This week’s Brownbag (hosted by @cody_bunch of Professional VMware) will revolve around one of the more popular VMworld 2010 sessions entitled “Storage Super-Heavyweight Challenge” (TA8623). The participants include Vaughn Stewart (@vStewed) of NetApp and Chad Sakacc (@sakacc) from EMC.
Date/Time: Wed, December 7th, 2011 @ 8:00p EST
Register: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/945190048
If anyone has attended an event of this nature (discussion forum, Q&A panel), the success of said event is highly dependent upon the interaction and participation of both the audience and the panelists. Accordingly, there needs to be an abundance of healthy and meaningful discussion topics so that the event does not turn into a 3rd grade staring contest, or even worse, a FUD-flinging competition. That responsibility is on us – the community.
In an effort to provide scintillating, thought-provoking topics of discussion, the below are my contributions to the forth-coming entertainment.
- Do you see large enterprises adopting unified platforms such as FlexPod or Vblock in place of their deeply-entrenched and traditional stack infrastructures? Or is it more of a niche play at the moment?
- How do you envision the evolution of technologies like intelligent caching algorithms (VST, FAST) and server-side SSD memory caches (Project Lightning) shape how customers consume data?
- As geographically distributed storage solutions like MetroCluster and VPLEX become more popular in practice, what can you divulge about the future innovations of continuous availability solutions?
- How do you see VMware’s expansion into providing storage technologies like the vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) and host-based replication compliment the current SMB storage array offerings?
- Has there been any progress made around the recent performance issues with the VAAI Thin Provision Block Reclaim primitive (UNMAP)?
There you have it. My take on vendor-neutral, non-FUD provoking, and intellectually-compelling questions. None of this “who’s best?” nonsense.
I encourage all who are interested to reach out to Damian Karlson (@sixfootdad) to submit your questions for this event.
UPDATE (12/9): Listen to this recorded BrownBag on Vimeo or iTunes.