• John starting with chatting about the last session with customers…
• Talking about 2nd platform and 3rd platform – we’ve now all realized that you’re not going to build the same kind of infrastructure stack for 3rd platform as 2nd platform
  • But if you could sufficiently virtualize you might have a common pool you can pull from.
• Trending toward that we can reuse components of the stacks – common substrate
• Less stranded hardware
• 3rd layer – data persistence layer – still debating how it will work out
  • Some won’t cross domains for economic reasons
  • traditional storage technologies may be over-designed for containers
  • software storage may work for traditional workloads
  • Isilon is a good example of this
• Definitely not just platform 2 and platform 3 storage architectures
• Data Protection – what about it?
  • It’s needed in Platform 3 – but most Platform 3 architectures don’t even think about data protection.
  • Are there potentially bad things that happen when Platform 3 cattle or chickens die?
  • What about snapshots in the Platform 3 world? Not really defined yet….but could apply.
  • Possibly entirely new data protection models
  • How do you protect a SaaS app? Or a public cloud app?
  • What happens is Salesforce loses all your data?
  • Data Domain could snap in here in very interesting ways – integration with various cloud apps
• What about resiliency and reliability of containers?
  • Different approach for enterprise workloads
• Data persistence will mostly go horizontal
• Roese asking – do we see blurring of Platform 2 and Platform 3?
  • Security has to live on both sides.
    • Security = stop the known bad, allow the known good, detect the unknown…simple, eh? 🙂
    • Security companies so busy doing virtual security that they haven’t gotten to micro-containerized security.
  • Resource Management Scheme – someone has to run this. Even if build into the application someone has to be notified.
    • Operational Recoery is really being ignored in many conversations.
    • Coolest thing here in the EMC portfolio is Virtustream and it’s MicroVM concept. It’s not a small VM but a unit of consumption.
    • Virtualization gets you to a certain point, aggressive resource management takes you farther.
  • Fairly long discussion of Virtustream and how it’s very important to this conversation.
  • Architectural inconsistency between Platform 2 & 3 – P2 has a mgmt tool at the top, P3 has no tools at the top….it’s API’s and the developer doing DevOps things
• Opportunity for health managment synergy between P2 & P3 – especially if running bimodal IT
  • Matters when sharing some resources underneath
• Question about Platform 3 going down to the hardware level for health management – P3 doesn’t really.
  • Working with various customers on this.
• Data Compliance Issues –
• Data Placement – any intelligence in the drive for data placement?
  • No…but going to happen in the controller level.
  • May happen in the DPAD group – trying to extend the metadata model to understand data protection.
  • This becomes even more important at exabyte scale – at exabyte scale you can only protect data on write…no way to copy/replicate the data.
  • Leads into how do you do advanced data protection at exabyte scale.
  • Metadata snapshot with WORM like capabilities potentially
• Discussing genetic data – most personally identifiable data out there.
  • Have to be able to clearly identify ownership of that data for it to be on a common substrate/put it into a common repository.
  • Want to share it but not easy
  • Specific example of the larger question.
• My thoughts/questions I didn’t ask…
  • When a chicken dies, I eat a chicken sandwich (might have had to be there to understand that one).
  • DD Boost – integration with applications – what about SAP, etc already?
  • VSAN – hardware integration – lost writes – split brain issues with high availability – need a quorum of 3 then….drives up costs
  • Common data planes – VPLEX for primary data, Data Domain for backup/archive data.
    • Cloudbridge & Cloudboost in there too.

That’s a wrap – was a mind bending session covering lots of topics.