Bye-Bye To 3PAR, McAfee: Scenes From VMworld 2010

VMworld 2010: Hello And Good-Bye

VMworld 2010 was the place to be for learning almost everything there is to know about virtualization and cloud computing, at least from the perspective of the show's organizer, VMware. But more than that, it was a place to meet partners, vendors, and users. CRN takes you into the exhibit hall of the VMworld 2010 conference to see what virtualization and cloud startups and solution providers were doing, and to say good-bye to 3PAR and McAfee in what will likely be their last appearances as independent companies.

Bye-Bye, 3PAR!

3PAR had a huge booth at VMware, one that befits a company that one month ago had a market cap of about $604 million but which today is in the process of being acquired by HP for a cool $2.35 billion.

3PAR develops enterprise-class storage arrays featuring such services as clustering, tiered storage and thin provisioning. It was the prize in a protracted bidding war started by Dell on Aug. 16.

Based on history, HP will most likely drop the 3PAR moniker for anything but a potential brand name, in which case this is likely the last we'll see of an independent 3PAR.

Bye-Bye, McAfee!

In contrast to the party mood at the 3PAR booth, things were much quieter at the booth occupied by McAfee, which is in the process of being acquired by Intel for $7.7 billion.

Post-acquisition, McAfee will operate as a wholly-owned Intel subsidiary as part of Intel's Software and Services Group. Intel is hoping the acquisition will help it make security an integrated part of billions of Internet-ready devices coming to market which have typically not been addressed from a security perspective.

Hello, Fluid Operations

One of the startups making a splash at the show was Fluid Operations, a German company looking to break into the U.S. with "Landscape-as-a-Service," or LaaS.

The company's LaaS software monitors a customer's entire IT stack, including networks, servers, applications and any changes that go on, and can take a virtual snapshot of that environment and clone it for moving to other physical hosts, said Tobias Sorn, development engineer (pictured at left).

That clone includes all the virtual machines and the connections between them. For example, a customer could clone an entire SAP landscape in less than 10 minutes. for test, demonstration, or upgrade purposes.

"You could also develop an entire SAP landscape and then clone it for a new customer," Sorn said.

Hello, Atlantis Computing

Atlantis introduced a new appliance for slashing storage bottlenecks in virtual desktop infrastructures.

The real VDI bottleneck is I/O, with a single Windows 7 virtual desktop requiring almost the entire I/O of a single hard drive, making storage the largest part of VDI cost, said Seth Knox, marketing director for the Mountain View, Calif.-based startup.

Atlantis' appliance sits between storage and end user devices to cache into high-speed RAM the virtual desktop I/Os used in the boot, anti-virus, patching, and other processes, cutting up to 90 percent of I/O requirements in a Windows 7 environment, Knox said.

"A lot of VDI technology is being pitched to customers facing a Windows 7 migration," he said. "But people don't realize how I/O-intensive it can be."

Hello, Actifio

A third startup, Waltham, Mass.-based Actifio, showed a new in-line appliance that automates data protection, disaster recovery, and business continuity in physical and virtualized environments, said Rick Nagengast (left), senior vice president of strategic development.

That appliance intercepts data as it is written, sends the data on to the primary array, and then virtualizes copies of the data into three separate storage pools, including a snapshot pool for instant recovery, a backup pool, and a replication pool for disaster recovery, all of which are written to low-cost storage, Nagengast said.

Jim Pownell, vice president of customer operations (right), said the company will add storage resource management and deduplication by year-end.

Datalink: Building Clouds

Chanhassen, Minn.-based solution provider Datalink made its first appearance at VMworld as an exhibitor, and the 12 personnel attending the show hosted about 30 customers for dinner and sales talk, said Kent Christensen, practice manager for virtualization and consolidation.

Datalink has already started helping customers build internal clouds, and will work with them to help set up outsourcing of IT to external clouds using NetApp storage if they desire, Christensen said.

"With all the talk about the cloud, you have to be at this conference," Christensen said.

While EMC has Vblock storage architecture, Datalink uses NetApp storage to build "Dblock" or Datalink-block storage infrastructures. "We done this enough with NetApp that we can offer secure multi-tenancy," he said.

