Tuesday is a big day for VMware and for their partners. I wanted to point you to a couple of things. First, VMware has a live webcast on Tuesday - while I know a bit about what's coming, mums the word until Tuesday. Here's a link where you can register for the live webcastwith CEO Paul Maritz and CTO Steve Herrod.
I also noticed that Stu Miniman from has a new blog post titled "HP Sharpening its VMware Storage Weapons". It's very good reading and I highly recommend it. A few comments/observations from me:
Stu says "HP StorageWorks did not have a strong affinity for virtualization". I'd admit that we were a little slow several years back around integrating with VMware but virtualization has been a focus for a long time. HP Storage was virtualizing before the industry adopted the term "virtualization". See HP AutoRAID from the mid 90's. I'd also point out that while we were a bit slow in the early stages, we've risen to the top. Check out my blog from January this year titled "HP passes EMC as the storage virtualization brand leader".
From my vantage point, we've been closely working with VMware for several years. We acquired LeftHand Networks nearly three years ago. That's when things really changed. As a result, we have been a leader in virtual SAN appliance (VSA) for VMware that has been shipping for nearly 4 years - and for a long time has been the only VSA on VMware's hardware compatibility list (HCL).
We are nearing the one year anniversary of our acquisition of 3PAR - as Stu points out, this has really helped because HP 3PAR "technology compares favorably with the market leaders" when considering VMware and storage integration.
At HP Discover, VMware joined our VP and GM of HP Storage David Scott on the stage for his keynote. HP Storage only had one keynote slot at HP Discover and David used a good chunk of his time to talk about HP and VMware. I have a video of that part of his keynote that I'll include here:
I'm working on several podcasts that will talk about the latest news from the VMware webcast and HP Storage. I should have the first one available here on Tuesday morning shortly after the VMware webcast begins. Be sure to stop by!
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Thanks for the linkage. As I stated in the article, HP Storage has been making some good progress on virtualization (Lefthand and 3PAR both help). The community is looking to tomorrow's announcement to see if it is truly VMware and cloud computing's "next big step". Wikibon will be hosting a real-time analysis/discussion at 2pm Eastern (which is after the noon VMware webinar) - hope you and some of the HP community will join us: July 12 Peer Incite: Maximizing the Value of VMware Infrastructure and Apps
