esfuerzo por la mayoría de ellos, creándose una tendencia cada vez más recia en comunicar esta información, al mismo tiempo que los grandes proveedores de soluciones de almacenamiento se ajustan a estándares para universalizar sus productos y flexibilizar una mayor integración en cualquier entorno heterogéneo cada vez más común.

En almacenamiento hay diferentes organismos para mejorar estos grandes problemas de incompatibilidades entre diferentes proveedores, de forma que establecen estándares y protocolos para una mejor comunicación e integración de dispositivos de almacenamiento. Entre todas ellas es destacable es el trabajajo que realiza SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association) cuyo proposito es encabezar en la industria el desarrollo y promoción de estándares, tecnologías y servicios educacionales para apoderar la gestión de información. Todos los grandes fabricantes de almacenamiento son miembros de la SNIA y de forma paulatina va creciendo un marco de interoperatividad entre todos ellos. Aún así, debido al proceso lento de salida y aceptación de estos estándares se realizan de forma independiente muchas alianzas tecnológicas entre diferentes fabricantes que es su mayoría pretenden impulsar propios productos de avanzada tecnología consiguiendo en gran cantidad de casos ser pioneros y mejorar su cartera de productos y especificaciones y por consiguiente competir comercialmente, forzando que el resto de competidores tecnológicos acepten e integren estas nuevas especificaciones aún no estandarizadas, por esta necesidad de compatibilidad en entornos heterogéneos y para que no penalice su imagen comercial.

A continuación se aportará  información junto con enlaces de  los proveedores de almacenamiento para el conocimiento de la Interoperabilidad de sus productos con las de otros fabricantes.

Algunas Tablas de Interoperatividad y HCL ( Listas de compatibilidad Hardware )

Fabricantes

Emulex

Emulex es unos de los líderes en interoperatividad en SAN, su reputación “It Just Works” se basa en un compromiso con los estándares, abierto al soporte de software y hardware, y al testeo extensivo de interoperatividad.

A continuación se listan sus Tablas de Interoperatividad con los siguientes fabricantes :

Información y enlaces procedente de Emulex.

QLogic

QLogic presenta un magnífico trabajo disponible en su web de interoperatividad al igual que de su historia altamente recomendable disponible en su web, que recopila sus productos, soluciones y servicios que proporcionan, al igual que su certificaciones con distintos proveedores de soluciones SAN. Un documento nada habitual en esta tecnología.

A continuación se listan las Tablas de Interoperatividad con los siguientes fabricantes :

3PAR | AC&NC | Apple | ATTO Technology | BlueArc | Compellent | Dell | Dell EqualLogic | DNF | Dot Hill | EMC | Enhance Technology | Fujitsu Computer Products of America | Fujitsu Computer Systems | Hewlett-Packard | Hitachi Data Systems | Hitachi Global StorageTechnologies | HP LeftHand SAN (aka LeftHand Networks) | IBM | Infortrend | Intransa | iQstor | iStor | LSI | Matrox | NEC | NetApp | Nexsan | Overland | Pillar | Promise | Qualstar | Quantum | RELDATA | Seagra | SEPATON | Spectra Logic | StoneFly | StoreVault | Sun Microsystems | Symantec | Tandberg Data | Texas Memory Systems | Thales nCipher | Winchester Systems | Xiotech | Xyratex

Información y enlaces procedentes de QLogic.

Brocade – McData

Brocade pone a disposición un documento con la compatibilidad/interoperatividad de sus productos en la sección de compatibilidad enlazable aquí llamado Brocade Data Center Ready.

Sun Microsystems

Proporciona un listado de soluciones de almacenamiento certificadas con Microsoft en el siguiente documento:

http://www.sun.com/software/windows/storage_cert.pdf

En su sección de almacenamiento y servidores individualmente es completada con tablas de soportabilidad/certificación/interoperatividad de cada dispositivo, y una sección genérica a la Interoperatividad de todos sus productos.

