Fancy running your own EMC Isilon, VNX, VNXe or ViPR installation in your own lab environment, to try out, trial and/or educate yourself with?  If so, you’ve come to the right post!  Here I provide the links to virtual instance simulators that are free to download, install, configure and use – plus there are no time restrictions on any of them!

There is plenty of learning and fun to be had with trying out and running these EMC storage simulators in your own lab.  I will be releasing a series of posts in the coming weeks (I will publish links from this post once completed) that will cover how to install and configure each of these simulators, though don’t let that stop you from jumping in straight away and trying them out.  Download links for each of the storage simulators is at the bottom of each of the sections below.

What Do EMC Storage Simulators Offer?

First off, as mentioned above, these simulators are free to download and use!  They allow you to spin up, configure, present and manage storage in your virtualized lab environment.  Yes, that means you could, technically, run VMs off of them and use them (apart from the VNXe 3200 simulator – see below) as shared storage in your lab environment.

The only catch is that these downloadable instances of EMC’s Isilon, VNX and ViPR are purely intended to be used in a lab environment only (ie: non-production), and as such don’t come with any “official” EMC support – though check out the EMC Community Forums Network here as you can usually find decent community support on these non-production simulators on the forum.

Just to manage expectations, don’t expect full eye-watering performance from these  virtualized storage instances and simulators, as this isn’t their intended use.  Though for use in a standard lab environment they are definitely capable and a whole bunch of fun to use and try out – with no time limits attached.

_____________________________________________________________

EMC ViPR

EMC ViPR is EMCs Software-Defined Storage  offering that provides storage management, automation and delivery. ViPR is an open, extensible architecture for that provides integration into the Software-Defined Data Center, which as you no doubt know, is one of the more recent hot-topics in IT.

One of the best words to describe ViPR is  ‘extensible’.  What this basically means is that it allows you to provide a single storage (albeit virtualized) platform that effectively sits in front of various storage types (eg: file, block, object and even commodity storage), all of which can be from various storage vendors (eg: HP, NetApp, HDS).  By providing this convenient centralization of storage VIPR can then provide storage automation, management (ie: single point of management) and delivery (ie: storage-as-a-service) out to various hosts as required.

I know from personal experience as an ex-IT administrator that dealing with various storage types from various storage vendors can be a real headache, usually the result of business mergers and acquisitions, or changes of IT management or administration who had a preference to one particular storage vendor at the time.

By abstracting the underlying physical storage hardware, similar to what we have seen with server virtualization, there are a great many time and financial saving benefits to also be had with the storage infrastructure.  This is the space in which EMC ViPR is positioned.

Along with the ViPR download there are also a number of useful installation, configuration and administration guides (and white papers) to get your lab installation of ViPR up and running. Click here for the link or on the image below.

I have yet to really get my hands dirty with installing and configuring EMC ViPR, though I will be spinning this up in my own lab shortly.

_____________________________________________________________

EMC Isilon

EMC’s Isilon is a scale-out network attached storage (NAS) storage device which is capable of expanding to 20 petabytes (PB) in a single cluster!  I’ve always been a fan of scale-out storage, as I like the idea of being to scale out both capacity and performance as you add more nodes to a cluster, rather than just capacity alone.

As with the VNX and VNXe, EMC Isilon comes with an intuitive and easy to use web based (OneFS) management interface.  Also, as with the other EMC storage products mentioned here, Isilon offers tight integration with VMware vSphere, for example; VMware VAAI and VASA APIs.

From this management interface you can create a simulated environment and get a feel for both the interface and administration tasks available in the latest Isilon software release.

*Note: You will need to logon using an EMC support portal account to download the Isilon Simulator, this is straight forward to do – check out my post “How to create an EMC support portal account in 3 easy steps” to see how to do this.  You don’t need to be an EMC customer or partner to create an account!

I have used this simulator quite a bit in my lab and can definitely recommend it!

