Perfect Late Summer Setting for a Big Show

VMWorld, held in late summer each year, is the fall season kickoff event in the IT world. San Francisco’s Moscone Center, located in the center of the city, is abuzz for virtually the entire week as a result. The weather cooperated nicely with blue skies and mild temperatures nudging out the usual San Francisco fog.

Adaptive Computing of Provo, Utah, which manages the large computing installations with its Moab self-optimizing cloud management and high-performance computing (HPC) workload management software packages, illustrated with this cube of 4,100 colored flashing lights the fact that at any given time, a significant percentage of data center servers are usually out of commission and that the only way to go is distributed workloads.

NetGear, known mostly for in-home and small business WiFi routers, is moving deeper into the enterprise market with network storage for midrange and small enterprises. ReadyDATA unified storage is an enterprise-class storage product that features native de-duplication, thin provisioning and unlimited snapshots, with support for Serial ATA, SAS and solid-state drives (SSDs). ReadyDATA scales to 180-terabyte capacity.

EMC, parent company of VMware, had a huge presence at VMWorld 2012, displaying its vBlock virtualized server and storage units. VBlocks are preconfigured, converged-function cloud computing systems that can run hundreds to more than 6,000 virtual machines, depending on customer needs. In three years, VBlocks have become a $900 million business for Cisco (which supplies servers and networking), EMC (storage and data security), VMware (virtualization and management software) and Intel (processors).

V3 Systems, a Utah-based virtual desktop startup, had one of the more active booths at VMWorld with this extreme skateboard setup. V3 Systems makes a 1U or 2U server box that users simply plug in, configure for number of desktop instances needed, find devices and let go. Company officials told eWEEK that “it just works.” V3’s box hosts 50 to 400 high-performance virtual desktops. Thanks to this simplicity, in combination with V3’s optimized management tools, V3 enables users to scale to thousands of desktops in the cloud.

Santa Clara, Calif.-based InfoBlox, a key partner with companies such as VMware, Cisco Systems and Microsoft, demonstrated the integration between VMware virtualization, cloud systems and Infoblox’s automated IP Address Management (IPAM) services.

F5, a Seattle-based cloud software infrastructure provider, offered the tried-and-true Claw Challenge game in which VMWorld attendees could get a surprise gift by manipulating the claw correctly. F5 provides application delivery optimization and cloud automation, filling in all those software and security gaps in heterogeneous systems that users don’t think about or know about until they show up unexpectedly.

The venerable Japanese data center equipment company isn’t really known for providing cloud services or infrastructure, but it demonstrated its NBlock cloud server at VMWorld. NEC is focusing on providing cloud infrastructures for service carriers, enterprises and social infrastructure.

Moscow-based Internet security and antivirus provider Kaspersky Labs, which has been gaining market share steadily during the last few years, brought back the 1960s concept of the slot car at VMWorld, grabbing a lot of attention in the process.

Fusion-io exhibited its super-fast NAND flash storage servers at VMWorld. Folks hoping to run into the company’s chief scientist, Apple-co-founder and former “Dancing With the Stars” contestant Steve Wozniak, at the booth were disappointed to learn that Woz had other plans and couldn’t be at the show. Fusion-io is based in Salt Lake City.

Data protection provider SafeNet, a long-timer in the business, provides data security from the data center to the cloud and to all enterprise end points. It also serves up data migration with its ProtectV software. The Maryland-based company claims that it is fast and airtight with encryption, compliance requirements and overall control for administrators.

CEO Kevin Brown (center) shares a laugh with a colleague at Coraid‘s VMWorld booth. Coraid epitomizes the underlying theme of this year’s VMWorld, “software-defined networking” and “software-defined data centers” because its new-generation arrays are automated to handle Ethernet storage area network (SAN) storage for cloud deployments.

FalconStor, a storage company best known for its OEM products to large companies such as Hewlett-Packard and others, won the Gold Award at the conference for business continuity and data protection. This speaks well for the company’s technology since there were some pretty solid competitors in that category.

ADTRAN, a provider of cloud connectivity, virtual mobility and enterprise communications hardware and software, announced at the show that its Bluesocket virtual Wireless LAN can now provide service providers and value-added resellers with multiple customer-premise equipment deployment options that include resale, managed and cloud-hosted services. In this photo, Mads Lillelund, general manager of ADTRAN’s Bluesocket Business Group, shows that the Bluesocket WiFi unit can be housed out of sight in a ceiling as necessary.

Quest Software, recently acquired by Dell, demonstrated its cloud infrastructure tools and gave away these popular bouncing balls, which flash red and blue for a minute after they make an impact with something hard—like the ground.

Longtime rock star Jon Bon Jovi and his band were set to perform Aug. 29 at VMWorld 2012. Most big-time IT conferences now include a Tier 1-type concert as part of the proceedings.