You’ve got to love these new class of video cameras, small, discrete, and surprisingly good for amazingly cheap…
Here’s a walkthrough of what happened before, during, and after the event…
Read on if you want the scoop from being there…
Before the Event:
The “old” on the left of the stage is a Sunfire 15K we bought on ebay for $4K (LOL!) – and 500 spindles to represent what it USED to take to run the target Oracle workload. The CLARiiON and 15 Enterprise Flash Drives on the table on the right along with all the other “new” (including Cisco UCS blades) show the modern equivalent that could run the same workload.
VMware employees filing into the back area (you can hear them during the event). As I sat down, I couldn’t believe the IT leadership pantheon – look at the name-tags on the chairs in the front row (nice guest spot – Ray O’Farrell – one of the many proud papas/mamas of vSphere). This is really a “who’s who” (with one notable “one of these isn’t like the others…” :-)
- Pat Gelsinger – Intel
- Frank Hauck – EMC
- Joe Tucci – EMC
- Chad Sakac – EMC (crashing the front row :-)
- Steve Herrod – VMware
- Paul Maritz – VMware
- John Chambers – Cisco
- James Mouton - HP
- Michael Dell – Dell
On to the main event (Part I) – Paul Maritz, John Chamber (a class act, IMHO – this is about VMware engineering celebrating) and then Pat Gelsinger (Pat did some cool demos, IMHO)
And in the second event – we heard from Steve Herrod (great as always), HP (sorry, James – IMHO it was a little mangled – but leave that to the viewer), Michael (a little rambly IMHO – but leave that to the viewer), and Joe Tucci (as Chairman of VMware) closed it out (obviously I’m biased, but I think it was great).
As an interesting “insider’s perspective” – when working on a draft of the speech, there was a point where Joe was pointing out how IT titans were taking flagship products and building them for VMware, and used UCS, N5K/1K, Nehalem as examples. What’s interesting (and is a reflection of how seriously he takes the “separation of church and state” – the earlier draft referred to Symmetrix V-Max and PowerPath/VE, which he cut. Was better that way – but for anyone who doesn’t understand how deadly seriously we take that independence – there’s a small point example. No one should confuse that with a lack of integration, and effort – but like Cisco and everyone else, we must invest, innovate, and win on our own merits.
Was a great event – was honored to be a part of it, and again congrats to the VMware team.
Comments