IBM

Presenta una sección de productos para SAN:

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/uk/storage/san/index.html

Cada dispositivo va acompañado de un documento de Interoperatividad llamado Interoperability Matrix.

EMC

Proporcionan un documento con las matrices de interoperatividad en la sección de Interoperatividad de su portal. Sus  clientes  pueden utilizar una herramienta de navegación para la interoperatividad en Powerlink.

HP

Sección de almacenamiento en su portal:

http://welcome.hp.com/country/es/es/leb/storage.html

NETAPP

Sección de Interoperatividad en su portal:

http://www.netapp.com/us/technology/interop.html

VMWARE

Dispone uns sección para consultas de compatibilidad desde su web con distintos proveedores:

http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php?action=base&deviceCategory=san

Proporciona un documento con las matrices de compatibilidad completa Storage/SAN Compatibility Guide.

….  sólo son algunos proveedores de fibra.

I came across an interesting issue when deploying Windows 7 into my environment. Users were having issues connecting to the filer/network share after upgrading to Windows 7. Due to the fact that we had several users unable to access network aliases, this put our Windows 7 deployment on hold momentarily. At the time we were running an EMC Celera DART (NAS) Code version 5.5. Windows 7 Introduces a new feature, Extended Protection for Authentication (KB968389), which is enabled by default in Windows 7. This feature enhances the protection and handling of credentials when authenticating network connections by using Integrated Windows Authentication (IWA).

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968389

If you’re running EMC in your environment, this could cause some conflict depending on the version of the OS. I recently came across the issue in my environment where the EMC server doesn’t have the capability to handle Extended Protection for Authentication. This results in an error message: “STATUS_INVALID_PARAMETER”. The error message tells us that EMC doesn’t have a way to understand “Extended Protection for Authentication” and throws the error message: “STATUS_INVALID_PARAMETER”.

To work around this issue, you can lower the security on Windows 7 to be compatible with the EMC server. This can be done by modifying 2 REG keys. Both are DWORD values.

HKLM\System\ControlSet001\Control\LSA

SuppressExtendedProtection=1

LMCompatibility=2

However, the better solution would be to upgrade EMC’s NAS OS so that it can understand and handle Extended Protection for Authentication feature.

You will find the solution is to upgrade to DART 5.6 if you’re running EMC within your organization.

Cheers!

Rich

Das Kollabo-Abum der beiden Eastcoast-Rapkings Masta Ace und Edo G ist endlich draußen! Als kleinen Leckerbissen gab es bereits den äußerst freshen Track Little Young als Vorabvideo, der gegen den Trend schießt, Rappernamen mit Lil’ oder Young auszuschmücken:

Masta Ace & Edo G – Little Young

Former EMC Philippines Channel Manager Teddy Sumulong is now the new GM of Technopaq Inc. Sumulong replaces Ms. Aila de Ocampo.

Established in April 1997, Technopaq Inc. is IBM’s Premier Value Added Distributors in the Philippines. In addition to the wide range of IBM System x servers (x86) and IBM Disk Storage on SAN & NAS environment on different platforms, Technopaq carries the full range of LENOVO desktops and laptops.

Technopaq is also the Premier Distributor of IBM range of Software Solutions such as Lotus, Tivoli, WebSphere and DB2. To date, Technopaq remains, IBM only True Blue Distributor in the Philippines.

There’s an old expression I like: “Different isn’t better, it’s just different.”

When it comes to SSDs based around a SATA or SAS format — that’s pretty much the case in my view. Yes there are exceptional products suited for enterprise like Pliant and STEC. And, yes — there are more conventional items for consumers like Intel and OCZ (and about 20 others).  And yes, the standard pacakge 3.5″ form factor for these devices make them suitable for shared storage as well as for integration into hetreogenous and homogenous storage environments like you might find in a typical data center.  Embracing these SSDs you will find the usual manufacturers like EMC, NetApp, SUN, and others.  Their use of SSD is evolutionary, easy to digest.

