Getting Flashy at EMC World 2015!

EMC World 2015 is a short week away, May 4-7, 2015 once again at the Venetian in Las Vegas.   The 2015 session catalog is live!  Is there any doubt?  Flash is impacting every aspect of the Storage Industry, disrupting normal, changing the way storage and applications are deployed across IT Organizations.  Last year I blogged about the EMC World 2014 Breakout Sessions that featured “Flash” as part of the breakout session; last year 2014 there were 9 sessions.  Do you believe that in 2015 there will be 34 sessions that include some type of “Flash”?  As I’ve always said, Flash is Everywhere – and it continues to enable EMC to develop a portfolio of solutions designed to help our customers deploy and manage enterprise applications.  From a small Flash footprint to an all-Flash data center, EMC has the right solution for the job.

Of course there is a focus on performance intensive workloads, but the EMC Flash Strategy is much more than performance – In fact, the most interesting flash sessions this year focus on applications.  Breakout sessions include; Redefining Database & Business Applications Performance & Efficiency With Flash , Transform Your Real Time Analytics With XtremIO & Splunk, Demystifing The Impact Of Flash & Virtualization On Database Licensing, XtremIO For SAP: Game Changer For SAP Landscapes , No Storage Tuning & Complete Operational Simplicity For Databases sessions also focus on Disaster Recovery Business Continuity For XtremIO All Flash Array.

Sessions also include customer case study; FutureCare: How Healthcare Providers Are Leveraging Cloud To Enable Next Generation Healthcare IT , how internal EMC IT leverages Flash EMC IT: Leveraging The Power Of Flash In The Data Center  and hear an industry analyst way in Wikibon’s View On All-Flash Array Trends, Adoption, & Market Leadership

And don’t miss the hands on labs Data Protection For EMC XtremIO With EMC RecoverPoint (Hands-on Lab) and VNXe3200 Management and VMware Integration (Hands-on Lab)

Here is the full list of EMC World 2015 Flash Breakout Sessions, be sure to check out:  Winning With A “Royal Flash” and follow me on twitter @SamMarraccini

EMC WorldWinning With A “Royal Flash” Flash is fast and it’s fundamentally changing how storage is designed. Flash has become mandatory in the data center; it’s no longer an option. While Flash provides unprecedented performance, harnessing the true power of Flash requires re-thinking Data Center Strategy.  Flash is impacting every offering from EMC and enabling every EMC Business Unit to provide unique benefits and value to your IT organization. View Less1 Hour Lecture

Monday, May 4, 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM &Tuesday, May 5, 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM

Flash: The Myth, The Media, The Magic Flash adoption continues to accelerate within the data center, with many viable and valuable deployment options and architectures. This session explains the technology foundations and architectural values of flash, and previews the world of next generation non-volatile memories. View Less1 Hour Lecture

Tuesday, May 5, 8:30 AM – 9:30 AM

Rack-Scale Flash: Solving Challenges For Performance Sensitive & Data Intensive Workloads Join the industry experts to learn why it’s becoming increasingly important for applications and infrastructure teams to think about Rack-Scale Flash for performance-sensitive and data-intensive workloads. Rack-Scale Flash is a truly transformative approach to flash technologies, it delivers groundbreaking performance –performance better than server-side flash, along with the ease and manageability of shared storage. View Less1 Hour Lecture at

Wednesday, May 6, 1:30 PM – 2:30 PM

Wikibon’s View On All-Flash Array Trends, Adoption, & Market Leadership Get Wikibon’s latest analysis of the evolving trends and use cases for all-flash arrays, and how they are transforming storage sprawl into agile data centers. Learn how they advise customers to consider the architectural differences and properly test-drive AFAs. View Less1 Hour Lecture

