Live from VMworld 2010: VMworld Day 2

by Amanda Zook, Systems Administrator, Biola University — September 01, 2010

Editor's note: More from our VMworld social media reporter, Amanda Zook. Originally posted on her blog.

VMworld Day #2

Note: this is long because there was so much good content today! Hope you still enjoy reading it.

What a great day it’s been today! Although the morning didn’t start off that well, as I didn’t end up making it over to VMworld with enough time to complete a lab before the main session, and then wasn’t able to get in to the PowerCLI session that I really wanted (Which would have made my goal of scripting a little easier!) the day definitely looked up from there.

The main session was great! The event was done very well. As the production director for my church, I really appreciate lights and sound that are done well. This was truly amazing. The screen was gigantic. They said that there are over 17,000 people at VMworld this year. No wonder you see people with VMworld name tags running all over the city. They ARE everywhere.

It was really neat to hear about what VMware is doing, and the new products that they are coming out with. They showed a great video in the beginning of the session talking about what a cloud is. It was really funny. They even threw some Inception-esque lines in — “The cloud is in your mind.” haha.

But really? What is the cloud? There’s the public cloud, like GoogleApps or other SaaS programs, and then there is the private cloud like using VMware inside your organization to host your VMs. They seemed to define it as a collective group of resources.

One thing that was really interesting to me in the keynote was the mention of how users now want things from businesses to work like the programs they use for personal use (Facebook, Google, Youtube, etc.). Users don’t want to have to submit a ticket to the IT department and wait for 3 days. They don’t care that you’re using a VM. In IT we like to point out that they’re using a cool new service. But they don’t want the platform. They just want their app to work. Essentially they want self service, where they can go in, click on the app or service they want to use, and be able to have access to it by entering information. Yes! This is so true. The business world can’t adapt that quickly to what users want, so it continues on with the slow movement while IT departments are working at a frenzied pace to adapt their whole system to what users want. We already have good fast moving infrastructure (ability to quickly create a new server/add RAM or other resources). The problem lies in the fact that we’re trying to use old apps. New apps need to be created to fully utilize the new architecture and infrastructure of cloud computing. Enter VMware. A lot of companies use it to reduce costs, or improve efficiency, but the next step of full utilization of VMware is flexibility and business agility. This is where the stuff gets good. They are putting out a product called vCloud Director. It pools virtual infrastructure resources in your existing datacenter and delivers them to users as a catalog-based service. I’d like to demo it out. It sounds pretty neat.

Also got to see some other product demonstrations that will be coming out in the future. My favorite one was the one coded “Project Verizon” (I think that’s what it was called…). It allows users to view their desktop from any device- iPad, Android phone, laptop, etc. It seemed like it will do a lot more than just normal VDI will. Interested in hearing more about it.
Although I liked the keynote session, apparently some others at Citrix and Microsoft had some comments about it. See these two blogs if you’re interested.

I wasn’t able to get in to the PowerCLI session, so I went and did a lab. Awesome set up they have. People have already done over 5,000 labs. Yikes. Over 40,000 vms have been created in labs. I think someone said there are over 800 VDI instances that are being used. I did the vSphere troubleshooting lab and it was very helpful. I must be slow though, because I had to ask them to give me more than the allotted time (1 hour) to finish it, as I almost ran out of time! Maybe I’m just thorough in reading instructions.

Heard a little more about VDI from a Gartner Analyst. Very good session comparing Citrix’s XenDesktop 4 and the new VMware View 4.5. He also compared Quest vWorkspace 7.1 and Microsoft VDI, but those both weren’t recommended for large enterprise usage.

Then, the event that I’ve been waiting to go to for 3 weeks now: Women of Purpose. So good. Ahh. They had a panel of 6 women who were either VPs, Directors, or CIOs in large companies. They seemed like great people. It was funny, one of the panelist said she was excited to see a lot of women show up for this event and knew others were happy to have a get-together as someone said in their blog that it was their goal was to find another woman sysadmin during the conference. That was me! So cool! A VP of IT read my blog. That’s fun. As a side note, thanks to all who read!

Many different topics were discussed on the panel from how to balance your time when you have a family and work as an exec in a company to mentoring and career paths. Most of these companies that the women were a part of were largely virtualized. One of the CIOs said her company was 100% virtualized. That’s so cool. What a great goal.

