by Liem Nguyen, 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 Liem Nguyen, Director of Communications and Social Media, Dell Storage — June 11, 2010
Five years is a long time in the storage industry. Five years ago, Compellent’s thin provisioning technology was a year old, and we introduced sub-LUN, block-level automated tiered storage to the world. Five years ago, Beth Pariseau, @PariseauTT, started covering the storage industry over at SearchStorage.com. That’s when Compellent first started working with her, offering our perspective on storage issues and connecting her with our customers across various industries, and we’ve enjoyed a great working relationship ever since. She was always willing to hear our point of view, and that means a lot to a growing company in this competitive market. Today Beth announced she’s moving on from the storage beat and will cover broader IT topics in the Data Center and Server Virtualization Group for TechTarget (the parent company to SearchStorage).
While I’m sure we’ll continue to share ideas on the role of storage virtualization in the data center, we’re going to miss regularly working with Beth. When I joined Compellent in 2007, I already knew of Beth’s reputation for balanced reporting, always digging at the story behind the story and never taking any vendor’s claims at face value. I first met Beth in person over dinner (Chinese) while at SNW Spring 2007 in San Diego. I found out that besides being a good reporter, she was a die-hard fan(atic) about all sports teams Boston, and we also compared notes about digital photography. She clearly knew more about ISO and F numbers than I did, and who was playing well or playing hurt. News briefings and phone calls since then have tended to include sideline discussions about the unimaginable life of Tom Brady or whether David Ortiz’s bat swing evoked fear or regret. Regrettably, I was supposed to take her to lunch last year but I broke my leg (playing touch football of all things) and had to take a raincheck.
Beth, the Compellent team wishes you all the best in your new role and thank you for sharing our passion for storage and sports. It’s been a fun and exciting journey for all of us as the market has changed so much over the past five years. We look forward to working with you on new stories, and also following you over @Cursed_to_First . Hopefully you and I will have that lunch soon.
by Liem Nguyen, Director of Communications and Social Media, Dell Storage — 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.