Monday, May 4, 1:30 PM – 2:30 PM & Thursday, May 7, 8:30 AM – 9:30 AM

Global Partner Summit – Flash Breakout for Partners Did you know  XtremIO is the fastest growing product in EMC’s history and is running away with the market share in this emerging space?  In this  session, led by Mike Wing, Global VP, XtremIO, you’ll learn about this transformational story, how to position yourself as a leader, and how to help your customers Redefine Possible with the power of Flash. View Less50 Minutes Lecture

Tuesday, May 5, 3:40 PM – 4:30 PM

EMC IT: Leveraging The Power Of Flash In The Data Center How did EMC IT get breakthrough shared-storage benefits for application acceleration, consolidation, and EMC Flashagility with a reduction in cost plus scale-out architecture, consistent low latency and IOPs, deduplication, and compression? This session provides an overview, discussion, use cases, benefits and lessons learned from EMC IT’s implementation of Flash storage/XtremIO. View Less1 Hour Lecture

Monday, May 4, 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM & Wednesday, May 6, 8:30 AM – 9:30 AM

Redefining Database & Business Applications Performance & Efficiency With Flash IT infrastructure teams are responsible for supporting business applications with maximum performance, high quality of service as well as agility and speed to deploy and scale applications infrastructures. This session discusses IT strategies leveraging all-flash-array technologies to dramatically simplify how your IT organization delivers infrastructure service to business applications including real world use-cases across Oracle, Microsoft & SAP. View Less1 Hour Lecture

Tuesday, May 5, 1:30 PM – 2:30 PM

VMAX3: Flash-Optimized By Design VMAX has long been the industry-leader for leveraging and exploiting Flash. This session outlines the architectural features of VMAX3 that allow it to optimally use EFDs.  It covers design and implementation best practices as well as details on the rich set of data services available for your all Flash or hybrid VMAX array. View Less1 Hour Lecture

Monday, May 4, 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM & Wednesday, May 6, 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM

FutureCare: How Healthcare Providers Are Leveraging Cloud To Enable Next Generation Healthcare IT Healthcare providers are making significant EMR investments to deliver safer, coordinated care at lower cost. Incorporating FutureCare-enabling technologies is more critical than ever as caregivers work to leverage real-time data at the point-of-care. Join us to learn best practices from healthcare organizations as they redefined their IT leveraging Hybrid Cloud & Big Data based on Converged Infrastructure and Flash technologies View Less1 Hour Birds-of-a-Feather

Wednesday, May 6, 1:30 PM – 2:30 PM

Hyperscale Infrastructure Is Moving To A Simplified Data Architecture: The 2 TIERS Model EMC’s Fast Data Group has developed technology (for Exascale computing) to bridge multi-tiered storage systems in a hyperscale environment.  With this technology at the core, we are introducing a “2 Tiers” I/O architecture for the Enterprise, a scale-out Performance Tier and a scale-out Capacity Tier. By combining the performance and agility of EMC PCIe Flash products with the capacity and reliability of EMC Data Lakes products, we will demonstrate the scale and flexibility of a 2 Tiers based hyperscale storage system. View Less1 Hour Lecture

Monday, May 4, 1:30 PM – 2:30 PM & Wednesday, May 6, 8:30 AM – 9:30 AM

VNX Hybrid Flash Best Practices For Performance Looking for great performance from your VNX array?  There are many design and configuration choices affecting performance that should be considered during initial planning as well as after deployment, to realize performance gains. This session explores considerations for pools, advanced data services, benchmarking, and port utilization that will help you to get the most from the system in your use case. View Less1 Hour Lecture

Monday, May 4, 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM & Wednesday, May 6, 8:30 AM – 9:30 AM

Transform Your Real Time Analytics With XtremIO & Splunk In this session, we will discuss how you can transform your real time analytics with Splunk using EMC storage solutions. We will provide technical validation and customer proof points along with a reference architecture using XtremIO and Isilon products. We will discuss benefits of using flash storage for improving performance by placing hot/warm buckets while optimizing the cost using Isilon for cold/frozen buckets. View Less1 Hour Lecture

