Vendors I plan to check out at #VMworld 2018

It’s here. VMworld 2018 is underway. I’ve just spent a great week in Nashville, a place I have wanted to visit for the longest time. Now it’s almost time to head to the airport and catch my flight to Las Vegas. As is usual at this time of year, there are a lot of announcements and briefing requests. In this post, I am going to share some of the announcements/briefings that I have been privy to, and share some of the things (mostly in the storage space) that I plan to learn more about over the next few days.

Changing policies on-the-fly with VVols

Last week, I was presenting at the VMware User Group (VMUG) event in Poland. My topic was SPBM, Storage Policy Based Management. This is the framework for consuming data services, whether these are provided from vSAN, Virtual Volumes or VAIO (IO Filters). You can get the presentation from here. One of the attendees who had implemented Virtual Volumes (aka VVols) asked a very interesting question about changing policies of a VVol based VM on-the-fly. The question is whether a policy change causes a new VVol has to be instantiated, data synced to original VVol and then the original VVol is…

The continued rise of HCI, and especially vSAN

This morning, twitter is alive with VMware’s Q4 2016 results. In a nutshell, its been a phenomenal quarter. Of course, the first thing I wanted to check out was how vSAN did. “Outstanding” is the word. At VMworld 2016 in Barcelona, we were somewhere around 5,500 vSAN customers. Today, that number stands at 7,000. In the space of a year we have more than doubled the number of vSAN customers globally. There is no doubt about it, but Hyper-Convergence is hot. The recent acquisition of SimpliVity by HPE demonstrates this. [Update] As does NetApp’s intention of getting into the HCI…

Where are they now? Recent changes in the storage space

The storage space has been a very exciting space over recent years. There have been so many new start-ups and new innovations, that it becomes difficult to keep track sometimes. More recently, there has been a lot of news around mergers, acquisitions, shutdowns and IPOs in the storage industry. It got me thinking about a lot of the changes we have seen over the past number of years in the storage market. Just for my own interest, I went back over many of my blogs, and the various conversations I had with people at various VMworld events and VMUG meetings,…