PCIe-based SSDs are very different.  For one thing, they sit on the server system bus right next to the CPU.  This is a direct attached (DAS) model that has numerous advantages for certain types of processing.  We agree that not all PCIe-based SSDs are suitable for all applications — but in terms of applications that can take advantage of bandwidth, throughput, and latency enhancements, these devices are indeed a superior architecture.

There are some challenges:

1)  Not all servers are created equal.  PCIe-based devices require strict adherance to the PCIe specifications at the server level.  Ping if you want to learn more about why this is critical.

2)  Many servers do not have enough PCIe slots configure appropriately for PCIe devices.  This is especially true when creating HIGH AVAILABILITY (or HA) environments.

3)  Only a very few servers have enough of the right type of slots to be meaningful from a value perspective.  It makes no sense to refresh a server for a PCIe-based SSD if you have to spend 2x or 3x to get the right slots, power, etc.

4)  Applications may not be optimized for SSD DAS.  No kidding.  OLTP or DBMS applications that can take the most advantage of SSD DAS are optimized for high latency disk access over networks such as NAS.  These applications are totally comfortable sending out 1000s or 10s of 1000s of transaction requests to build up a queue depth for the CPUs.  The net result of this is that the CPUs appear very busy but in fact aren’t doing very much.  These limitations are known and well defined.  Over time, application vendors such as SUN, Oracle, and Microsoft will implement fixes to optimize PCIe-based storage.

Aside from these items, there is a discussion regarding suitability of NAND flash devices in the data center as well as the MLC/SLC issue.  I’ll tackle those in another post.  In my veiw, MySpace and Wine.com are leading the way — and there are many others who have not come forward publicly preferring to keep the ROI and GREEN advantages all to themselves.

The latest announcements from Fusion-io, Texas Memory Systems, Micron and others point out these differences.  FULL DISCLOSURE:  I am a former employe of Fusion-io.

The market for SSD-based or at least SSD-inclusive storage appliances is broadening from purpose-built devices in support of specific applications to a more generic layer some call TierZero supporting basic compute operations that require low latency, fast throughput, higher bandwidth.  Below is a list of manufacturers; I’m pulling together some notes and will publish a brief chart in a future post.

• 3Par
• Avere
• Compellant
• Data Direct Networks
• DataRam
• DELL
• DolphinICS
• EMC
• Gear6
• HP
• Hitachi Data Systems
• IBM
• NetApp
• Nimbus
• Schooner Information Technology
• Solid Access
• SUN
• Teradata
• Texas Memory Systems
• Violin Memory
• WhipTail

I’m interested in published specifications, use-cases, and sales strategy.  Hopefully this will help you cut through some of the clutter.

Just when it looked clear where the markets were lining up around data center automation and cloud computing, things change. I guess that is what makes this industry so very interesting.  The proposed acquisition by HP of 3Com is a direct challenge to Cisco’s network management franchise. However, the implications of this move go further than what meets the eye.  It also pits HP in a direct path against EMC with its Cisco partnership. And to make things even more interesting, it also puts these two companies in a competitive three way race against IBM and its cloud/data center automation strategy. And of course, it doesn’t stop there. A myriad of emerging companies like Google and Amazon want a larger share of the enterprise market for cloud services. Companies like Unisys and CSC that has focused on the outsourced secure data centers are getting into the act.

I don’t think that we will see a single winner — no matter what any one of these companies will tell you.  The winners in this market shift will be those companies can build a compelling platform and a compelling value proposition for a partner ecosystem.  The truth about the cloud is that it is not simply a network or a data center. It is a new way of providing services of all sorts that can support changing customer workloads in a secure and predictable manner.

In light of this, what does this say for HP’s plans to acquire 3Com? If we assume that the network infrastructure is a key component of an emerging cloud and data center strategy, HP is making a calculated risk in acquiring more assets in this market.  The company that has found that its ProCurve networking division has begun gaining traction. HP ProCurve Networking is the networking division of HP.  The division includes network switches, wireless access points, WAN routers, and Access Control servers and software.   ProCurve competes directly with Cisco in the networking switch market. When HP had a tight partnership with Cisco, the company de-emphasized the networking. However, once Cisco started to move into the server market, the handcuffs came off. The 3Com acquisition takes the competitive play to a new level. 3Com has a variety of good pieces of technology that HP could leverage within ProCurve. Even more significantly, it picks up a strong security product called TippingPoint, a 3Com acquisition. TippingPoint fills a critical hole in HP’s security offering. TippingPoint, offers network security offerings including intrusion prevention and a product that inspects network packets.  The former 3Com subsidiary has also established a database of security threats based a network of external researchers.