Tuesday, May 5, 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM & Wednesday, May 6, 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM

Data Protection For EMC XtremIO With EMC RecoverPoint (Hands-on Lab) XtremIO is the only scale-out storage array designed from the ground up for flash. In this lab, see how EMC is bringing business continuity and data protection to XtremIO through EMC RecoverPoint. In this lab, users will get an overview of the RecoverPoint 4.1.2 Unisphere interface, learn about RecoverPoint integration with XtremIO, and protecting applications running on XtremIO arrays. View Less1 Hour Self-Paced Hands-on Labs

Demystifing The Impact Of Flash & Virtualization On Database Licensing There is plenty of misinformation on the impact to database licensing from infrastructure consolidation. Join this session as we untangle database consolidation and storage consolidation marketing to deliver a clear picture of how these technologies drive greater return on investment for database licensing. We will also dispel many of the myths surrounding database licensing and virtualization. View Less1 Hour Birds-of-a-Feather

Tuesday, May 5, 1:30 PM – 2:30 PM

Redefining Next: Experience, Performance & How to Drive Your Business Industry-defining experiences are the result of industry-leading technology – and EMC is ready to take you all the way forward. David Goulden and Jeremy Burton share the vision for high-performance scale-out Flash in next-generation data centers, the game-changing role of advanced data protection, and much more – with a big emphasis on staying fast and agile with the applications and workloads that drive your business. View Less90 Minutes General Session

Monday, May 4, 10:00 AM – 11:30 AM

XtremIO For SAP: Game Changer For SAP Landscapes Learn how EMC is helping customers increase SAP performance by 70% and reduce TCO dramatically using XtremIO All-Flash Arrays. This customer panel teaches you how to move your SAP applications from traditional infrastructure to all flash arrays at incredible speed, while consolidating multiple copies for test and pre-production landscapes onto one XtremIO platform. View Less1 Hour Lecture

Monday, May 4, 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM & Thursday, May 7, 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM

VNX Hybrid Flash File Deep Dive This session discusses EMCs VNX2 file offerings with a focus on recent file enhancements including, file level deduplication, file system space reclaim, and other DR related enhancements. We also discuss customer use cases for these new enhancements by showing their functionality and usability aspects. View Less1 Hour Lecture

Monday, May 4, 1:30 PM – 2:30 PM & Thursday, May 7, 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM

Business Continuity For XtremIO All Flash Array The session discusses the range of XtremIO high availability / business continuity solutions that enable XtremIO customers to protect mission-critical workloads. EMC offers the most complete business continuity portfolio in the industry. This session will cover all of the available solutions including XtremIO local protection, native replication using RecoverPoint, RecoverPoint for VMs, and VPLEX. Best practices and real customer examples are highlighted throughout the session to recommend the best approaches for different scenarios. View Less1 Hour Lecture

Monday, May 4, 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM & Thursday, May 7, 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM

XtremIO In The Wild: Insights, Data Reduction, Performance & Operational Best Practices As the market’s #1 all-flash array, XtremIO has deployed to almost 2000 customers to date. This session looks through some of the most interesting insights from that install base to help discern the future of storage and all-flash application workloads. We will spotlight general and specific results for data reduction, performance, and operational best practices. View Less1 Hour Lecture

Tuesday, May 5, 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM & Wednesday, May 6, 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM

Fiber, Fabrics & Flash: The Future Of Storage Networking Using a single converged network for both storage and networking poses both opportunities and challenges. Multiple SAN protocols (FCoE, iSCSI, iSER, and the emerging RDMA based version of NVMe for fabrics) support IP and Ethernet networks. This session discusses these protocols (including standards and deployment considerations), and provides a view into the future of storage networking. View Less1 Hour Lecture