_____________________________________________________________

EMC VNX

The EMC VNX is EMC’s Unified mid-tier range of storage appliances.  The VNX is often referred to as the “Swiss Army Knife” of EMC storage, a title that it has rightfully earned in my opinion.  It offers plenty of different disk and connectivity combinations in a single storage appliance (hence it being termed “Unfied” storage).  For example: NFS and Block storage, iSCSI and Fibre Channel (FC) connectivity, and Near-Line (NL) SAS, SAS, Enterprise Flash Disk (EFD).

*Note:  this downloadable lab version of the VNX only offers NFS storage (ie: not block level iSCSI), this is due to licensing implications around this part of the VNX simulator – don’t hold your breath for this to change and become available in this virtualized version of the VNX anytime soon. 

You will need to create an EMC Support Portal account, which is free and quick to do, and then from the EMC Support portal you’ll be able to locate and download the latest build of the VNX VSA.  EMC Support account creation details can be found in my post here and VNX VSA download instructions can be found here.

_____________________________________________________________

EMC VNXe 3200

The VNXe is EMC’s entry level storage offering.  Though don’t let the term “entry level” put you off as the VNXe is a highly capable piece of storage kit that offers the SMB or enterprise remote offices with plenty of excellent functionality and features quite often only seen in mid or enterprise tier storage.  For example with the new VNXe 3200 you can now take full advantage of functionality previously only seen on it’s bigger brother the VNX, such as auto-tiering, Flash SSD caching (FAST Suite) and Fibre Channel (FC) host connectivity – this makes the VNXe 3200 one powerful little unit!

As the VNXe is generally targeted at the SMB and remote office use cases, where local IT resource is often limited, the management and configuration of the storage is made extra-easy via the use of the usual user-friendly EMC Unisphere web based management interface as well as through the use of wizard driven functionality.

This VNXe 3200 simulator provides you with easy access to the web based Unisphere management interface.  As this is actually an Adobe Flash based simulator there is a basic installation process with no configuration necessary – apart from any configurations you want to create or change once in the simulation interface.

The best-use case for the VNXe 3200 simulator is for VNXe 3200 Unisphere management interface familiarization/education.   As this is a Adobe Flash base simulator you are unable to create and present out storage to other machines/VMs.  Don’t let this put you off though as this simulator still behaves like a fully working VNXe, so there is a whole bunch of fun to be had in playing and configuring up your own VNXe 3200.

Default EMC Unisphere Logon Credentials:

Username: admin
Password: Password123#

_____________________________________________________________

So there we have it folks, four different EMC storage products to download, install and play with for free in your own lab environment.  As I mentioned at the start of this post, I will be writing some posts on each that will provide step by step information on how to install and configure each of the storage simulators.

Download each, have fun and be sure to leave a comment telling us how you get on!  And finally don’t forget to visit the EMC Community Network to share and gain help and information from others who are also running these EMC simulators in their lab.

The post EMC Storage Simulators for your lab – Free! appeared first on TechHead and was written by Simon Seagrave.

The VMware vSphere Hardening Guide is something you should always be familiar with and keep stashed away in your vArmory of useful things.  This MS Excel based document/guide contains valuable information and a checklist of the settings and best practices that you should be applying to your vSphere infrastructure to ensure that it is secure against the risk of common exploits, etc.

Mike Foley and the VMware vSphere security team have just released the latest update to the vSphere hardening guide which covers vSphere 5.5 Update 1 (U1).  This is the latest update since the vSphere 5.5 version of the Hardening guide and contains all the usual great stuff pertaining to securing your vSphere environment, but also includes the following four new updates (along with minor amendments):

enable-VGA-Only-Mode: Used for server VM’s that don’t need a graphical console. e.g. Linux web servers, Windows Core, etc.
disable-non-essential-3D-features: Remove 3D graphic capabilities from VM’s that don’t need them.
use-unique-roles: A new companion control to use-service-accounts. If you have multiple service accounts then each one should have a unique role with just enough privs to accomplish their task. This is in line with least-priv operations
change-sso-admin-password: A great catch. When installing Windows vCenter, you’re prompted to change the password of administrator@vsphere.local. When installing the VCSA in a default manner you are not. This control reminds you to go back and do that.