But I think that one of the most important reasons that HP bought 3Com is its strong relationships in the Chinese market. In fiscal year 2008 half of 3Com’s revenue came from its H3C joint venture with Chinese vendor, Huawei Technology. Therefore, it is not surprising that HP would have paid a premium to gain a foothold in this lucrative market. If HP is smart, it will do a good job leveraging the many software assets to build out both its networking assets as well as beefing up its software organization. In reality, HP is much more comfortable in the hardware market. Therefore, adding networking as a core competency makes sense. It will also bolster its position as a player in the high end data center market and in the private cloud space.

Cisco, on the other hand, is coming from the network and moving agressively into the cloud and the data center market.  The company has purchased a position with VMWare and has established a tight partnership with EMC as a go to market strategy.  For Cisco, it gives the company credibility and access to customers outside of its traditional markets. For EMC, the Cisco relationship strengthens its networking play.  But an even bigger value for the relationship is to present a bigger footprint to customers as they move to take on HP, IBM, and the assortment of other players who all want to win.  The Cisco/EMC/VMware play is to focus on the private cloud.  In their view a private cloud is very similar to a private, preconfigured data center.  It can be a compelling value proposition to a customer that needs a data center fast without having to deal with a lot of moving parts.  The real question from a cloud computing perspective is the key question: is this really a cloud?

It was inevitable that this quiet market dominated by Google and Amazon would heat up as the cloud becomes a real market force.  But I don’t expect that HP or Cisco/EMC will have a free run. They are being joined by IBM and Microsoft — among others. The impact could be better options for customers and prices that invariably will fall. The key to success for all of these players will be how well they manage what will be an increasingly heterogeneous, federated, and highly distributed hardware and software world. Management comes in many flavors: management of these highly distributed services and management of the workloads.

So its nearly a week since the event in Athens closed and I’ve had enough time to gather my thoughts, and write up some of the sessions, so it is time to summarise the 3 days which I spent there.

To put the conference into perspective I think we need to understand the market and past 12 months of EMC CM&A.

ECM Market

SharePoint continues to be the young pretender breaking into the market. They have no doubt increased their market share in the past 12 months, no figures to back this up unfortunately, and the release of SharePoint 2010 will be a major milestone in the marketplace in the next 12 months as it increases its DM and EDRM functionality. IBM and FileNet continue to be a confused product and player in the market, the traditional strength of BPM in the product is diluted by the integration into IBM and the Process Server product. OpenText remain strong and their relationship with SAP will see them continue to play strong in this area, whilst some of their SharePoint and Microsoft products are attractive. Their big strength though is their solution focus and they are very good at going to market with solutions which focus on business value. Adobe are making a strong play in the market with their forms product and the tie up with Alfresco is certainly interesting. The Open Source market will continue to grow.

Where does this leave EMC CM&A?

I believe they are still strong, going into Athens I believed they were in a strong position, coming out I believe the steps they are taking will ensure they remain a leader.

Momentum Summary

The messages I came away from Momentum with were the three new groups within CM&A:

- Information Governance

- Information Access

- Process

Of the three I see Process as being the one which can lead EMC to success, with Governance not being far behind. Why?

Information Access – of the three groups I believe this one will be impacted most by SharePoint 2010. Organisations will become less likely to look to another product to manage their documents when SharePoint can be considered good enough. When it comes to collaboration SharePoint is strong, no doubt about that, yes it has flaws but it is a product which does a job well. At Momentum 2008 EMC’s message was all about Centerstage; this year I did not get much of a feel for that (although I did spend more time on xCP sessions). Plus Centerstage has been delayed a number of times, I just think it will be a hard sell to push this as a Collaboration play within an organisation who are remotely interested in SharePoint.