Tuesday, May 5, 1:30 PM – 2:30 PM

VNX Best Practices For Running Microsoft Applications This session discusses best practice considerations for deploying virtualized Microsoft applications in private or hybrid cloud environments including SQL Server, Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync on EMC VNX and VNXe flash hybrid arrays. The discussion highlights sizing and performance tuning considerations and discuss strategies for operational recovery and data protection. View Less1 Hour Lecture with Demonstration

Tuesday, May 5, 4:30 PM – 5:30 PM & Thursday, May 7, 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM

Best Practices For Running Virtualized Workloads On XtremIO Great, you customer have just purchased a shiny new all flash array (AFA), now what? In this session, learn the reasons for ones of the quickest revolutions that the storage industry have seen in the last 10 years, we will understand the different architectures and the different use cases, we will go trough specific use cases pains and how to overcome this, Lastly, we will put an emphasis on specific gotcha’s that AFA possess and how to overcome these, so your customer won’t have to.   View Less1 Hour Lecture

Monday, May 4, 4:30 PM – 5:30 PM & Wednesday, May 6, 4:30 PM – 5:30 PM

Transforming Agile Software DevOps With XtremIO More than ever, agile development and software DevOps drives critical top-line business impact for customers across a broad range of industries. Learn how XtremIO is fundamentally enabling the next generation of agile DevOps with customer use cases to • Improve developer and overall product quality by providing full copies of production applications & datasets to all developers with zero-overhead XtremIO in-memory copy services • Dramatically accelerate performance across the entire DevOps ecosystem, enabling 1000’s of developers in a real-time • Deliver consistent, predictable performance for developers, automated build systems, and automated QA via sub-millisecond All-Flash DevOps storage • Accelerate adoption of a continual experimentation and learning through rapid repetition of prototyping. View Less1 Hour Lecture

Tuesday, May 5, 8:30 AM – 9:30 AM & Thursday, May 7, 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM

VNXe3200 Management and VMware Integration (Hands-on Lab) The VNXe3200 is the newest member of the VNX Family of storage systems and the most affordable flash optimized hybrid array in the market. VNXe3200 includes enterprise features such as MCx multicore optimization, FAST Suite storage efficiency, unified data protection and vSphere 6 integration. Experience Unisphere’s unprecedented ease of use as you explore each of these features in this lab. View Less1 Hour Self-Paced Hands-on Labs

VPLEX: Advanced Configuration & Design – Performance, Design, Failure Modes & More This session covers advanced aspects of using VPLEX, such as performance optimization, scalability, configuration, and failure modes and will provide customers with deeper understanding of its architecture to design for optimal behavior. This session also discusses in details best practices of architecting and deploying VPLEX with all-flash XtremIO environments for performance and availability, and virtual-environments for maximum flexibility.   View Less1 Hour Lecture

Tuesday, May 5, 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM & Thursday, May 7, 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM

Transformational Technology Inside XtremIO This session provides an overview to the EMC XtremIO all-flash scale-out array and its design objectives. The architecture is discussed and compared to other flash arrays in the market with the goal of helping the audience understand the unique requirements of building an all-flash array, the proper methodology for testing all-flash arrays, and architectural differentiation among flash array features that affect endurance, performance, and consistency across the most demanding mixed workload consolidations. View Less1 Hour Lecture

Monday, May 4, 1:30 PM – 2:30 PM & Wednesday, May 6, 8:30 AM – 9:30 AM

No Storage Tuning & Complete Operational Simplicity For Databases Running XtremIO In a 2014, IT Resources Strategies Survey, DBAs and storage teams today spend nearly 70% of their time maintaining their database environments versus focusing on application integration. This session reviews detailed solutions and case studies to showcase the value of EMC XtremIO all-flash-arrays to dramatically reduce steps needed for database infrastructure performance tuning, provisioning, and replication management. View Less1 Hour Lecture with Demonstration

