by Liem Nguyen, Director of Corporate Communications — September 02, 2010
All the buzz at VMworld 2010 has been around virtualization. I had a chance to catch up with Bruce Kornfeld, VP of business development and alliances from Compellent and David West, VP of marketing and business development from CommVault to talk about the partnership between the two companies, how the two technologies work together, data storage efficiencies, and data management and protection.
It wasn’t all work and no play for Compellent and CommVault at VMworld 2010. The two companies hosted customers and prospects at Tres Agaves restaurant on Tuesday, August 31 to unwind after a long day at the show and enjoy some great food and great company.
Watch the video to learn more about the way Compellent and CommVault technologies work together.
by Amanda Zook, Systems Administrator, Biola University — August 31, 2010
Editor's note:
Amanda Zook, Compellent customer from Biola University, is our social media reporter on the ground at VMworld. She will be updating her blog with the latest happenings from the show and we'll post them on "Around the Block" as well.
First Impressions:
Wow. This place is cool. So fun! Everyone is talking about techy stuff.
I met up with a fellow Compellent customer last night to see what they’re doing with their environment. It’s always nice to meet up with people that you have met before and catch up, especially since there are thousands of people here and sometimes you can feel lost in the crowd.
This morning I walked into the huge conference center with tons of people (Well, there’s 3 conference buildings, which each have tons of rooms). There’s digital signage everywhere, which I love. Bean bags line the wall in several areas where techies are on their laptops, smart phones, and iPads. Some people are working in their free time, others are networking. Me? Free time = None. However, in the midst of walking to sessions or talking with others before or at the end of sessions I’ve had some good conversations with fellow IT people.
The virtual world is a weird one. I “met” a friend on twitter who messaged me and we were able to meet up today. It’s always one of those weird moments because you don’t know what the other person looks like (the tiny twitter icon is hard to judge what a person looks like most of the time), so you’re scanning a room looking for someone who looks like they’re looking for you.
There’s a bloggers area where people are chatting, writing, and recording videos. It’s a pretty neat environment. Everything looks sharp. All of VMworld’s marketing is great. They even have M & M’s that have stamped on them. That’s cool.
Today I tried to learn more about cloud computing, the change over to ESXi and new features of 4.1, and about VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure).
Did you know that ESX 4.1 is the last version of ESX? There won’t be a service console anymore. You’ll have to use ESXi, which sounds like it will work just great. The bummer part is that we’ll have to move over to that new version. No rush- there’s 7 years of support, but if you want updates, you’ll need to move sooner.
In 4.1 you can have up to 1000 hosts in a virtual center, which seems like so many VMs! Our team has about 115 virtual servers and 85 physical machines. We’ll never reach that limit of 1000 but it’s good to know that it scales!
I was excited to hear about the DRS host affinity, which is new in 4.1. It allows you to create certain restrictions on your VMs. So, say you never want your SQL server to move hosts (like we do). You can create a rule so that it stays on the same host. Or you could create a preferential rule that says “If at all possible, don’t move it, but if you must, then do it”.
I heard something about VAAI (vStorage API for Array Integration), which allows the host to use less CPU when doing storage-related tasks. See here for more details. I need to learn more about it. It sounds interesting.
Learned about how the vMA (Virtual Management Assistant) can help you run scripts on all your vms. Essentially it sounds like a CLI that runs so you can talk to all the VMs. Since there isn’t an esxtop in ESXi (and that’s what everyone will be moving to soon) this tool will be useful to monitor performance.
I interviewed some people on how they would define cloud computing and how they’re using it. Hopefully will get those videos up later. Also was able to hang out in the Compellent booth and talk to potential customers, sharing why it’s great for my team and Biola. Hopefully I’ll be able to answer the questions that people throw at me about our set up 
It was quite tiring doing that though, as I’m not a sales person. I’m an introvert, which is why I do IT; leave me in a cube by myself all day, and I’m pretty good. But it’s still fun to get out and do those types of things.
Side note- All the booth’s had women outside them talking to people. They call them “booth babes”. Some booth’s have girls dressed really scantily. It’s pretty ridiculous. Thankfully Compellent’s not that type of vendor!
Something interesting: I was asked how I got into social media. It really threw me off guard, because I don’t feel like I’m “into” social media. It’s just something normal. I’m in my 20s. Who doesn’t use twitter and facebook to communicate? Especially young IT people! It seems weird to me that I have a few friends who have taken jobs as Social Media Reps for companies. It just seems like a weird thing to do for a job! It’s not something we’re “into”. It’s just a part of normal life! It’s the way we communicate. Kinda interesting though how different of a culture it is when you’re 10 – 20 years younger than someone. But sure, I can blog, tweet, facebook, etc. It’s sorta second nature. Do other of you younger people feel that way? Maybe I have cultivated it more than others, but maybe it’s just a generational thing.
Pics are from the conference and my cable car ride last night! Yes, I did hang off the edge of the train! So fun. Really, I haven’t thought something was that fun in awhile. I’m easy to please, I guess.
by Liem Nguyen, Director of Corporate Communications — May 11, 2010
Our partners at Citrix and Microsoft are making it easier for Compellent Fluid Data storage users and channel partners to plan cloud computing projects. A few weeks ago, Compellent announced our work with Microsoft on the dynamic infrastructure toolkit for cloud computing. This week the Compellent team will be demonstrating more of our next-gen cloud technology support for both Citrix and Microsoft virtualization platforms at Citrix Synergy in San Francisco.
In Compellent booth no. 300 in the Moscone Center tomorrow May 12 through May 14, we’re going to showcase support for the next evolution of the Citrix Ready program: StorageLink version 2.2. The upcoming StorageLink 2.2 code from Citrix will include the Compellent Storage Adapter, which integrates provisioning, management and recovery of Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines through the StorageLink interface.
The wow factor will be our demo for Site Recovery integration. It’s future technology from both Compellent and Citrix, which will automate setup and execution of disaster recovery of Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V workloads. I can’t go into more detail right now but we’re working on enabling customers to integrate Compellent continuous snapshots and thin replication with Site Recovery.
Stay tuned for more official words from Citrix and Compellent. In the meantime, don’t miss our demonstrations of Compellent, Citrix and Microsoft cloud tech at Synergy.
If you can't make it to Synergy, here's a video demo that walks through some of the technical features of the StorageLink 2.2 GUI with Compellent integration. We'll have the second demo with Site Recovery next week.
Let us know if you're going to Synergy. If you're already using StorageLink or plan to use it with Site Recovery we'd love to hear from you.