It’s Thursday afternoon and I’m flying back to Boston from a hectic week at VMworld in Las Vegas.  My days and evenings were booked with attending technology sessions, attending keynote addresses, meeting customers and partners, and giving demos of BalancePoint at our booth.  I did get a chance to catch up with some friends and play a little blackjack.  In the end I got out of Vegas $7 ahead of the game…not bad I guess!

The big buzz at the show this year evolved around storage.  VMware and it’s customers have all realized how important a role storage plays in the successful deployment of virtualization in the data center.  If your storage subsystems aren’t configured properly and performing at the right levels then your entire virtual infrastructure is impacted.  As I’ve stated for the past few years you can’t only focus on one component of the infrastructure but need a complete "cross-domain" view of your virtual system.

Another hot topic were "Clouds".  Clearly in it’s infancy Cloud Computing is gaining a lot of attention these days.  Most customers and partners I talked with are still trying to figure out how clouds impact them and how they can advantage of it.  I think you’ll see a lot of adoption of "private clouds" over the next year.  This is the logical next step and get’s IT closer to were it ultimately must go anyway which is to a services based architecture.

Akorri generated a lot of buzz with it’s announcement of a reseller deal with Dell and demonstrated it’s support for Dell’s Equallogic storage array.  We also demonstrated an integration of BalancePoint into VMware’s Virtual Center and with Quest Software’s Foglight product.  Over the next week I’ll write a more detailed blog about each of these items.

For now I’m looking forward to a good nights sleep and trying to decide how to spend that $7!

At VMworld this week VMware announced a new initiative called vStorage.  There isn’t a lot of detailed information about vStorage that I’ve been able to find but from what I’ve heard vStorage will significantly impact the virtualization landscape.

vStorage understands the services that exist in the storage layer and will utilize those services when they make sense.  For example, if a user wants to move a large VMDK from one storage pool to another then vStorage will kick off the migration using storage array migration services instead of having the server actually perform the migration.  This is significantly improve the performance of the system by cutting migration times by an order of magnitude.

This reminds me of all the buzz around "Serverless Backup" that the SAN switch guys use to talk about in the late 90’s.  Anytime you can get services enabled that are actually closer to the data the better. 

My understanding is that vStorage is 6-18 months out.  I’ll be keeping any eye on this and keep you updated as more information rolls out.

This week I’m attending VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas.  I’ve heard that there will be somewhere from 12,000 to 15,000 attendees!  I believe it, this place is packed. 

If you are here please stop by booth 1314 to see the latest version of Akorri’s BalancePoint in action.