Monday, May 4, 8:30 AM – 9:30 AM & Wednesday, May 6, 4:30 PM – 5:30 PM

VNX Best Practices For Efficiencies: Flash, Deduplication & Compression Ever thought about enabling a VNX2 space saving feature like Deduplication or Compression? Come to this session to learn more about VNX2 Deduplication and Compression features and implementation Best Practices. We also take a deep dive into the latest enhancements to VNX2 Block Deduplication.   View Less1 Hour Lecture

Wednesday, May 6, 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM & Thursday, May 7, 8:30 AM – 9:30 AM

Enterprise Hybrid Cloud & Database-as-Service Best Practices Learn best practices for Enterprise Hybrid Cloud deployments with Tier 0 storage services build on scale-out all-flash arrays. This session discusses key use cases and benefits like Database-as-a-Service, leveraging pre-defined service catalog capabilities; empowering VM Admins, Application Admins, and Infrastructure Admins with self-service; streamline EHC management; eliminate silos, accelerate workflows, and handle cloud bursting. Customer examples show how XtremIO can take you hybrid cloud to the next level for all workloads, with breakthrough consolidation, data reduction, workload agility, and elastic capacity.   View Less1 Hour Lecture

Tuesday, May 5, 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM & Thursday, May 7, 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM

Accelerating SQL Server With XtremIO This session provide a deep dive into XtremIO all-flash technologies for SQL Server. We begin with looking at the XtremIO features that are unique for SQL Server deployments, going over test some results we are seeing in the lab with different feature implementations. Then switch gear into a demo, and dive into detailed use case studies of where you could benefit from deploying your SQL Servers on XtremIO. We wrap up the session with discussing some common pitfalls, deployment considerations, and provide some best practices guidance. View Less1 Hour Lecture with Demonstration

Monday, May 4, 8:30 AM – 9:30 AM & Monday, May 4, 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM

Evaluating All-Flash Arrays AFA’s are evaluated differently from hybrid arrays. Learn the latest tools and techniques from XtremIO engineers and each other. Share your challenges and successes to help fellow attendees with their testing. Bring your ideas to advance the state of the art and improve available tools. This is a no-holds-barred session aimed to get a clear picture of AFA capabilities. View Less1 Hour Birds-of-a-Feather

Wednesday, May 6, 1:30 PM – 2:30 PM

Emerging EMC: Better, Faster, Smarter, More Get ready for a sneak peek into the future with emerging technologies from EMC that are guaranteed to amaze and delight! EMC innovations in data lakes, software-defined, cloud and flash have never been more exciting. See first-hand how unprecedented performance of rack-scale flash plus cutting edge innovations in software-defined storage, elastic cloud infrastructures, and open source software are redefining Enterprise IT for the third platform. View Less 90 Minutes General Session

Wednesday, May 6, 10:00 AM – 11:30 AM

VNX Hybrid Flash: Designing For FAST Cache & FAST VP On Unified Storage This session discusses whether skew applies to your environment. Given your datacenter application, we’ll explain when to use FAST VP versus FAST Cache, or both together. The second half of the session walks you through a methodology by which you can work out the optimal composition of your pool (SSD, SAS and NL-SAS) by the numbers.   View Less1 Hour Lecture

Monday, May 4, 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM & Wednesday, May 6, 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM

XtremIO Native Replication With RecoverPoint The session provides a deep dive of the new native replication for XtremIO. It articulates the innovative unique replication technique that leverages the power of XtremIO’s in-memory snapshot architecture to perform replication with breakthrough efficiency and RPOs. We will discuss the different design considerations when applying replication to all flash workloads and how XtremIO and RecoverPoint successfully implement those considerations. We will show how customers can achieve best in class replication while keeping XtremIO’s consistent high performance. The session includes a demonstration of the solution.   View Less1 Hour Lecture with Demonstration

About the Author: Sam Marraccini

Sam Marraccini is a 18-year EMC veteran and 27-year technology veteran. Part of the Dell EMC Global Portfolio Marketing Team, Sam is focused on developing and evangelizing the unique benefits of Dell EMC Products, Technologies and Solutions