More on the HP VirtualSystem
Last week I gave you an introduction to the new HP VirtualSystem in the Power Podcast I did with Tom Joyce. Today I want to talk a bit more about it. While at HP Discover, I went over to the VirtualSystem booth in the demo area (called the Discover Zone). I had an interesting discussion with Adam Provost who is a solution architect. I'll include that video in a minute.
I was just trolling YouTube and saw a video there giving an overview of the VirtualSystem. Since I know all the guys in this video, I thought I'd share it with you. Patrick Eitenbichler used to be in storage and I worked very closely with him - very smart guy and yes you'll hear the slightest German accent from him. Lee Johns is in HP Storage and you'll hear an English accent from him. I work with Lee a lot and he's made a few appearances on my blog. Lee stopped into the bloggers' lounge at HP Discover to talk about Converged Storage - but that's another blog for later this week! Lastly, Jim Jackson is also in the video - Jim worked in storage many years ago and is now helping drive Converged Infrastructure in Dave Donatelli's organization. Here's that video:
One of the things I wanted to understand is what advantages does the VirtualSystem have over the approach a couple of storage-only vendors have taken in delivering virtual systems. I asked Adam about that in the video and he talked about the VCE approach (EMC and Cisco working with VMware as the virtualization sauce) compared to ours.
NOTE: The HP VirtualSystem supports hypervisors from VMware, Microsoft and Citrix. The VirtualSystem will be available in a couple of months but I I'd note that we have been shipping solutions like this for some time - just not with the simplified SKU that HP VirtualSystem will have.
Adam and I talked about the three variations we have of the VirtualSystem - the one we had at HP Discover was based on the P4800 BladeSystem SAN. I've raved for several months about how much I really like the P4800 because it showed the power of converged infrastructure - now you can see what I was hinting at as we take that solution and deliver a complete VirtualSystem.
Here's that video from HP Discover:
You can learn more about the HP VirtualSystem at www.hp.com/go/virtualsystem and I'll continue to bring you content here on the blog.
UPDATE: About 30 minutes after publishing this, I found some time to listen to a podcast that several of our storage bloggers that attended HP Discover did. Devang Panchigar, Enrico Signoretti, and Chris Evans discussed the HP VirtualSystem and compared that to other solutions. You can find that podcast on Chris' blog. I plan to post an article later in the week highlighting what the attending bloggers had to say.
