Last week EMC invited all of the Microsoft specialists within the company to Redmond for a week of training and discussions on Microsoft technologies. Attendees came from around the globe with over 100 showing up for the event! Dare I say that this group can challenge Chad's Army as his team of EMC vSpecialists are affectionately called within EMC??
We even had a vSpecialist in attendance and while we thought about taking him out back to tar & feather him we decided to hold off since he is likely there because he has come to his senses and wants to learn about a real virtualization solution.
We spent the week listening to presentations and technical discussions by key EMC and Microsoft specialists and the topics ranged from backup, replication, storage design for key Microsoft applications, updates on Alliance activities between EMC and Microsoft as well as many other topics. But there was one topic that continued to come up all week and that was Microsoft virtualization. In addition to the dedicated presentations we had on Microsoft's cloud strategy, EMC's integration for Microsoft virtualization and Microsoft's hosted application offerings, we also heard support for Hyper-V throughout the week. Many of the EMC's Proven Solutions that we are developing are now using Hyper-V to virtualize key applications including virtualized Exchange, Sharepoint and SQL (I've provided links to previous posts that I've written on some of these solutions).
When EMC product teams talked about support for key Microsoft applications they shared their roadmaps for Hyper-V feature enhancements including improvements we continue to make with our backup and replication products as well as continued testing of EMC's storage federation solution called VPLEX with Live Migration for maintaining 100% uptime of your Hyper-V virtual machines so there is no disruption to a workload when moving a virtual machine from one site to another!
EMC also is continuing to invest in Microsoft virtualization starting by recently adding one of the top Microsoft Virtualization Specialists …scratch that…top virtualization specialist regardless of vendor to the EMC Microsoft Alliance team (more on this later). We will also be hiring Microsoft Virtualization specialists (MSvSpecialists?) across the globe in 2011 to work with customers on EMC and Microsoft Virtualization integration as well as trainings and overall increased communication on our support for this technology. If you know of someone who would be a good fit, send me an email: [email protected]!
So watch out Chad, that sound you hear is the march of a new army and we are growing (and I can promise we'll have cooler shirts than your vSpecialists & their Sgt Pepper uniforms)!
"We even had a vSpecialist in attendance [...] he is likely there because he has come to his senses and wants to learn about a real virtualization solution."
You know my views on that. MSvSpecialist? How about: EMC Microsoft Virtualization Specialist - Hyper-V Edition. Nah, just doesn't roll off the tongue...
Posted by: Michael Lozano | 12/10/2010 at 07:33 PM
@ML, not sure, but it was the geeky guy with this oversized vmware sticker on his Computer.
@Adrian My vote for the specialists is still Hyper-vSpecialists ........
Posted by: Karsten Bott | 12/14/2010 at 01:21 AM