This morning’s keynotes started off with Carl Eschenbach (on right below), EVP of Worldwide Field Operations, VMware. If you ever have the opportunity to see Carl speak, go. He’s a great presenter and very easy to follow. Carl opened up by discussion the VMware opportunity to our partners.  He also made the new announcements about the upcoming updates to Partner Central, VMware’s partner portal. He discussed the upcoming changes to the partner programs and our focus on specialized partners. That is, Partners who have a specialty in one or more of four main areas, Virtualization Core, Virtualization Management, Business Continuity, or Desktop Virtualization. He introduced Brandon Sweeney (on left), VP of Channel Sales – Americas.
Brandon walked thru the new portal and how are partners can use it to find the information that they need.
Afterward, Carl introduced Chad Sakac (in center below), VP, VMware Technical Alliance, EMC. Carl also introduced Ed Bugnion (on right below), VP and CTO, Server Access Virtualization, Cisco.
Ed went first and talked about Cisco’s unified stragety and the issues that the Nexus 1000v will solve. He described the VN-Link protocol and how the network switches become virtualization aware. He then described the Unified Computing System from Cisco, although there was not really any new information that has not already been discussed .
Next up was Chad. If you’ve never read Chad’s blog site , I highly recommend it. It’s really some good reading. Chad really pulled all the messaging together. He described VMware as the software layer, Cisco as the computing and network integration, and EMC and the platform for storage. He mentioned an interesting stat: 44% of all Site Recovery Manager implementations today run on EMC storage. Chad described EMC’s V-Max announcement from yesterday. One of the interesting points I saw was that the new V-Max platform from EMC will now run on Intel Xeons and not Power PC chips as Syms have always done in the past. He closed with reiterating why customers would want to run Tier-1 apps and desktops on VMware.
Now onto my labs for the day, I’ll report back in soon….
April 15th, 2009 at 2:26 pm
Dave,
Thanks for the General session summaries!
What’s up with Chad using the General Session for recruiting PE09 attendees to boost his Virtual Geek blog standings in the top VMware blogs?! He had his URL on a slide and he mentioned it in his presentation!! ;)
All kidding aside, Chad’s blog is a must read for VMware admins and the new V-Max and Nexus 1000v technologies are awesome advances for virtualization
April 15th, 2009 at 4:22 pm
Haha, well I can’t say much, I put vmguy.com on the end of every one of my presos and my business cards… Seize the opportunity to advertise I guess.