My pilgrimage from VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas has come to an end. In my humble opinion, this has been the week for the storage side of things with some amazing and interesting new stuff that has been released or is about to be released. There has been some really cool stuff that is working with SSD and storage.
I had a briefing with the friendly folks over at Astute Networks and got a chance to hear about the storage appliance that they are working on that will work as a datacenter presented to vCenter and I was told that this device is able to achieve 80,000 IOPS.
I made a stop at the Mellanox Technologies and got to learn about the virtual appliance that they are releasing. This 1U appliance will be able to have 1, 2 or 4TB of SSD storage and each appliance comes with its own service processor so as you scale device you gain in performance.
I made my rounds around the Solution Exchange and was talking with some of the different VSA companies that were out there. Some I have known over the years like FalconStor, Datacore and StarWind as well as the very cool performance monitoring / Troubleshooting available with Tintri and Nexenta Cloud Storage solution.
The best in show belonged to a company called ZeRTO for replication at the hypervisor level per virtual machine. The basic new technology belonged to LiquidWare Labs and as a side note about LiquidWare Labs, it was like a Vizioncore reunion party as Dave has gotten the band back together again. This is one thing that makes LiquidWare Labs one of the companies to keep your eye on moving forward. Another couple of companies to keep your eye on are Hytrust and Veeam as they expand their technology.
The next really cool thing that caught my eye, besides storage, was the advancement with mobile technologies. While attending the Office the CTO’s vExpert networking event. I got a firsthand personal demo of the new mobile technology that VMware is working on and to see firsthand a virtual phone running inside of the Andriod OS. This technology is like running VMware Player or VMware Workstation on your phone and running a virtual machine. Some really cool stuff and Samsung had a booth with some models on display for all to see.
All in all I think this was a great week and it was great to see all of my friends and colleagues once again this year. I am really excited to see all the new up and coming technology and have as much passion with virtualization now as I did once I got started. The technology just keeps getting better and better and it is an absolutely amazing time to be involved with virtualization.
Virtualization is a passion and a journey, not a project