Some time now has passed since EMC World tore through Las Vegas and my head is still spinning from all the announcements! One that definitely should not be overlooked especially for SMB customers is the newest addition to the VNXe family, the VNXe 3150. For those of you who are not familiar the VNXe line of storage from EMC let me get you up to speed. VNXe systems were designed with one philosophy in mind: keep it simple. It’s storage from the application’s point of view with one clear way to handle any task from initial installation to creating storage for virtual servers. You can shift from managing file shares to creating application storage without missing a beat. What this means to you? Well…You can save time and steps. Provisioning storage is a breeze most any operation you need to do can be lone in 5 clicks or less and most certainly under 10 minutes. Not too shabby huh? All of this is done through the all new Unisphere management interface tailored especially for the VNXe for administrators of all types. This system is easy for the first time storage user to the storage expert. The wizards in this thing are fantastic! Not a wizard fan and don’t like being bound with their constraints? No problem all the advanced features are still there for the storage pros! Don’t forget the best part though, the VNXe line provides deduplication, thin provisioning and compression all for FREE, no extra licensing required for any of those features! So, all of that said let me tell you what the VNXe 3150 brings to the table, more after the bump! Read more >>

EMC recently announced VSI 5.2 for vSphere.  From comments I’ve heard, this seem to be a underutilized FREE utility from EMC that can help simplify managing storage environments that support vSphere.  The software is now on revision 9 for those of you who like “others” to “work out the bugs”.

For VNXe customers, EMC VSI 5.2 now utilizes the EMC VNXe Advanced Storage Access feature to support cloning and compression of NFS datastores.

For VDI customers EMC VSI 5.2 integrates with VMware View and Citrix Xendesktop providing simplified storage management for those complex environments.

More features, enhancements and fixes are outlined in Power Link.  From the home page navigate to the following:

Home > Support > Technical Documentation and Advisories > Software ~ T-Z ~ Documentation > Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI) > Virtual Storage Integrator for vSphere > 

This tool is definitely worth trying out and keeping up with as it continues to add features.

VNXe – Simple. Efficient. Affordable.
Take one for a test drive with EMC’s 45-day risk free “VNXe 2011 Try & Buy Program”!

This special offer, a joint offer by eGroup and EMC, enables you to try a VNXe at no risk – and no cost – for 45 days. The program officially kicks off on October 1, 2011, but let us know today if you’d like to take advantage!

The EMC VNXe Series is an affordable unified storage platform for smaller businesses. It provides automated, application-ready storage with solution-focused software that’s easy to manage, provision, and protect.

• Simple graphical wizards guide you through provisioning storage with ease, and in minutes
• Unified capabilities can replace your file server(s) and SAVE YOU MONEY through the powerful file de-duplication engine
• Application-ready Microsoft Exchange wizards make mailbox storage creation a breeze
• VMware integration creates storage, and automatically adds it to your VMware h

EMC’s best sellers are available for the 45-day trial:

• VNXe3100 3TB
• VNXe3100 6TB
• Flex Configuration

To learn more about the VNXe Try & Buy Program, and to get started with your 45-day risk free trial, contact eGroup at sales@eGroup-us.com or 1.877.eGROUP.1!

I worked with EMC support recently to identify and work around an apparent bug in the VNXe operating environment. One of our customers purchased two VNXe 3100’s with the intention of using them to replicate CIFS data between two sites. Because the data exceeds a terabyte we placed both VNXe’s in the customer’s primary datacenter to perform the initial data migration and synchronization. Once the initial sync between the VNXe arrays completed we relocated the secondary VNXe to one of the customer’s offices a couple of hours away.

Changing the management IP address of the VNXe that had moved to match the subnet at the new location was no problem, but there seemed to be no way to successfully change the IP address used by the replication interface and reestablish the replication session.

We opened a support case with EMC, who after some digging acknowledged that we had encountered an issue that will be corrected in the next VNXe OE release.

If you find yourself unable to change the IP address of a replication interface on a VNXe storage array the work-around is to contact EMC support and let them reconfigure the replication for you.

Shortly after posting a blog entry ( http://blogs.egroup-us.com/?p=3969 ) with my thoughts and experience from the field with a VNXe, I was contacted by an EMC Engineer who works on the VNXe platform. He specifically asked for the cause of an error message we had seen, and while I won’t quote him directly, he basically said “This platform is designed to be extremely simple, and spitting out hex codes for error messages does not fit our vision. We will fix that error and make it user-friendly and legible”.

After following up with the Engineer this week, I was informed that they found the location the error existed, and will be implementing a fix to make the message simple and easy to read.

Now THAT’S COMMITTED to the SIMPLE AND EFFICIENT goal!