Ok, I know VMworld ended 11 days ago but last week was more than a little busy with Labor Day and playing catch up. I also had a bit of an excuse for holding off because I knew the video that I have at the end of this post was coming. So thanks for reading this more than a little late summary of VMworld.
HP Super Session
HP had a "Super Session" on Tuesday morning. There was a great storage demo and I'll have some details (a video) on that. I have a lot of notes from the session but I'm only going to cover it at a high level.
Our Executive VP of the Technology Solutions Group Ann Livermore kicked the session off. The session title was "Stop Virtualizing Servers, Start Virtualizing Infrastructure". Ann began by talking about industry trends: data center transformation, the information explosion, and delivering everything as a service. She went on to say that the challenges that IT face are around being able to deliver what the business needs today while preparing for tomorrow and working with a legacy infrastructure that is rigid and complex.
HP's answer to this is a converged infrastructure. This will be built on standard components where the whole infrastructure is virtualized: servers, storage, and the network. Our vision is to do this in a way to unify and optimize the data center, taking an integrated holistic approach. And make it easy to manage - both the physical and virtual infrastructure.
Ann highlighted that HP can deliver this the way our customers want - in house, outsource it to HP, or parts of the service delivered via the cloud and integrated into the customers environment. Ann then briefly discussed the announcement we did on September 1:
Ann then invited Mark Potter, Senior VP of Enterprise Systems and Networking and Rob Taylor VP from EDS. Mark talked about managing virtual infrastructure as being top-of-mind for customers according to the latest "The Info Pro" wave study, and in fact the #1 issue of managing and monitoring virtual infrastructure jumped from the #11 issue in the previous wave to being the #1 issue in the latest wave.
During the super session, Adam Carter, HP LeftHand Product Manager, came out and gave a very impressive live demonstration of a single SAN environment in an ESX cluster. In the iSCSI-based SAN, Adam had set up two HP LeftHand P4000 arrays that simulated being stretched across the SAN in a multi-site configuration. While the distance between the multiple sites was only 10 feet, Adam said that depending on the WAN between the sites, the distance can be 100 miles. He also said that with the P4000, the software required to set up this disaster tolerant, high availability solution is included free. I grabbed a low-res video of the demo Adam did:
What's impressive about this is that with traditional arrays, you'd have to set up two SANs, one at each site to have the fail-over capability. I looked at this recently for one competitor and just the software we're talking about is between $30-60K. And again, with HP LeftHand, it's all included for free, nada, ZILCH. Very impressive set of features that are included.
Other impressions of VMworld
Stephen Foskett organized a storage Tweetup on Tuesday night - I met so many people from both the vendor community as well as storage analysts. It was a big highlight of my week and was great to be in one room with a lot of the very smart storage people I engage with in the industry. I also got to spend some time with Alex McDonald from NetApp. If you've read our blog, you've seen some of the many conversations we've had with Alex and his other colleagues at NetApp. We didn't talk too much about our day jobs but it struck me afterward that it was good to be able to just hang out with other storage vendors that we vigorously compete with and have a beer.
Wednesday night was the VMworld party. That was a great chance to unwind and just have some fun. Earlier in the week, I had met storage bloggers Devang Panchigar and Ed Saipetch; it was fun hanging out with these guys along with Stephen Foskett and John Troyer (John manages social media at VMware). Here are a couple of pictures:
Me and Stephen Foskett at the VMworld party
John Troyer, Devang Panchigar, and Ed Saipetch rocking out to Foreigner.
I have a couple of other posts that I did around VMworld. Here's a short summary of what those were and links if you want to check them out:
A couple of the negative sides of the event were:
And now the video I (note I didn't say you all) have been waiting for
While at VMworld, I was asked to have a video crew follow me around to get a sense at what a blogger does at an event like VMworld. I wish the crew would have followed me on Wednesday to get some video of the rockin' Foreigner VMworld party but hopefully you get a feel for the show and what I did at the show as a blogger.
