Well we've reached the end of MMS 2011 and overall I'd say it has been a great show! I talked to many people (attendees, partners and Microsoft) who all agreed that the show was well attended, the sessions were excellent and the overall content was relevant to current management and virtualization topics. As I mentioned the other day, Brad Anderson announced System Center 2012 which includes VMM 2012, a new technology code-named "Concero " which will bridge public and private clouds and Opalis has been renamed to System Center Orchestrator.
EMC's booth was busy all week and I had the chance to meet with several existing and potentially new customers. The majority of questions and interest was around EMC's System Center plug-ins including our Unified Storage and Symmetrix management packs, our event packs and our Pro tip for moving VMs off a volume low on space to a new volume with larger capacity to hold the Virtual Machines. We were able to demo our System Center Management Packs using the beta code of System Center 2012 CTP2 which had just been announced this week at the show! Many customers expressed interest in downloading these packs as part of our Beta program and had some suggestions on how we can improve on these (thank you to these customers as you gave us some killer ideas we are exploring! Want to get on the Beta list? Send me an email at Adrian.Simays@emc.com).
EMC was mentioned in Brad's keynote regarding back-end storage used in testing for virtualizing Microsoft applications and as a key partner in Microsoft's SMI-S development work. SMI-S or Storage Management Initiative is a SNIA standard and provides management of storage devices across all vendor systems. SMI-S is a backbone of storage management in System Center 2012. EMC also had a breakout session highlighting management for the System Center, Hyper-V and Windows administrator through a series of tools that were captured in my blog post the other day. We also were included in a Microsoft session for Datacenter DR with Hyper-V talking about key EMC products such as VPLEX storage federation when used with Hyper-V Live Migration for high availability of virtual machines between geographic locations.
As one Microsoft employee I was talking to put it, the roles of the server administrator, the virtual machine administrator and the storage administrator are colliding. Look at the technologies that were discussed all week between System Center 2012, SMI-S for storage management, Concero for bridging public and private clouds and System Center Orchestrator – this couldn't be more accurate. EMC is well aligned for this as we showcased not only our System Center plug-ins for EMC storage reporting and automating VM mobility with the PRO tip, but we also showcased tools such as the EMC SCOM Adapter (formerly Ionix's SCOM Management tool) and EMC's Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI) which provides a visual mapping of SCVMM virtual machines to the back-end storage including path information, array details and information about the actual drives that the VMs sit on.
The other tool that we showed in the booth and discussed in our breakout session was something that is in the early stages of development and had never been seen by the public before. It is designed for the Microsoft administrator and it makes managing storage simple, almost transparent. Didn't see it? Stay tuned because I have some blog posts coming up that will include demos, screen shots and information from the product team.
For all of you that came by to say hello and spent time with us in the booth, THANK You! I hope to see you at EMC World and Microsoft TechEd in May (stay tuned for more information on these as well)!
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