Virtualization at Cloud Expo

I attended the second day of the HP Converged Infrastructure Roadshow in NYC last week.

Most of the day was spent watching PowerPoints and demos for the HP Matrix stuff and Virtual Connect.

Then came lunch. I finished my appetizer and realized that the buffet being set up was for someone else. My appetizer was actually lunch! Thanks God there was cheesecake on the way…

There was a session on unified storage, which mostly covered the LeftHand line.

At one point, I asked if the data de-dupe was source based or destination based. The “engineer” looked like a deer in the headlights and promptly answered “It’s hash based.” ‘Nuff said… The session covering the G6 servers was OK, but “been there done that.”

Other than the cheesecake, the best part of the day was the final presentation. The last session covered the differences in the various blade servers from several manufacturers.

Even though I work for a company that sells HP, EMC and Cisco gear, I believe that x64 servers, from a hardware perspective, are really generic for the most part. Many will argue why their choice is the best, but most people choose a brand based on relationships with their supplier, the manufacturer or the dreaded “preferred vendor” status.

Obviously, this was an HP – biased presentation, but some of the math the Bladesystem engineer (I forgot to get his name) presented really makes you think.

Lets start with a typical configuration for VMs. He mentioned that this was a “Gartner recommended” configuration for VMs, but I could not find anything about this anywhere on line.

Even so, its a pretty fair portrayal of a typical VM.

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