Being my first time to EMC World, I was not sure what to expect. Honestly my gauge of reference has always been VMworld from the last few years. The day started off with the General Session with a lot of announcements all around as expected. Being that I am still fielding calls for day-to-day work, but I was able to get into David Hill and Clint Kitson’s session to live tweet about the new Avamar 7.1 plugin for vCloud Director.
I was pretty impressed with the work that went into the effort to make all the API’s and hooks for service providers to offer data backup to their consumers. Personally I was not aware of the development effort that went into this release. There was a few live demos by Clint showing the Provider side UI as well as some very cool vCAC and vCO workflows that providers can use to automate the deployment of the service to consumers. What makes this cool is now vCloud Powered providers can all offer a true backup solution to their customers as part of their cloud offering. I was pretty impressed.
Following that on the heels of the announcement of vCloud Air Data Protection 2.0, Dave went through all the new features and the use cases for how data protection can be used in vCloud Air by VMware’s customers. There was also two blog posts released talking about Data Protection and the new Standard Storage Tier available in vCloud Air. In winning form the vCloud Air team has been able to announce new major features quickly and smoothly right on the heels of the Disaster Recovery announcement.
Later in the day, the Solutions Arcade was opened and I spent some time checking out the vendors. I got pulled into a few conversations around the booth on the vCloud Air Disaster Recovery offering. Later today I will be doing my first session on the offering and also manning the expert bar for vCloud Air. Being a storage event I did notice there was a lot of interest on vSAN, which is to be expected seeing as most customers here are EMC Storage customers.
The best part for me about any of these conferences is not just the technology but also the networking with people from the community. The time to find out where and what people have been up to and working on. Unfortunately getting into many of the session is always difficult with managing my own sessions and covering the booth, but maybe on Wednesday I will get to take in some of the other sessions.
Funny thing in the midst of it all I found out our lab we use for live demos lost one of its Switches, and I needed to fix all that so we could limp along in case we need to do demos in the sessions. Right now the fallback is screenshots, but those are always fun problems to fix when you are not expecting them while working a trade show!