Information Governance – the acquisition of Kazeon could be key to the success of this group. EMC can now deliver a compelling message about managing records in-situ, finding information to assist in meeting compliance needs and also about moving information to the appropriate storage tier. eDiscovery has been banded around in the market a lot in the past 2 years but I see this becoming more and more prevalent as organisations begin to act on the risk threats they perceive.

Process – as I said above, this one caught my eye the most. I went into the conference unconvinced about xCP, and to be honest version 1.0 is still nothing more than a collection of products, no matter what the marketing hype. However the ambitions which EMC have for this could really start to drive some opportunities. As I said above OpenText are very good at selling business solutions, the xCP programme where partners and EMC develop business solutions together, will put EMC in a position to challenge OpenText on a level playing field, except the BPM capability of Documentum is greater than that of OpenText. Also by moving the xCP platform onto the Centerstage paradigm it will enable more composite solutions to be built as this is much more aligned with Portals. From personal experience the ability to show Documentum information/content alongside other important information is something customers do wish for and the solution until now has been to bespoke this using a Portal solution or something similar. Also by improving some of the underlying architecture to support things such as relational objects will make developing these applications so much easier and instead allow us as SI’s to focus on the business value of the solution rather than how we relate a vehicle to a claim.

Was it worth attending the event?

Yes, definitely. Again this was an excellent networking event and I have made a number of contacts which I will work with over the coming weeks and months. Its also nice to catch up with some old faces such as Andrew, it would be great if Pie could find his way to europe one year although it could be said that I need to get stateside at some time. There is a lot more which goes on at these events than the presentations and these sometime become as important as the session. I enjoyed the news on xCP and will just have to be patient for this to be realised, if EMC can execute the plans in this area successfully, and importantly, in a timely fashion then I can see the product set breaking out of the pure EDRM mould and starting to play in areas of business where they have sometimes struggled.

I have updated my VMware Workstation on my laptop. Next task is to update VMware Tools inside all of my virtual machines, simple task for almost the common mortals, right?
But, can someone tell me why, there are always one “black sheep”?! This time was my Celerra Simulator VM…
Everything went fine till the moment that I run the command “rmmod vmxnet”, here I got a loop error saying something like this:

unregister_netdevice: waiting for eth0 to become free

This is because the EMC Celerra services are up and running for sure.
After some reboots and try to stop a bunch of services I always ended up in the same error. What I did next? Well if I cannot stop all the services, how about to boot the VM in a mode that those service haven’t started yet?!

The steps were as root user:

Edit the file /etc/inittab. Where is id:3:initdefault: replace by id:1:initdefault and reboot, this way Linux boots in single user mode. No EMC services running

Next I installed VMware Tools, and et voilá now everything went fine with no errors!!

Last step is revert back the file /etc/inittab to is default, where is id:1:initdefault: replace by id:3:initdefault, and reboot.

When the VM restarts we’ll have VMware Tools updated and everything up and running.

clariion solutiongs implementation
Exam Number/Code : e20-340
Exam Name : clariion solutiongs implementation
e20-340 Questions and Answers : 104 Q&As
e20-340 Update Time: 2009-11-14
e20-340 Price:  $ 130.00

e20-340 practice exams and questions
Our e20-340 practice exams and questions are constantly being updated. You can check the quality of our practice test updates by visiting our latest news page or signing up to our newsletter for recent updates and new releases to our practice exams. You are not about to purchase a disposable product. E20-340 practice exam updates are supplied free of charge for up to 180 days. Regardless of how soon you decide to take the actual E20-340 examination certification, you will be able to walk into the testing room with confidence using Testinside E20-340 training resources.

E20-340 practice exam help you pass your exam
By purchasing our E20-340 practice exam, you will have all that is necessary for completing the E20-340 exam with all E20-340 practice questions that are always up to date. You will receive the highest quality and support with Testinside customer service (live chat) that will fulfill all of your certification needs. Purchase our E20-340 training products today, simply put, Testinside is your key to opening up new doors for a brighter future!

