EMC World 2012 – Best Event in Four-Year History of Virtual Instruments

We just returned from EMC World 2012 — a phenomenal event for the company in terms of the number of people we met with, and the depth of discussions.  Virtual Instruments has attended this show for the last four years and it’s great to see the progress we’ve made in terms of who already knows about us.  It’s also very gratifying to note the number of people who were referred to us by their IT management peers and other vendors … HDS, EMC, IBM, and many resellers.  I guess we can’t claim to be a “best-kept secret” any longer!

As for other trends … the fibre channel market is more alive than ever before.  Of course, our current customers all have FC SANs, but of the people who had not already heard about us, it seemed that about 80% of them rely on FC for their business-critical apps.  There were surprisingly very few NAS shops, even fewer iSCSI shops, and FCoE interest was mild at best.  A few Cisco shops were heading in this direction over the “next few years,” but we didn’t find anyone heading down an end-to-end FCoE path.

At the booth, we focused on “Ensuring Performance and Availability of your Private Cloud.” Lots of people are interested in building private clouds, but it seemed that for the most part, not many are actually running a productive private cloud yet.  This just re-enforces the need for products like VirtualWisdom that can eliminate the risk of moving critical apps to a private cloud.  Just about everyone we had extended meetings spoke at length with are doing some form of consolidation, refresh, or migration project.  Also, a surprisingly large number of them are building new data centers in the next 12-18 months to accommodate their growth. Helping people optimize their infrastructure, consolidate, upgrade and migrate to new platforms are some of our biggest strengths, and the discussions at EMC World underscored the need for this level of support.  Changes to infrastructure always carry some risk, but with VirtualWisdom, we can help them de-risk these infrastructure transformations.

If you’re planning a consolidation/migration/refresh, call your local Virtual Instruments team to talk through the project, or download this best practice whitepaper on consolidation: http://www.virtualinstruments.com/files/pdfs/WP_Storage-Consolidation-Best-Practices.pdf, or check out this on-demand webcast on migration best practices:  http://info.virtualinstruments.com/webinar-cloud-migration.html