Good quote from Melissa Armstrong: Listen most, question often, talk least. Good advice. There was a lot of wisdom that was given in the 2 hour session. Very worth my time. I’m hoping to get in contact with a few people I met and maybe one of the panelists to see if they would informally mentor me. There was so much useful information given. I had to leave right after and couldn’t stay for the reception because I was off to skype in to my Intro to MIS class.

Thankfully there were no technical issues skyping! I think it went well, at least it did on my end. It’s easier to teach looking at a computer screen than a class full of 40 college students! I’m looking forward to meeting my students next week for class though. It’s fun to be able to do things like that and use technology in a way that allows business/teaching to still carry on even though I’m 300 miles from home.

After class, the evening was filled with talking with current and prospective Compellent and CommVault customers. Great party held at Tres Agaves, a Mexican restaurant. The food was really good. It was great to talk to other users. Met some new friends and did some good networking. It was a chill environment to sit down, have dinner with people, or stand around just talking. Even though I was at a conference all day, I probably walked over 5 miles today! The restaurant was 1.5 miles away and I thought I’d just walk rather than pay for a cab. And then I walked back with a Compellent team member on the way back, which I originally hadn’t planned on doing, since I already had walked quite a bit before. It sure was nice to move though, especially after sitting all day.

Looking forward to another day tomorrow!

Leave me some comments and let me know what was your favorite part of the day! Thanks for reading.

Live from VMworld 2010: Compellent Press Conference with Heineken Netherlands

by Compellent Technologies, — September 01, 2010

A press conference was held today to announce Heineken Netherlands as a new customer of Compellent. Phil Soran, Compellent, Tod Nielsen, VMware, and Mike Robers and Lucien de Konink, Heineken were at VMware’s Blogger’s Lounge to share the news.

9:15: Tod Nielsen, COO of VMware kicks off the press conference with introductions and highlights the importance of partners like Compellent who provide efficient storage solutions to their customer base.  Tod adds “My favorite twist of this press conference is the fact that Compellent is different than other vendors because of their Fluid Data architecture. Funny how last night was the VMworld Hall Crawl, and now we have Heineken a new customer of Compellent.”

9:19: Phil Soran steps in- “We are thrilled to be participating in this conference, and happy to have Heineken as one of our new customers. We’re providing Fluid Data storage solutions to our customers and have been the primary innovator in the storage space, with thin provisioning, sub-LUN automated tiering and intelligent data management. Compellent is one of the fastest growing SAN vendors in the world.” We’re in 34 countries and have 2,100 end-users with about 1,900 of those customers running VMware.

9:21: “Fluid Data is so simple to use that you can even enjoy a Heineken while using our technology it’s that easy.” He adds. “We are expanding globally as a company, as you can see with customers like Heineken and we’re also announcing our Australian market opening this week.” But let’s hear from Mike and Lucien about Heineken

9:22: Lucien: A little about Heineken, we brew great beer and brands. We are the #1 Brewer in Europe. We have 200 regional beer and ciders. We have a brewery in almost every country. The 140 breweries in 70 countries, brewed 200 million hectoliters of beer in 2009. In Netherlands, we have 3 breweries that brewed 18 million hectoliters of beer, 5 million is for domestic and the rest for export.

9:23: “We started Heineken Light last year just for the USA market, because we don’t drink that stuff,” Mike adds, getting laughs from the crowd.

9:24: Mike: Why did we choose Compellent? We needed to look for other solutions. We had a serious problem with support costs from  HP, along with capacity and performance issues, so we had to take action and fast. We were stuck on EVA 5000 which didn’t allow us to upgrade to a newer version of VMware. We chose Compellent because it operates with every system and enabled us to have business continuity.

9:27: Lucien: We also had major issues with reporting. Thus, the major pro of Compellent is the reporting, I’ve never seen better. Right now we are 61% virtualized as of last week. We plan to be 90% by 2012. On our old EVA, some business critical reports took 35 minutes to generate, with Compellent it’s done in 20 minutes, showing the obvious performance improvements we’re seen.

9:28: Lucien: The Fluid Data concept gave us high flexibility and reporting functionality. Plus, the 24x7 proactive support, which is critical for us and our business.  In addition, with Compellent we were also able to automatically tier 5% SSD, 72% Fibre Channel and 23% to SATA. We lowered our disk count by 40% in Zoeterwoude and 60% in Den Bosch.

