by Liem Nguyen, (former) Director of Communications and Social Media, Dell Storage — October 14, 2010
As VMworld Europe 2010 comes to a close, I wanted to highlight interesting discussions from Copenhagen this year. Compellent was at the Bella Center in Copenhagen with more than 6,000 attendees from 82 countries and one of 113 exhibitors. News highlights include the VMware View 4.5 iPad client, vCentre iPad application and VMware’s Project Horizon, which was announced last month at VMworld in San Francisco but continues to generate excitement.
Much of the buzz has been around the keynote speakers and hands-on labs taking place throughout the course of the show. More than 2,150 labs have already been completed and 19,400 virtual machines have been deployed. The labs have been so popular that blogger Christian Mohn of vNinja.net proposed holding them year-round for customers and partners – I think that’s a pretty cool idea and hope our friends at VMware seriously consider a way to pull this off. There’s been so much hype about cloud computing that it’s important to showcase some real and practical ways to design and create pragmatic solutions. That’s why Compellent is working with Intel and VMware on the “Cloud on Wheels” project.
Matt Roblin of Breathalize.co.uk blogged that VMware’s October 12 keynote from Paul Martiz and Steve Herrod was filled with positive messages, and is happy to see that the company is attacking on a lot of new fronts across the ‘New Stack.’ According to Matt’s post “Thoughts on the ‘New Stack,” VMware is clearly hungry to keep innovating and has a degree of confidence that can help support the company’s expansion.
There’s also a great summary of the Paul Martiz and Steve Herrod keynote from Mike Laverick of www.vibriefing.com, who said that while the keynote was basically the same as the one he’d seen from San Francisco, it was interesting to hear it again for nuances and additional details. That’s sort of like re-reading a great novel.
For on-the-floor sights, check out the VMworldTV YouTube page for video compilation of the first and second days of the show, as well as other tidbits like an interview with VMware’s new European CTO, Paul Strong. There’s also a great social media hub on VMworld.com, where you can get the latest feeds on blog posts, tweets, photos, and videos.
And last, but certainly not least, the Best of VMworld 2010 Europe User Awards were announced, and I'm thrilled to report that one of our Italian customers, Bankadati Servizi Informatic, was named Best Virtualization and Server Consolidation Project. Congratulations to Christian Manzia of Bankadati, Compellent’s channel partner Gruppo Reti S.p.A. and to all the winners. Here's the complete list of the award recipients from VMware’s Tony Dunn:
- Simon Gallagher, vinf.net - Best of Show
- Simon Gallagher, vinf.net - Best Remote Office/Home Office Virtualization Project
- Benny Goedbloed, Belgian Department of Justice - Best Desktop Virtualization Project
- Paul Maddock, Warwickshire College - Best Desktop Virtualization Project Honorable Mention
- Christian Manzia, Bankadati - Best Virtualization and Server Consolidation Project
- Richard Nunan, DNM Technology - Best Private Cloud Computing Project
- Daniel Pfuhl, University Hospital Leipzig - Best Virtualization for Disaster Recovery Project
Over at Tech Target's SearchVirtualDataCentre.co.uk, Lauren Horwitz and Kayleigh Bateman report on all six award winners and document Bankadati’s integration of Compellent Fluid Data in this slide. In honoring Christian, judges said, “Bankadati created more room for applications and data that really need the performance."
Another Compellent end-user, Kim Deleuran, CTO of IT Gaarden, based not too far from Copenhagen, was interviewed by Kayleigh for her cloud computing article on two different viewpoints on creating and managing virtual and cloud data centers: using products from multiple IT vendors or from a single or fewer sources. IT Gaarden, for instance, chose Compellent, VMware Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. for its infrastructure.
What stands out the most to you from VMworld Europe? Do you agree with using best-of-breed solutions for virtualized or cloud infrastructures? Let us know your thoughts.
Sounds like if you didn’t go to Copenhagen you missed a lot. I’m already trying to talk my boss into letting me go to both US and Europe VMworlds next year!
If you want just the links, here they are:
vNinjanet: http://vninja.net/virtualization/extending-vmworld-labs/
Breathalize.co.uk: http://breathalize.co.uk/2010/10/12/thoughts-on-the-new-stack/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Breathalize+%28breathalize%29
VMworld Youtube: www.youtube.com/VMworldTV
VMware community page: http://www.vmworld.com/blogs/vmworld/2010/10/13/best-of-vmworld-2010-europe-user-awards
Search Virtual Data Centre:
http://searchvirtualdatacentre.techtarget.co.uk/news/article/0,289142,sid203_gci1521802,00.html
http://searchvirtualdatacentre.techtarget.co.uk/news/article/0,289142,sid203_gci1521802,00.html
http://searchvirtualdatacentre.techtarget.co.uk/news/article/0,289142,sid203_gci1521812,00.html
by Compellent Technologies, — September 06, 2010
With the flood of photos from VMworld 2010, we decided to capture the highlights. From the arrival, to the booth demos, press conference with Heineken Netherlands, roundtable discussion with customers and even photos of the Compellent CEO working the booth, you’ll find a nice variety of scenes from VMworld 2010.
