Varrow Blogs

While at the Carolina VMware Summit on Friday, which was excellent, I had a conversation with someone from EMC that I work with frequently.  He mentioned that EMC was really trying to get the word out about their Celerra VSA offering.  They want customers to get it, use it, test it, and get used to [...]

EMC has recently released its replacement for its EmailXtender product which is now called SourceOne.  More and more companies are faced with Email archiving challenges due to things like compliance, legal discovery and just the plain explosive growth of email data.  SourceOne solves many of these problem and integrates right in to most corporate email [...]

I was at a conference this past week attending a session on server virtualization which included several different interactive polls regarding what the audience was doing with virtualizing systems in their own environments.  A common theme of course was Test/Dev being the obvious consideration and to no surprise there were several people who still doubted [...]

I was at a conference this past week attending a session on server virtualization which included several different interactive polls regarding what the audience was doing with virtualizing systems in their own environments.  A common theme of course was Test/Dev being the obvious consideration and to no surprise there were several people who still doubted [...]

While at EMC World last week I attended an excellent session on Site Recovery Manager from VMware.  If you haven’t read about this solution yet think of it as an “easy button” for recovery of your server virtualization infrastructure.  SRM allows you to automate your disaster recovery plan facilitating seamless failover of your infrastructure without [...]

It’s very common that I observe organizations put a lot of time and resources into architecting and implementing a Server Based Computing environment but then leaving out the details with the overall solution.  It’s quite often these details that make or break an implementation and leave a less than desirable impression on users.  Out of the [...]

I wanted to shutdown our EMC Celerra the other day and the proper way to do this is to halt the data mover, once all of the hosts are turned off.  Here is the command:
server_cpu server_2 -halt
This will shutdown the data mover altogether.  You can verify this by doing a “/nas/sbin/getreason”.
In order to bring it [...]

Something that is often easy to overlook when putting new toys in your datacenter is power, UPS protected power in particular.  In the case of most large datacenters this is usually done with a large central UPS systems that power the entire datacenter.  In smaller datacenters or data closets a much smaller rack mount or [...]

In case you missed it, on May 21st 2009 EMC released PowerPath/VE which is the first true dynamic multipath load balancing solution for virtual environments (vSphere environments only). Building your internal clouds on proven LB and MP software such as PP is in your best interest and necessary to support the increasing demands of the [...]

Well what can I say, Day 1 was a blur, as was D2 and D3. Between keynotes, sessions and solutions exchange track time the ability to formulate my thoughts and introduce them here has escaped me. But anyways here is the synopsis..
Session1-Symmetrix V-Max Series w/Enginuity Overview by Rick DiFabio
What generally became of this session was [...]

This self paced workshop demonstrated 3 key components of PowerPath: Virtual Multipath Management, Encryption, and Migration Enabler. The presenters for the session were Rob Pellowski, Brian Stultz, and Eddie Thigpen. This H.O.W (Hands on Workshop) was one I was looking forward to. My primary focus was on PowerPath/VE, I spent little time allocated to the [...]

This session focuses on design considerations, use cases and best practices for RecoverPoint and VMware ESX and SRM integrations. The presenters for the session were Donald Kush and Hari Kannan. Note: Yes I had to go to at least one RecoverPoint session just out of curiosity, although I came out none the wiser. But I [...]

This session focuses on new advancements with EMC’s PowerPath particularly in the areas of virtual workloads. Note: This post documents some of my notes during the session, so please be tolerant of the flow.
PowerPath, as you know,  is one of the most successful licensed products from EMC with over 800,000 licenses and across 20,000 sites [...]

I recently have been working with Avamar.  If you are not familiar with Avamar, it’s EMC’s client-server backup and restore solution that includes a unique global data de-duplication technology.  What makes Avamar so unique is that it identifies redundant data at the source, not only reducing the amount of backup data traveling across your network, [...]