9:32: Dave Villante, from Wikibon Group comes to the table

9:33: When you migrate to new systems what do you expect? From my research, customers plan for migration to cost $50,000 and take 6 months, do you  guys think that is reasonable? What have you found?  He asks of Mike and Lucien. They reply with a couple of raised eyebrows at the cost and said, “We expect it to be very easy. We migrated in three weeks. Our business is a 24/7 operation, so we cannot have much downtime.”

9:36: Can you talk about being a 24/7 company? Dave asks. Mike: You can’t stop brewery systems. If you interrupt the process, the beer goes bad. If a line goes down, it costs 12,000 Euros an hour. Same with packaging and distribution, all of those systems need to stay up and running.

9:38: Dave to all: What do you see as a big disruptive technology in the future? Phil- On the connectivity side, we have 10G iSCSI, FCOE, Infiniband, etc. On the hardware side, smaller drives, SAS taking over and SSD/flash drives. The core of Compellent is the flexibility to incorporate new technologies into existing systems, so when Heineken is ready to adopt the next new technology, they can do that with Compellent.

9:39: On the software side, he adds, data will be managed differently. It will need to be flexible to fit into cloud. You will need automated tiered storage at the block level. When we’ve had customers migrate over to Compellent they reclaim 60-70% of their capacity that they didn’t have with other systems.

9:40: Dave asks Mike and Lucien: What’s the benefit of saving all that space? Mike replies with- Not only are we spending less money, but we’re looking at green IT. Less hardware also means less cooling and power that we need.

9:41: Dave also asked about chargebacks . Mike: We are a non-profit IT organization so, we do chargebacks on a yearly basis and only charge for normal maintenance and hardware. Dave replies asking if charge backs were difficult? Mike promptly answers- no, it was fluid. We’ve been doing it for the past five years.

9:43: Dave to Lucien and Mike: What would you say is on Compellent’s to do list? Lucien- things are very good, all of our previous problems have been solved by Compellent.

Read more about this press conference and the announcement on SiliconAngle.

Live from VMworld 2010: Behind the Scenes Look at the Compellent Press Conference with Heineken Netherlands

by Liem Nguyen, Director of Corporate Communications — September 01, 2010

We are very excited to have Heineken Netherlands join us at VMworld 2010, particularly for the press conference at the VMware Social Media and Blogger’s Lounge in Moscone South at 9:15 AM PST and the SuperSession today at 3:00 PM in Room #134 in Moscone North. Being the number one brewer in Europe with more than 200 regional, local and specialty beers and ciders, it’s no surprise that Heineken Netherlands generates a lot of data. What you may not know is that not too long ago Heineken Netherlands wanted to upgrade their VMware infrastructure but was faced with capacity, performance and reporting issues with their HP EVA storage systems. After evaluating other vendors they landed on Compellent Fluid Data for our automated tiered storage with enterprise SSD, scalable and persistent hardware, and, of course, the seamless integration with VMware. Together, Compellent and VMware have increased performance for Heineken Netherlands by as much as 300 percent and reduced disk requirements significantly using tiers of SSD, FC and SATA. In the future, Heineken Netherlands will be able to save even more money adding SATA disks almost exclusively.

As part of the team preparing for the press conference and SuperSession, it’s been a pleasure working with the IT folks from Heineken Netherlands and talking with them about the real-world problems they were faced with and how they went about addressing those enterprise challenges. I remembered how we joked about the connection between Fluid Data and enjoying your fluids in moderation, but in the end, the Heineken Netherlands IT story is really about better enterprise performance and storage efficiency since they’ve introduced Compellent into their VMware environment.

Here are additional press conference details:

• Who: Phil Soran (CEO of Compellent), Tod Nielsen (COO of VMware), Lucien de Konink and Mike Robers (Heineken Netherlands)
• When: Wednesday, September 1 from 9:15 AM to 9:45 AM (PST)
• Where: VMware Social Media and Blogger’s Lounge, Moscone South

Can’t make it to the press conference? Or even worse…couldn’t make it to VMworld? No problem. Tune in to find out more and watch it streaming live at http://www.SiliconAngle.TV starting at 9:15 AM PST

SuperSession details:

• Who: Bruce Kornfeld (VP of Alliance for Compellent), Parag Patel (VP of Global Alliances for VMware), Lucien de Konink and Mike Robers (Heineken Netherlands)
• When: Wednesday, September 1 from 3:00 PM to 4:00 PM (PST)
• Where: Room #134