EMC World day 1 - VPLEX, Joe Tucci & Michael Capellas drop by, and an interesting private cloud TAB
Day one at EMC World kicked off today. The day had what was to me a bit of an odd structure, with a product announcement to the press, a keynote that really didn’t go into the announcement, and then two more keynotes and an executive panel in the afternoon. 
Here are some pix from the conference:
The big EMC news today was VPLEX, a new federated storage product that, in its current incarnation, should let you VMotion a single virtual machine or an entire data center across 100km or so. It’s new enough - even a new category? -- that even the EMCers seem to be struggling to define it succinctly. 
Chuck Hollis (EMC): VPLEX: The Birth of a New Storage Platform "Like anything relatively new, it will take a while for people to fully understand the rationale and the strategy behind the product.  It took me a good while before I got a full grasp on the implications of this new technology."
Chad Sakac (EMC): Your Virtual Machine Teleporter is ready ... Are you? "Why is this important?   Well, one of the key tenants of the “journey to the private cloud” is not only being able to consume things differently (via all sorts of self-provisioning models amongst many things), but also being able to break the barriers of the physical datacenter – being able to do things across geographic boundaries."
Stu Miniman (EMC): VPLEX: Redefining the Boundaries of the Data Center. "When new technologies are introduced into the marketplace, people are most comfortable in making comparisons to things that they already know.  In this post, I’ll compare traditional replication solutions with VPLEX Distributed Federation."
Storagezilla (EMC): This is VPLEX. "A category creating product which brings Distributed Cache Coherency to workloads in the Private Cloud by providing the ability to make block storage volumes available Always-Active across long distances."
The bloggers lounge at EMC World was a great place to network and still do work besides. Along with the discussions on storage, virtualization, and private cloud, we were able to watch a succession of luminaries step into SiliconAngle’s TheCube for a live video streaming session. All the sessions will eventually get up on YouTube, but for now you can check them out here. For me, the standout session was a surprise visit by EMC CEO Joe Tucci and new Acadia CEO Michael Capellas. This may be the first on-camera intervew from Michael Capellas since he was was announced at heading up Acadia, the EMC-Cisco joint venture. Check out his reasons for signing up to lead this new company focused on private cloud.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that I was also on a live panel discussion on social media. It was a good session, but it really wasn’t about virtualization, so if you’re interested in hearing us punditize, check out this post at Len Devanna’s blog.
Another interesting bit of news via Chuck Hollis was the formation of a Technical Advisory Board at EMC. Nothing very controversial with this group of very very smart people, all of whom I’d love to invite to dinner; but check out who is on the board from VMware:
Steve Herrod – Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of R&D, VMware
Rod Johnson – General Manager, SpringSource; Senior Vice President of Middleware, VMware
Now Steve has been our CTO for quite a while and is instrumental in building the private cloud and steering VMware technology to be in alignment with the evolution of IT. But that second member is Rod Johnson, now the general manager of the SpringSource unit of VMware. Rod founded the Spring Framework, the most usable (and most used) Java framework today, and he is now charting out the course of building the most usable and powerful toolset for creating the next generation of cloud-enabled applications.