As always I recommend that you download, familiarise and apply, where necessary, the security recommendations and best practices outlined in this guide, this will help you sleep at night knowing that your vSphere environment is better secured.

Download your copy of the vSphere 5.5 U1 Hardening Guide from VMware’s dedicated page here, where you can also download vSphere Hardening Guides for previous versions of vSphere.

Happy securing!

The post VMware vSphere 5.5 U1 Hardening Guide Available appeared first on TechHead and was written by Simon Seagrave.

Internet privacy has been a constant topic in the news for months, yet, until now, relatively little attention has focused on how consumers really feel about the issue. Taking the pulse of 15,000 survey respondents in 15 different countries across … Continue reading →

The post EMC Privacy Index Reveals Divergent Views on Internet Privacy Worldwide appeared first on Reflections.

Ever been on a Netflix binge? You Breaking Bad fans know exactly what I’m talking about. My latest was when I discovered the availability of Star Wars Clone Wars’ final season in its entirety. Prior to that, it was cramming The Walking Dead’s first 2 seasons into one long (and gory) weekend. There truly is no better way to watch a TV series these days. You get completely immersed. It’s awesome.

But this isn’t a blog post about Star Wars Clone Wars, Walking Dead, or even going on weekend-long Netflix binges. It’s about how our increasingly seamless consumer experiences with technology devices and services has changed our expectations of how IT should work when we are at work.

That we can get almost all digital content on demand, streamed over the internet, direct to our personal devices- and that it almost always works the way it’s supposed to – is the new paradigm for, well…everything.

A side effect of the demand/instant gratification model is that it’s pretty infuriating when it doesn’t work.

Remember how your mouse’s pointer icon would transform into an hourglass icon while you waited for web pages to load? Just 6-7 years ago, that hour glass would spin, and spin, and spin…. Now we’re furiously clicking our mouse in frustration or rebooting the program after waiting just a few seconds for a Facebook news feed to refresh.

It was only inevitable that our consumer experiences with IT hardware, software, and services would gradually creep into our work life. The main theme of TSIA’s recent book B4B: How Technology and Big Data are Reinventing the Customer – Supplier Relationship is that consumers are more productive in their personal lives than they are at work. In response, they’ve brought their personal productivity to work via technology.

In one sense, this is manifested in the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) phenomenon. But viewed through a broader, more personalized prism BYOD merely reflects how our expectations of how technology should work in the consumer space have significantly raised our expectations of Enterprise technology. The resulting “consumerization” of customer expectations in the Enterprise has transformed IT vendors/suppliers including EMC and its competitors.

EMC understands this and is making aggressive moves to stay ahead of these trends by providing its customers and partners the experience they expect. At the highest level, EMC’s Federation strategy provides an increasingly seamless experience across the entire EMC family and throughout the IT Stack- from EMC products and services for storage and VMware for public cloud and virtualization, to RSA for IT security and Pivotal for big data analytics and innovative software.

IT’s consumerization requires vendors to adopt a more empathetic design ethos toward their customers  and partners. For example, Pivotal recently announced the launch of the new Spring IO Platform 1.0- which is billed as the “Consumerization of Java for Developers”. This shift in design ethos extends to (and by definition includes a closer wedding between) product and services.

In EMC Customer Service, this means evolving to an agile and increasingly automated, proactive, and self-help driven experience. See Mary Cay Kosten’s recent blog post for a good list of what EMC is building in this space. As a prime example, support.emc.com’s My Product feature provides on demand reporting built to ensure always on availability of a customer’s products and services across their entire installed base.

The increasing preeminence of the software defined 3^rd platform is accelerating the consumerization of IT. Software design’s inherent flexibility, along with its ability to tap into and better leverage big data, will dramatically enhance the types of service offers and capabilities EMC will provide to its customers and partners. I am very excited by the opportunity and challenges to continue evolving EMC’s Customer Service model in line with our customers and partners consumerized expectations.

