VMware Bridges Old-School and New-Gen at VMworld 2014

by Chris Preimesberger

Host At VMworld, VMware set up an “Expert Bar,” similar to what Apple calls a “Genius Bar” at its retail store locations. Here, any interested conference-goer can have a question answered or obtain product and/or services information at the central VMware booth.

SolidFire offers a primary storage system designed specifically for cloud service providers using an all-solid-state, scale-out architecture. It has patented IT for reduced power, cooling and capacity consumption; the system can scale performance to thousands of servers from a single storage system. The company was giving away a radio-controlled drone helicopter at the show.

The San Jose, Calif.-based computer maker that provides end-to-end green computing solutions for HPC, data center, cloud computing, enterprise, Hadoop/big data and embedded systems worldwide was named one of six VMware partners to provide the servers for the new EVO:RAIL hyperconverged systems. See eWEEK’s conference coverage for more details.

End-user data backup and security provider Druva is always showing people how to fight the so-called “data monster”—the ever-increasing piles of incoming data that enterprises are engulfing due to BYOD, in-house computing, siloed data, customers and many other sources. Here the Monster takes a break from the data center to confront an eWEEK journalist making the rounds at the conference.

Campbell, Calif.-based Barracuda Networks, best known for pizza-box-type storage servers and arrays for midrange-size businesses, now has cloud backup to go with its highly secure on-premises data storage. The company also has cloud services, such as custom firewalls, now available.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company made its mark by being far ahead of the curve on software-defined storage; in fact, the company pioneered it about 10 years ago. The hardware-agnostic, play-with-all-hypervisors systems can fit like a glove into basically any IT system and scale out storage like few other providers can.

DataCore, a smaller but highly regarded company based in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., is another Switzerland-like software-defined storage provider with a loyal customer base; it works on any hardware, with any hypervisor and with any type of array. Its mascot, Data Corey, who has his own Facebook page, Twitter account and LinkedIn page, is of undetermined origin.

The host company demonstrated some impressive high-definition video games at the conference that are powered on workstations by its Horizon set of products.

San Francisco’s local McLaren agency and scale-out storage provider SimpliVity gave away a 2014 McLaren MP4-12C at the show. One lucky person out of the 25,000 on site was to be awarded the car through a drawing. Side note: About 70 percent of the companies at the show made products that are storage-related.

HGST, a division of WD, demonstrated a new helium-filled spinning disk hard drive that works quite well under water or in any harsh environment.

VMTurbo is an award-winning Intelligent Workload Management solution for cloud and virtualized environments. It uses an economic scheduling engine to dynamically adjust resource allocation to meet business goals. It was an award-winner at VMworld 2014.