VMworld Day 2 – Liquidity and Air

A slight delay in this blog post but couldn’t be avoided.

Day 2 was all about VMware showing its journey and evolution in the SDDC (Software defined DataCenter) and Pat Gelsinger was covered off all the major software updates as well as the improvement of the partner ecosystem which now includes HP and HDS in the EVO Rail (Another converged infrastructure block) stack. This is designed more for the SMB space and I’m looking forward to hearing more about its bigger brother, EVO Rack, when it’s released. Sanjay Poonen took us through the EUC landscape and how the the new Horizon Flex solution will improve container desktops and also the local desktop offerings on both Mac and PC devices. Another great stage presence from Sanjay and he clearly showed his passion for the area he has been put in charge of.

I made it a point to attend a few session yesterday on vRealize Ops Manager and then wanted to talk to some vendors at the Solutions Exchange.

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As always there are plenty of key players demonstrating their SDDC vision and how convergence is being shown. I talked to both IBM and Nutanix on their new platforms to tackle this. I met my good friend Yossi Siles from the storage team in Tel Aviv who walked me through IBMs vision for vVols and it’s good to know they are catching up with the competition (finally !!). I also had a good chance to talk to a Nutanix UK manager who took me through their webscale vision and their ever increasing market share in the hyper converged infrastructure area.

I had some time booked with Nimble storage and it was good to have a deep conversation with Nick Dyer and Charlie Whitfield who are great spokesmen for the company.They explained their growth had increased over a year and have shipped over 700 units which is up from around 100 last year. The Storage market is big enough for everyone to take a segment of revenue and Nimble seem to be doing very well with a wider range of storage units to meet both performance and capacity demands. Very impressive !!

I also took part in the ‘Destination Giveback’ initiative. This is designed for VMworld attendees to donate to charity through the VMware foundation. Simply put, fly a paper airplane as far as you can and this equates to Euros that you can decide to allocate funds to a category such as Children, Women, Health etc. I was lucky enough to hit the €1000 mark and go straight on the leaderboard. Skills in aeronautical design I guess ??

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Finally, I managed to attend the annual Veeam party that was very mellow until Ratmir Timashev (Veeam CEO) grabbed the mic and thanked his partners and customer base. It was a lot more vibrant after this but I had left early in order to get some rest before Day 3 and rest my aching feet.

Stay tuned for more from a Day 3….

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