NetApp @ VMworld 2008: No Marketing Gimmicks, Just Technology

It's that time of the year again where over 15,000 visitors will flock to Las Vegas for what it promises to be yet another exciting VMworld. With more than 150 sponsors, exhibitors and 300 breakout sessions, VMworld is one of the largest IT events in the world.

For NetApp this will be the largest event of the year and like everybody else we've been preparing for it for some time now. This year, by far, we'll have the largest presence in the show and we'll be ready to showcase various technologies that solve some very real and hard to solve business problems.

Clarification: By "...largest presence" I mean comparable to what we had in previous years at this event.

First of all, I'm happy to report we won't be holding any car winning contests.  Rather than attempt to entice prospective customers to our booth with marketing gimmicks, and taking a stab at solving personal transportation challenges,  we've chosen an approach that fits our business. We are a storage company, not a furniture company or a car dealership.

Technorati Tags: VMware,NetApp,VMworld2008,Deduplication,Metrocluster,SMVI,VDI

So we've concentrated our efforts into providing our customers and prospects with Business Value by applying modern day, innovative, technologies into solving old and new business problems.

With that said, NetApp will be located in Booth #400, and this year we'll be showcasing several technologies that help our customers realize the promise of a virtualized infrastructure.

Here's a Breakdown of the various demos that will be featured at our Booth:

• VMware SRM on NetApp and the Power of FlexClones
• NetApp MetroCluster with VMware
• ESX, VM Discovery and Real Time Monitoring with SANScreen VM-Insight
• Backup and Recovery using SnapManager for Virtual Infrastrucure (SMVI)
• Last, but not least, an improved, scalable, NetApp VDI and Deduplication solution using a VI Client plugin to deploy 5,440 Deduplicated Virtual Machines across 3 VMware Datacenters and 32 ESX servers. Starting with a Single Virtual Machine, we will show how the NetApp architecture enables customers to mass deploy thousands of Virtual Machines, from start to finish (including power-up), in 30 minutes. All that, at a fraction of capacity, cost and  storage management headaches.

We have several breakout sessions, a keynote address by NetApp founder Dave Hitz, as well as the ability to meet one-on-one with some of NetApp's experts. In fact, this year, more so than any previous years, we will have a very heavy technical presence at the event.  You can find more information about the NetApp events here. No Marketing Gimmicks, Just Technology.

I hope to see you there. Travel safe and have fun.

Comments

[Bradford Knowlton]

Look forward to seeing you there.

Thanks
Bradford Knowlton
http://x86Virtualization.com

[Chad Sakac]

LOL - Nick, we'll see you there. We ARE giving a way a car (it is Vegas after all), but that seems like a bit of an unfair comment, I've always been kind to NetApp.

I don't understand the need for the attack, but whatever.

Here's what will be in the EMC booth (Booth 500):

- Demonstrating Oracle and SAP with instant/backup recovery and Site Recovery Manager all in action together
- Demonstrating Exchange 2007 Joint VMware/EMC reference architecture including VSS backup/restore, CCR and LCR use cases
- Replication Manager for VMware - instant VM or datastore, VMware Infrastructure backup/restore
- VDI - great to hear that you guys hit 5K clients. We just broke 10K :-) Same idea - mass scale with consumption of one. We will be sharing all our performance scaling data, and experiences. There were critical learned elements.
- Deduplication, and simple file-level recovery for Windows/Linux VMs
- NFS deployment best practices
- Joint EMC/VMware Remote/Branch Office solution
- How all our management tools (Storage, Network, Application Dependency and VMware Best Practice compliance analysis) integrate with the VI 2.5 SDK and ESX CIM APIs - TODAY.
- Several of our Partners (Agilsys, Fusionstorm, ICI and others) will be present in the booth to show their integrated solutions.

- We will be demonstrating LIVE several things I can't even allude to as they are under an embargo until the event.

- We will have 70 people at the event, including myself, but also our engineering teams directly, along with our Field VMware Specialists (all VCPs). There will be approximately 70 EMC folks there, so happy to talk to customers, and of course with our competitive brothers and sisters!

Oh, and our keynote - which all are welcome to is KN EMC on Wednesday at 11:00-12:00. It is a joint VMware/Cisco/EMC session discussing best practices for designing the next generation datacenter.

Sincerely, looking forward to seeing you all there!

[Nick Triantos]

Bradford, Chad see you guys there.

PS. Chad I expected you to reply much sooner than you did. :-) I'm not knocking EMC. What I'm merely questioning is why would a company work so hard to get people to visit their booth? I'm of the opinion that good solutions sell themselves.

[Chad Sakac]

I'm up to my eyeballs, Nick - and now needed to do a formal post on it, you're keeping me busy :-)

http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2008/09/my-likely-last.html