VMworld 2010 – TA8623 “Storage Super-Heavyweight Challenge”

This session was fun, and not your normal run-of-the-mill session.   Four of us (Adam Carter @ HP, Eric Schott @ Dell, Vaughn Stewart @ NetApp, and myself @ EMC).   About 1000 people.   Any question they want to ask.  2 minutes on the clock for every answer, 1 minute during the lightning round.

The questions were, shall we say, hard-hitting :-)

Well – watch for yourself.

A bit of interesting background – several of us have been pushing for this for several years now, this was the first time that VMware let it happen… I think it was good.  There were a couple of times where I thought to myself “did I just go over a line?”, and a couple others where I thought to myself “man, I pulled a punch there”. 

Another interesting tidbit – I know all the guys there well.  Adam and I worked together at Allocity (I was the first SE, he was one of the first support guys), Eric was a strong contributor to both “Multivendor iSCSI” posts and he’s also a respected colleague of many of the former EqualLogic folks on my team.   Vaughn and I go back (and back n’ forth) a long way of course :-)

Also this was submitted and sponsored originally by Tom Howarth who unfortunately couldn’t make it – Mike Laverick did a fine job standing in, but THANK YOU to Tom for pushing it through.

If you thought this was good (and not just in the “lets see people brawl” sense of “good”, but rather that it was useful for the attendees and the VMware mission), please comment – it will influence whether or not it happens again.

Comments

[Jeramiah Dooley]

The value for me (the customer) of forums like this revloves around the LACK of a vacuum. Sometimes vendors feel free to...take liberties with reality...when they are the only one talking. That's not possible when many of your competitors are represented more than competently on one stage.

Personally, I was impressed with how well both NetApp and Dell came across. I am more familiar with the EMC product set and story, but I was impressed with how passionate (and aggressive) those companies were on stage.

HP comes across (in my opinion) as the loser here, although that may (hopefully) change with the 3PAR acquisition. They just don't have the horsepower to compete with the EVA line at the same level as EMC and NetApp, and they haven't advanced the LeftHand stack as far as Dell has with the EQ product line.

Overall, this was a great forum for THE CUSTOMER and I feel certainly needs to be done again when possible. If you think you have the best technology you should be willing to stand up and debate the issue face to face in a professional manner. My hat is off to all four of you.

[Austin Workman]

Blue Shirt, Blue Hat. That's me. I got a lot of camera time.

[Ajay]

im no expert and have no field experienc whatsoever. however, after seeing this video, i know why EMC and NetApp lead, and dell too in the frame. And yeah, HP was certainly not attractive at all!

I work for EMC.

[Jonas Irwin]

This was great. Yes, do it again!

[Ray Lucchesi]

Chad,

I came in at about the halfway mark and stayed for the rest of the session. I thought the answers were to the point, nobody took any cheap shots and the questions were stimulating. All in all a great tech session. I vote to have it again next year.

Regards
Ray

[Chad Sakac]

@Ray - thanks, glad you liked it. I think it was good for all also....

[sigit]

fantastic