In our Big Data engagements, we talk about the importance of building detailed “profiles” of our most important entities, such as customers, products, devices, machines, employees, partners, stores, wind turbines, cars, ATMs, etc. As part of our data science process, we build a profile on each individual entity that:

1)     Captures that entity’s tendencies, propensities, patterns, trends, behaviors, relationships, associations, affiliations (plus, in the case of humans, interests and passions)

2)     Compares that entity’s current state and recent transactions, activities, and interactions to their individual profile in order to flag “unusual” activities and behaviors that might be indicative of a problem or monetization opportunity

But what do we mean by the word “profile,” and what elements might comprise a profile?

Defining and Building a Profile

A profile is a combination of metrics, key performance indicators, scores, business rules, and analytic insights that combine to make up the tendencies, behaviors, and propensities of an individual entity (customer, device, partner, machine). The profile could include:

• Key demographic data such as age, gender, education level, home location, marital status, income level, wealth level, make and model of car, age of car, age of children, gender of children, and other data. For a machine, it might include model type, physical location, manufacturer, manufacturer location, purchase date, last maintenance date, technician who performed the last maintenance, etc.
• Key transactional metrics such as number of purchases, purchase amounts, returns, frequency of visits, recency of visits, payments, claims, calls, social posts, etc. For a machine, that might include miles and/or hours of usage, most recent usage time and date, type of usage, usage load, who operated the product, route of product usage (for something like a truck, car, airplane, or train)
• Scores (combinations of multiple metrics) that measure customer satisfaction level, financial risk tolerance, retirement readiness, FICO, advocacy grade, likelihood to recommend (LTR), and other data. For a machine, that might include performance scores, reliability scores, availability scores, capacity utilization scores, and optimal performance ranges, among other things
• Business rules inferred using association analysis; for example, if CUST_101 visits a certain Starbucks and a certain Walgreens, we can predict (with 90% confidence level) that there is an 85% likelihood that this customer will visit a certain Chipotle within 60 minutes
• Group or network relationships (number, strength, direction, sequencing, and clustering of relationships) that capture interests, passions, associations and affiliations gained from using graphic analysis
• Coefficients that predict certain outcomes or responses based upon certain independent variables found through regression analysis; for example, a machine’s likelihood to break down given a number of interrelated variables such as usage loads since last maintenance, the technician who performed the maintenance, the machine manufacturer, temperatures, humidity, elevation, traffic, idle time, etc.)
• Behavioral groupings of like or similar machines or people based upon usage transactions (purchases, returns, payments, web clicks, call detail records, credit card payments, claims, etc.) using clustering, K-nearest neighbor (KNN), and segmentation analysis

Example Customer Profile

A profile could be made up of hundreds, if not thousands of different metrics and scores that—when used in combination against a specific business initiative like customer retention/up-sell/reference, predictive maintenance, supplier quality, or on-time shipments—can improve the predictive capabilities of the model.

Let’s review in the table below what a profile might look like for a particular customer. Note that I have grossly oversimplified the profile to facilitate the explanation and because I can’t process anything more complex myself. My data science team is probably rolling over laughing in their Python, R, Mahout and SAS toolsets as they read this.

Some metrics and scores are more important than others, depending upon the business initiative being addressed. For a financial services firm focused on customer acquisition, certain data (disposable income, retirement readiness, life stage, age, education level, and number of family members) may be the most important predictive metrics. For customer retention, however, metrics such as advocacy, customer satisfaction, risk comfort score, social network associations, and select social media relationships may be the most important predictive metrics.

In my next blog, I’ll take a look at how to use these profiles in a customer retention example.

Like my colleague, Bill Schmarzo, in his recent Point-Counterpoint: Eight (No, Nine!) Problems with Big Data blog where he takes on the New York Times, I felt the need to comment on an article I read in the Washington Post entitled “Five Myths about Big Data” by Samuel Arbesman [August 18, 2013, Outlook Section, Page B2, The Washington Post].

