VMworld 2009: Great for storage vendors

For a storage guy, last week's VMworld 2009 in San Francisco was a great show. All the familiar storage vendors were there and then some. Walking the show floor, I found them to be uniformly positive about traffic and the response they were getting from attendees.

Digging a bit deeper I found that storage vendors were getting attention from a broad range of IT specialists including server, network, architecture, and of course, storage administrators.

Wait a minute. VMworld isn't supposed to be a storage show. And yet storage vendors were, in general, more positively impressed with VMworld 2009 than many of the previously attended storage-focused shows they have been to in the recent past.

Server virtualization is now reordering the IT landscape, and the ground storage vendors have stood on for years is moving under their feet.

At varying levels, storage vendors feel the motion. They know the server virtualization thing is huge opportunity.

At varying levels, storage vendors feel the motion. They know the server virtualization thing is huge opportunity. Said another way, they fear that they could eventually disappear if they don't position themselves properly in the eyes of IT buyers now driving toward near complete if not total virtualization of the enterprise IT function.

Decades ago, storage was a mere peripheral, a feature of the server as Scott McNealy once famously quipped. But as he made that pronouncement, storage was getting connected to its own network and creeping out from behind the shadow of the server into a limelight all its own. EMC perhaps said it best: Storage--Where Information Lives.

Now that networked storage is mature, the ground is moving once again. Data and storage management is heading back toward the server running VMware. Data replication and storage provisioning functions are now features of the VMware server with more to come.

Beyond IT architecture, the architecture of the virtualized IT operations department is undergoing perhaps an even more profound change. The boundaries that once defined operational "silos"--server, network, and storage administration--are breaking down as vCenter becomes the focal point for VMware-managed IT. Hence, storage vendors here at VMworld 2009 get visitors from all walks of VMware operational life.

What am I taking away from VMworld 2009?

1. VMware needs to resist playing favorites with storage vendors, especially the one that owns them. To VMware's credit, I saw much evidence that they get this imperative. VMware is democratically exposing APIs and vCenter plug-in opportunities to any storage vendor that wants to use them.

2. VMware administrators will be increasingly challenged to choose between data and storage management functions that reside on the VMware platform or live within the storage environment. Larger IT environments will likely settle on a combination of both. Smaller shops may well opt to manage data and storage from the vantage point of the VMware platform.

3. Storage-focused shows may no longer be able to support themselves. The nature of the storage buyer is changing. The nature of the storage environment is changing. Both are becoming more diverse and less narrowly focused on issues that only pertain to storage.

VMworld 2010 will likely be another great storage show.

[Random_Walk]

I spent all last week there myself... and while storage vendors did have a great time, you must've missed out on the huge Intel, AMD, Red Hat, Wyse, and buckets of other not-so-storage vendors all over the show floor. ;)

Personally? Between the classes, labs, and customer councils, the storage aspect was there, but man - if anything, I got a far different impression than you did - the main focus (IMHO, and especially from the keynotes) was on thin clients, VDI, and mobile devices using VDI.

I realize that as Press, you probably couldn't sit on the customer council sessions, but storage was only one aspect of a wide range of things in the pipe for VMWare (sorry, can't elaborate further - we had to sign an NDA to participate). I actually skipped a few classes to get in on a few of these sessions, since they held more excitement and purpose for me. (You'd have done it too - getting to freely talk to the actual programming teams from VMWare was pretty frickin' awesome, and I learned more from them than from most of the classes).

Also, while yes EMC is VMWare's daddy, I only run NetApp rigs @ work, and honestly I have never seen any real favoritism by VMWare towards EMC at all, at the show floor or otherwise. Heh - If you peeked at that big ol' demo rack they were pimping, you would have seen a nice mixture of EMC and NetApp sitting there powering it. (and personally, if there was any partiality shown on that rack set, it favored blades vs. individual servers...)

re: "Larger IT environments will likely settle on a combination of both." Dunno - it's not that tough to do both... Mostly, I use the NetApp side for snap/snapshot (backup, not VM) management, disk sizing and allocation, and adding new LUNs as needed. vCenter I use for pretty much everything else (including SVMotion). I'm pretty sure EMC end-users operate similarly. Not exactly sure where you're seeing a disconnect, or where we would face a dilemma... Even a non-SAN user (using an array w/ NFS, say, or relying on local storage only), would have to split the diff between disk maintenance and VM maintenance. I think the only case where you would find differently is a small user with a single ESX/i box w/ only local storage.

I guess I'm just wondering what exactly drove you to see this conflict...

[JohnSWebster]

Random_Walk

Thanks for the comment. Yes, I was storage-focused at the show. Monday was consumed by presentations for the analyst community. Honestly, not much storage there. More of what you were seeing. It just struck me as a fixture at certain storage-focused events that the storage vendors I'm used to seeing were smiling at this event and wondering why they were doing some of the storage-focused events on their calendars.

Re the conflict: For me, its all about $$$. Storage vendors, knowing that storage hardware is increasingly a commodity item, try to add value via storage-resident software for data and storage management. This trend started years ago when IBM introduced XRC for mainframe data copy between storage controllers, but EMC turned storage-resident software into a serious revenue generator with SRDF, TimeFinder, etc. Now come the server virtualization platforms with their ways to manage data and storage. The question for users is: Who you gonna pay for the data/storage management software - the server virtualization platform vendor or your favorite storage vendor?

JW

[wmshoe]

Gee... you think that may be why EMC bought VMWare in the first place? Regardless of which storage vendor floats your boat, you can bet VMWare has been responsible for more than just a few TB's of EMC storage going out the door.