Forsythe

Forsythe Solutions Group, Skokie, Ill., brought over 30 of its employees to San Francisco for training and to meet with customers, said Grace Bulger, director of market communications for the solution provider.

Forsythe one evening hosted 66 personnel from over 50 of its customer companies for dinner and a meeting with executives from VMware, who did a presentation about virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), Bulger said.

At the booth, Forsythe demonstrated several VMware technologies including resource management on Cisco's UCS platform with vSphere, an overview of View 4.5 VDI technology, Thin App application virtualization, and more.

With Bulger, from left to right, are Matt Lloyd, product specialist; Bruce Lee, server architect; and Kurt Roemer, business development manager, all from Forsythe.

GreenPages: The "One-Click Data Center"

GreenPages Technology Solutions, a Kittery, Maine-based solution provider, used VMware to demonstrate its new "One-Click Data Center."

That new offering using BMC's Cloud Lifecycle Management Suite on the backend to manage both virtual and physical IT infrastructures as a single infrastructure, as well as manage the network layer parts including provisioning of network connections and firewalls in the virtual and physical world, said Chris Ward, senior account manager.

Ward said he demoed the One-Click Data Center in the BMC booth, and also spent time in the EMC booth demonstrating that vendor's Data Domain deduplication technology.

Amax: Custom Building For Virtualized Environments

What is a custom system builder doing at VMworld? Showing high-end custom servers and storage for virtualized environments, of course.

Bohr-Young Tsao, senior OEM account manager and product manager (left) for Amax, said his company used VMworld to roll out the latest versions of its Cluster ax HPC (high performance computing) servers. The new Cluster ax HP servers include models ranging from supercomputer-class units HPC blade servers to HPC workstations, Tsao said.

The company also unveiled what Tsao called the highest core-density rack mount server, the BladeMax, which lets customers put up to 240 processor cores in a 7U space using six-core Intel Xeon processors.

With Tsao was Tam Nguyen, account manager at Amax.

Great Lakes: Proud To Still Be A Hardware Company

The Grand Rapids, Mich.-based solution provider sells servers and related hardware from IBM, HP, Dell, Cisco, and others, and exhibited at VMworld for the third time, said Steven Wright, solutions engineer (right).

Its two previous appearances brought it a total of over $2 million in new business and dozens of new customers, said Jeff Stevens, vice president (second from right).

Great Lakes thrives on selling hardware, with 2010 hardware sales so far up 30 percent over last year, Stevens said. "We lead with hardware, and provide services to put a fence around the customer," he said.

With Stevens and Wright are Matt Burch, IBM product specialist (left) and Ryan Devereaux, account manager.

World Wide Technology: Showing Off Its Integration Capabilities

WWT, a St. Louis-based solution provider, has been exhibiting at VMworld either on its own or via another solution provider it acquired since 2004.

This year, the company brought about 50 personnel to VMworld to get training and do customer presentations, said Dave Brown, data center sales specialist. At its booth, it was demonstrating VCE technology from the VMware-Cisco-EMC alliance, similar technology combining VMware, Cisco, and NetApp products, and HP's Matrix network convergence technology, Brown said.

"All three systems are up and running here," he said. "We can build whatever environment our customers want."

Vendors Get Help From Channel Partners

Many of the vendor booths at VMworld had solution providers come in to do demonstrations on the vendors' stages. Other vendors offered its solution providers mini kiosks inside their booths featuring the partners' logos in return for their spending time demonstrating the vendors' products.

EMC, for instance, had mini booths inside its main VMworld booth featuring demonstrations of its technology by Kittery, Maine-based GreenPages Technology Solutions and Huntington Beach, Calif.-based Applied Computer Solutions, among other partners.

More From VMworld

VMworld was also about products, including storage, networking, server, and virtualization hardware and software aimed at helping customers build virtualized environments and a variety of private, public, and hybrid clouds.

For a look at a variety of new products exhibited at VMware, click here to check out the hot management and data protection products at VMworld.