I feel some of the observations were off base—which I will address shortly. Some I actually agree with—but with a twist. Yet the article points out a key issue that we big data specialists have to deal with:  these perceptions are out there. In addition, as conventional wisdom states, “perception is reality.” Coming from the author, who is an applied mathematician and network scientist, this commentary predictably takes a jaded view of the need for, and benefits of big data analytics. Let’s address each one of his myths:

Other objections that I have come across in my discussions with communications provider senior executives – and my actual responses:

In conclusion – don’t give up!  Start small, celebrate success and evangelize!

Next Up:  Transforming a Business area with IT as a Catalyst – Why is this so hard?

I hope you will join me and will pass on the link to your friends and networks. Please … subscribe, send me feedback, and check back for the next installment. If nothing else, I promise the Travel Tips will be extremely useful!

Today’s Travel Tip:  “Must see” sights and favorite gifts to bring back from international travel

Typically, I am asked, “You’ve traveled to X. I am going there…what should I see and what should I bring back?” The following is by no means exhaustive but what I consider the top sights and gifts representative of the countries I have visited. Generally these gifts are readily available throughout the country as well as in the airport for last-minute shopping. We’ll start with the Americas:

I was sitting in the lobby of the New York Hilton after attending a fantastic, 2-day forum focused on delivering value to customers and retaining their loyalty. In fact, I had plenty of time to reflect on all the great lessons from the forum because my departure was delayed 4 hours by a bus malfunction. This dreadful company didn’t even apologize when they called to inform me of the delay. It was the first time I used them and I can say with certainty that it will be the last time too. Some people may say, “Hold on a second, Dave. You’re getting carried away. This company couldn’t have anticipated that the air conditioning would go out. Incidents like these happen in the transportation industry. It’s just bad luck.” I may have taken a similar tone prior to attending this conference. But not anymore. Excuses just don’t cut it anymore.

Here are my top three takeaways from the Forrester Research Customer Experience Forum 2014:

1. You CAN control and define the customer experience. Rick Parrish, a Forrester Senior Analyst, talked about how Delta (yes, an airline) has risen in the ranks in the firm’s Customer Experience Index. They did it by rallying around a single customer pain point – eliminating cancellations. Instead of surrendering to factors usually deemed outside of an airline’s control, Delta assumed control.

1. They acquired Travelport, a leading distribution services and e-commerce provider for the global travel industry, to maintain tighter control on whether flights are delayed vs. cancelled.
2. They acquired an oil refinery so as not to be subject to fluctuating fuel prices.
3. They reformed their culture and empowered front line agents to be more flexible and responsive to customer needs.

2. The competition does not consist of your typical industry peers. Every day, consumers are on the receiving end of amazing experiences from companies including Zappos, Nordstrom, Southwest, and Starbucks. It’s becoming the norm and those experiences will increasingly be expected in B2B relationships. Looking at your peers will only make you a fast follower rather than truly differentiating your company based on the customer experience.

3. Inspiring your employees will generate inspiring customer experiences. Stephen Cannon, Mercedes Benz USA President and CEO gave great examples of how they are inspiring their employees by enabling them to drive their fleet of cars on race tracks, allowing them to take cars home for several days to know how it feels to pull into their own driveway, and facilitating trips to the Mercedes museum so they can fully internalize the rich history of the world’s first car maker. In short, they turned all employees into real fans of the brand, not just salespeople focused on closing a transaction.

It was a great couple days in New York City, full of inspirational stories and practical advice. If you are focused on continually improving the customer experience as we are at EMC, I highly recommend the Forrester Customer Experience Forum.

“The opinions expressed here are my personal opinions. Content published here is not read or approved in advance by EMC and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of EMC nor does it constitute any official communication of EMC.”

When a leading technology company like EMC makes a major announcement affecting four core product lines, techies tend to get very excited about the speeds, the feeds and what new frontiers have been enabled.  Being a techie myself, I find the product feature/functionality very interesting, and perhaps even “very cool.” In my role as the leader of EMC’s professional services delivery organization, a different set of words come to mind when I hear major product announcements: solutions, business enablement, skills, training, investment, and time.

In fact, time is the key watchword when looking at new technologies:  time to implement; time to train; time to realize gains; time to actually take required training.  These are realities that IT professionals around the world face every day.

