At VMworld this year, my focus was on the products. The event floor was crammed with both people (the official figure was around 17,000 registered attendees) and booths. Sometimes the floor was so full that I gave up trying to go a certain direction and had to go around.
I asked vendors what was new or interesting about the products they showed off. There wasn't time for in-depth interviews with each one, so check out the vendors' sites for more information. Also, I only had time to hit a fraction of the booths at the show, so feel free to contact me if it seems like I'm missing something.
Acronis talked to me about the company's online backup subscription product. It uses a per-machine, per-year pricing model for workstations, servers, and virtual machines. And interesting feature of the service is the possibility of failing over to the cloud—you run on local hardware, but if something goes horribly wrong, you can quickly start using cloud hardware.
RingCube's vDesk wins the award for the product I had the most trouble understanding. It's sort of like a virtual desktop, but not. Instead, it provides virtual workspaces, which run without a hypervisor—so they're not virtual machines. They provide isolated work environments. These virtual workspaces can be streamed across a network, or stored on a USB stick, or run on a local PC. vDesk could be useful in "bring your own computer" environments. That way IT departments don't have to worry about what you do with your personal machine, but when you BYOC to work, they can take care of the virtual workspace. Like I said, I don't totally understand this tech, but if it sounds interesting, check out the site.
Microsoft had a small presence at VMworld due to politics of the typeI'd rather not talk about. Its booth staff was talking about the company's Azure offerings, which we've covered several times in the past. Microsoft's reps wouldn't give me figures for how many companies have adopted Azure products or tell me which ones were the most popular. But I don't think I’m making much of a judgment call when I say that the company seems dedicated to getting a big piece of the cloud business.
Samsung was showing off both RAM and SSDs. The RAM is being marketed as "Green DDR3." It's created using a 40nm process and uses less power than older DDR3 modules. The new, larger capacity RAM chips allow you to get the same amount of RAM that you could before using fewer DIMMs.
Samsung was also showing off its SSDs. The upgrades weren't very shocking—just bigger capacities, better control software to increase drive life, that kind of thing—but they show that SSD technology is continuing to advance quickly.
Keep watching for more from VMworld 2010!
