Wrap up from VMworld
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!