Technical advancements are accelerating, and these innovations have enabled businesses to evolve faster than existing systems and infrastructure can support. For example, companies have been gathering data in data warehouses for two decades, accumulating massive volumes of information.

As part of this week’s Redefine Possible event, EMC is announcing an Isilon system with twice the IOPS of previous models and a VCE converged infrastructure solution built on Isilon scale-out Networked Attached Storage (NAS).  With these technologies, the concept of data lakes –all of the data in both public and private clouds, in one place, with no common structure– becomes both real and usable.  Companies can take the scores of data they’ve amassed and leverage it as an asset to drive future growth.  Just one problem – how do you make that leap?

This is where the Professional Services organization creates additional value for customers. Bringing to bear a force of people trained on the product, as well as on the full solution, enables us to optimize the customer’s implementation, prevent miscues, and provide the customer with a well-built foundation to drive business value.   It is “risk mitigation” at its finest, and it is all about time — whether it’s accelerating time-to-value, or ensuring the customer doesn’t lose time and opportunity through missteps in design or execution.

A similar speed to utility with new technology can also be seen with hybrid cloud. New XtremIO enhancements include greater scale, functionality, and major support improvements for virtualized workloads. In the new VMAX³ family you have machines that are purpose built for cloud, offering one click provisioning and the new EMC ProtectPoint, which enables quick back-up from primary storage to an EMC Data Domain. The VMAX³ eliminates the large hurdles that have stood in the way of people understanding how they can benefit from implementing a cloud architecture. But, will the IT staff in a non-cloud data center be able to quickly and optimally do drive this implementation?

Again, that this is where a trained Professional Services organization can create added value for the customer.  It is the wrapper on this solution, helping IT staffs around the world take advantage of ever-changing technological advancements more quickly, and with fewer missteps.

EMC is redefining possible with a host of new innovations across its flash, enterprise storage and scale-out NAS product lines to provide a foundation for a hybrid cloud infrastructure.  Is your IT enterprise ready to take that next step forward? How do you see this wave of innovation benefiting your organization?

Please take a moment to comment below and share your thoughts on how you would like to redefine possible for your business.

I am still in shock after watching Germany hammer Brazil 7-1 in the World Cup 2014 semi-finals. Who could have predicted it? Probably no one, yet there are many in  the global wage-maker community that knew Germany would win.

I feel pretty smug. I thought Germany would beat Brazil as two outstanding players (Neymar and Silva) were missing from the lineup. But was my “gut-feel” correct? FiveThirtyEight.com’s player-based-prediction engine still had Brazil as favorites despite some ad-hoc correction for the inactive players.

The predictor that has been most successful has been Bing’s prediction engine. It has called the last  12 World Cup 2014 match results correctly. Microsoft explains that “Data obtained from prediction markets allows us to tune the win/lose/tie probabilities due to the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ phenomenon captured by the people wagering on the outcomes.”

Odds makers collect coin by facilitating wagers between punters. If everyone was picking Brazil the odds maker would change the odds. The individual making the wager would win less money if they placed a bet on Brazil. Similarly, the odds of Germany winning would result in a higher pay-out. The result of this manipulation in odds is that the odds maker will have about as much money to reward the winners from those who lose the wager (plus enough to take a cut). A collective “gut-feel” is derived. Microsoft’s insight was superb.

So what’s the future? Later today the Netherlands play Argentina. Being the son of a Dutch mother, I am pretty depressed. Bing currently predicts Argentina will win (as does FiveThirtyEight.com). My only hope is that a feedback loop is being created. As more people wager according to Bing’s prediction, people are actually putting their faith (and investment) on Bing being successful rather than Argentina winning. This could be distorting the prediction in favour of Argentina and thus Bing may be wrong this time around.

So if the Dutch win (or the prediction for the final is wrong), maybe the lesson learned will be: if you have a winning formula, keep it to yourself.

There are things we do innately – check the time, read the news, breathe. For me on the road, it’s second nature to share ideas. Even though I lead a file sharing division (Syncplicity), I’m not the only one who … Continue reading →

The post Sharing is a Necessity appeared first on Reflections.