Presenting the top 20 photos:
by Amanda Zook, Systems Administrator, Biola University — September 03, 2010
Editor's Note: This blog was originally posted on Amanda's Adventures Blog and shortened by the editor. This is the last 'Live from VMworld" blog from our social media "woman-on-the street" and we thank her for doing a great job reporting on what she saw and heard at VMworld this year.
My 3 Jobs
I’ve had three jobs this week: SysAdmin for Biola, solving problems on the side, while at VMworld; Compellent Social Media Reporter and Customer Rep; Professor for Intro to MIS.
What a week it’s been! I’m exhausted. My body has decided it’s tired too, as I’m definitely fighting a cold now. Bummer. If you don’t rest, it catches up to you. I’ve pretty much worked from 7:30am to 11:30pm every night this week and tonight will be no exception, even though VMworld is done. That’s a long day! They’ve been great; lots of fun, great learning opportunities, wonderful new friends and networking acquaintances.
I almost didn’t want to leave VMworld. It was such a great environment, I had made a new little community of friends there, and didn’t have too much stress. Yes, I was busy running around doing things, but they weren’t super critical. If I missed a session I was bummed, but it didn’t matter. I can always watch them online anyways.
As I was flying home today I started getting freaked out. There’s so much to do here at home!
I realized as I was coming back that my slides for class weren’t complete. There were only about 15 slides. I just don’t know how to make each class session long enough! We finished class around 7:20 tonight (so a 1hr 20min class). We pulled apart some computers and played with the parts which I think they really enjoyed. I think it was pretty new for most of the people, although I know it was a little boring for those who know a lot about computers. It’s hard to balance that. We did the computer project for about 45 minutes or so, which means I only talked for 30 minutes or less. I think next week will be a lot better. I’ve already been prepping for the past three hours for our software class next week. It will be interesting I think. I am sure that I will go the whole session, as we now can go in to the labs and start working there on our projects. I really like my students. I’m excited to be teaching, but it’s just a lot on top of my already crazy-normal life!
“The world we have created is a product of our own thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.” – Albert Einstein
Exciting stuff happening at VMworld today. The morning session was great! I wish I had more time at the conference. I did a great lab at 8am, ran over to the general session at 9am, and then ran to the expo from 10-10:30. I literally ran almost all the way back to my hotel (1 mile away) to be back and ready with my stuff for the shuttle to pick me up at 10:45. I was sorta run-walking (my sister does race-walking) and I think I would have won the race! Haha! My feet definitely hurt now.
I’m a little disappointed that I didn’t get to spend more time in the Expo area. I was in the Compellent booth most of the time that I was in the Expo area, so I didn’t get to scope out the new products or get too much swag. I had to get some things to bring back to my team, otherwise they might not ever let me leave again 
Morning Session: Awesome stuff. The theme was innovation, and so they had three presenters talk. My favorite was a Ph.D student from MIT who started a company called SixthSense (see Fast Company’s review of them here). They created a gadget that uses augmented reality. It comprises an off-the-shelf webcam, mirrors, smartphone, and a pico-projector–all hung on a lanyard. It can recognize objects, like a book in a store, and pull up Amazon review of the book and project them on to the front cover of the book. I can’t explain it very well, so go look at the review on Fast Company’s site. Wow. Really impressive. I think it definitely will take off.
Other presenters were Natan Linder, a Master’s student in the Fluid Interfaces Group at MIT Media Lab and Tan Le, Co-founder and President, Emotiv Systems. Natan Linder presented LuminAR, which can project images of the web, anywhere. It allows you to have Internet everywhere, as long as you have a wireless signal and a power socket. They’re calling it the new form factor for a computer. The pixels can be put on any spaces. It looks like a light bulb, and you can put the bulb pack in a lamp or in a robot.
Emotiv’s product is a head set that measure brain waves in order to move virtual objects. It tests your brian waves when you’re thinking of moving a block on the screen up. It then tells you to pretend that you’re moving the block. The block moves. Pretty cool. I’ve heard about them in INC. magazine before and thought it was awesome then. It allows you to control things with your mind. A demo was of a man sitting in his wheelchair and he had his chair hooked up to his brain waves. When he would move his face or think to go to the left, the wheels would start going to the left. I really think it has potential to do great things.
Emotiv Initial Brain Wave capture device |
Emotiv Current Brain Wave capture device |
Vendor Booth at Expo |
By the way, Compellent was a Finalist for the Hardware for Virtualization category of awards at VMworld. Yay! That’s cool.
Hardware Virtualization:
Gold: Cisco Systems Inc., Cisco Nexus 7000 Overlay Transport Virtualization
Finalist: Compellent Technologies, Compellent Storage Center 5
Finalist: Xsigo Systems, VP780 and VP560 I/O Director
That’s all for now folks!