E20-340 Downloadable, Printable Exams (in PDF format):
Testinside EMC E20-340 Preparation Material provides you everything you will need to take your E20-340 Exam. The E20-340 Exam details are researched and produced by Professional Certification Experts who are constantly using industry experience to produce precise, logical and verified answers.

Whitney introduced the keynote, reinforcing the theme of ‘Inspired by the past…Primed for the future’, before handing the reins to Mark Lewis.

Mark set the tone by reinforcing that the future is bright for EMC CM&A. He quoted an example of his personal experience of visiting a doctor and having to complete the same details multiple times. He then talked about Business Value, and the need and desire for EMC to drive Business Value. He then introduced the three pillars of the strategy for EMC CM&A:

- Value. Covered by Access and Process.

- Efficiency. Covered by Governance, Access and Process.

- Compliance. Covered by Governance and Access.

He also talked about a move from Application Centric to Information Centric, and a move from Static Placement to Dynamic Movement, see my earlier post on the Future of ECM to see my views on this.

Back to the earlier themes of Governance, Access and Process. Mark introduced these as the three main product groups in CM&A.

Governance

These are the products covering Archiving, EDRM and Search/eDiscovery.

Access

The theme of this group is having it your way and includes the stages of Capture, Communication, Collaboration, Context and Cloud.

Process

This is about building the custom solutions, interestingly Mark talked about Content Enabled Applications, note no Vertical in the title. This is where xCP fits in, Mark described it as the Case Process Platform. He claimed this is the first for the industry, I’m not sure this is true but it could be a major step forward for EMC.

Mark then handed over to John O’Melia who conducted an interview with the CIO of Eurobank, but the main chunk of the session was Mark’s message. Mark’s message was clear and the alignment of the products was clear. He showed a lot of belief in the future and especially in xCP, I left the session needing to find out more about how XCP was going to be executed.

The EMC E20-590 certificates give you possibility to work in any country of the world because they are acknowledged in all countries equally. This EMC E20-590 torrent certificate helps not only to improve your knowledge and skills, but it also helps your career, gives a possibility for qualified usage of EMC E20-590 exam products under different conditions. The majority of companies in the sphere of information technologies require the presence of EMC E20-590 exams for the work in the company, and that makes obtaining this EMC E20-590 certificate necessary. Many IT specialists were not able to obtain the real EMC E20-590 certificate from the first attempt, which was the result of poor preparation for the examination, using preparatory EMC E20-590 study guide of poor quality.

Killtest has the latest dumps of E20-590 exam, which is the best study material for you to prepare your E20-590 exam.

Try killtest E20-590 real practice exam, 100% guarantee to pass your exam.

The recent announcement from VMware, Cisco, and EMC got me thinking.  The trio has gotten together to offer private clouds to the enterprise, promising to bring the benefits of cloud computing inside a company’s data center.  It’s a smart move as it changes the dimension of the discussion with a customer.  It looks to be profitable as well because the offering is heavy on both technology and services.  And services have become a big play for the VCE crew (don’t believe me, check out charts below).

Which is what got me thinking.  Can you name another IT behemoth that is heavy in both technology and services?  Yup, IBM.  IBM would love to have this offering in it’s portfolio.  And you can bet that they will find a way to compete with VCE.  The upcoming battle prompted me to run a business model comparison of VCE vs. IBM.  Check it out:

Can you figure out which one is the combo of VMware, Cisco, and EMC?  Here’s a hint, look for the only revenue trend line that is positive.  Remember my comment about the importance of services?  All three VCE companies have seen positive services growth since the start of 2007.  You can bet they want to keep this trend going.

Who knows if this service growth has come at the expense of IBM but private clouds are targeted at big, enterprise customers.  The type of customer that is likely to be a big IBM shop.  If private clouds take off, you can expect the VCE crew to find success at the expense of IBM.