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 Liem Nguyen, Director of Corporate Communications — August 31, 2010
VMworld 2010 is bigger than ever, with upwards of 12,000 – 15,000 people expected to converge on the Moscone this week. The registration lines snaked around several times yet moved along at a brisk pace thanks to efficiency of the event organizers. The blogger lounge has been upgraded to include live Internet streaming of VMworld TV and daily newscasts. I spent some time there yesterday and for me personally it was great meeting folks I’ve been following on Twitter or talking to on blogs (including the Roger Lund blog) over the past year or so.
While the VMware team really has perfected the art of running an event, sessions have been filled to capacity and some people haven’t been able to get into them. Before you head out to the Moscone check out this interview I did with Sean Clark, vExpert, consultant and blogger who is otherwise known as @vseanclark. For all you Twitter fanatics, you’ll appreciate the video angle that cuts off the top of Sean’s head, since most of you probably wouldn’t recognize him without his pith helmet. This year was Sean’s fifth VMworld so you’ll be wise to listen to his 3 tips on maximizing your time at VMworld: get to sessions early, start impromptu tweetups while in line, and head to hands-on labs to learn at your own pace. And his bonus tip: come see us at the Compellent booth 1022!
Do you have any additional tips on getting the most out of VMworld 2010? Feel free to leave us a comment.
by Liem Nguyen, Director of Corporate Communications — July 27, 2010
This post is about four storage geeks who flew to Seattle to meet up with a Minneapolis-based VMware evangelist, spend a few hours in a barn with the descendant of a Nigerian chieftain, talk to a lot of other outspoken thought leaders and launch a product not on our company’s roadmap. All in a period of 24 hours. During that time, there was also a conversation about the differences between tiered storage solutions and Live Volume vs. VPlex.
In some ways, Tech Field Day Seattle was a like a movie about male bonding, virtualization and data storage that Cameron Crowe could have made with Judd Apatow, if either of them knew the difference between Token Ring and JRR Tolkien. But more on this later.
The Players
Back to those four geeks, Justin Braun, Bob Fine, Scott DesBles and yours truly started our Tech Field Day on Thursday night, July 15, at the Museum of Flight out by Boeing Field. Compellent sponsored a reception held at the Red Barn inside the museum, which housed artifacts in the history of Boeing and aviation. That’s when things really started to take off.
Soon, we met Jason Boche, who heads up the Minneapolis VMUG and talked about having Compellent present at a future VMUG event. It’s been a couple years since we were in front of that group, and I thought it was hilarious that I hadn’t met Jason before seeing him at TFD…in Seattle. At dinner, I sat next to John Obeto, a Microsoft expert and CEO of a managed service provider who mentioned that somewhere in his bloodline is a Nigerian village chief. We made the rounds, and it was fun meeting people we had only “talked” to before via Twitter or on their blogs.
The next morning we met up with everyone at the Microsoft Partner Solution Center, building 25, on the Redmond campus. Many thanks goes to John Porterfield, Compellent alliance manager, for making all the arrangements, not just for Compellent’s session but for others held at the MPSC. John and a couple other Compellent team members have an office there and regularly conduct lunch ’n learns and demos with Microsoft and other partners. (Follow John @allianceguy - his spot-on observations about Microsoft, consumer issues and the industry deserve a bigger audience.)
Is Live Volume the Affordable VPlex?
Compellent was up first on Day 2, starting at 8 am. We introduced the company to those who didn’t know about it us before, gave some demos on Fluid Data technology like thin provisioning, thin replication and automated tiered storage, and updated the group on our product roadmap.
We also talked at length about Live Volume. Rod Haywood of Sydney posed the question, “Is it VPLEX, but affordable?” Rod and a couple others were surprised we hadn't done a whole lot of marketing around Live Volume, which is a fair comment since we really haven’t said much. Partly because this is a new technology that customers are beginning to roll out. Though we blogged about Live Volume before, we typically don’t fully “launch” or put a lot of marketing behind a product until we’ve proven the concept with real customers who have fully implemented. This is just a different go-to-market philosophy from some vendors who announce products years before shipping.
One Token Ring Rules Them All?
About that product launch – no, we really didn’t announce a new product. Before we showed up, people were teasing one delegate, Ethan Banks, for being the token networking guy (get it, token ring?). Anyway, I got wind of this, so when the Compellent team got up to talk about how our persistent architecture is designed to support both 10Gb iSCSI and FCoE, we also said we’re announcing FC over Token Ring--as a joke.
Saying we’d support FCOTR even in jest to this bunch was like turning it up to 11. Pretty soon they were riffing on a standards spec. You can also check out some of the tongue-in-cheek reactions and also read a thoughtful essay from Mr. Foskett.
The Reviews
Of course, Compellent’s presentation was the best of the week. But for more objective observations, you can read the reactions from some of the delegates below. A couple of the guys are planning to write more so check their sites again later:
Over at GestaltIT, Stephen Foskett has the complete coverage for the Seattle event from all of the delegates.
The Wrap
Afterward, I managed to catch up with Curtis Preston to get his impressions on the future of backup (he is Mr. Backup after all).
And as a followup to the previous 3 questions blog I wanted to find out what Stephen thought about the whole thing.
I’ll update you with more links and videos as they appear. Justin Braun will also post his own thoughts on the event.
Many thanks to the delegates for their time, participation and great feedback on Compellent storage. A tip of the hat to Stephen Foskett and the incomparable Claire Chaplais for organizing a great Tech Field Day. We were very glad to be a sponsor. Other vendors should definitely consider participating in future Field Days. The next one, appropriately on networking, has already kicked off and you can follow @TechFieldDay for more info.