During the day 2 general session at VMworld, VMware CTO Steve Herrod gave each of the VMworld Global Diamond Sponsor 4 minutes to do deliver a demo of their latest vSphere integrations and capabilities. These demos were presented to a massive room, packed with 10,000 VMworld attendees.
Cisco, Dell, EMC, HP and NetApp all presented…
The crowd voted for the demo they found to be the best…
NetApp Won!
Scratch that, NetApp Stole the Show!
If you’ve never had to deliver a demo, especially in a tight timeframe, it can be very difficult unless you understand your value very well.
What did NetApp Demo?
NetApp founder, Dave Hitz showed how NetApp addresses real problems facing cloud infrastructures and service providers. No other storage vendors can offer what is possible with Data ONTAP Cluster-Mode.
Dave demonstrated how Peak Colomanages their customer’s data needs by running their cloud on NetApp. “One Cloud”. A single shared storage infrastructure for hundreds of private clouds. One Agile Data Infrastructure. A real customer that has solved real problems and is now more focused than ever on bringing customers online.
- Instant Provisioning – Creating a virtual storage system (referred to in the demo as a vSAN) in 10 seconds a hosted customer
- Non Disruptive Operations – Addressed a performance issue by non-disruptively migrating a 30 VM Oracle DB eco-system nearly instantaneously from SATA to SSD drives.
That’s right, 30 VMs migrated without any intervention at the hypervisor layer!
- Immortal data infrastructure – Attested to the storage savings and high performance available with NetApp data deduplication. Peak Colo averages data reduction over 50%
The Punchline
I absolutely loved when Dave proclaimed, “My Goal is to sell you less storage. What storage vendor says that?”
Seriously, what vendor outside of NetApp has customer running production VMware clouds on capacity efficient storage platforms?
Start at 00:58:50 to see catch the ‘EMC buzz’ and then jump to 01:06:00 for Dave & the winning Peak Colo on NetApp demo.
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The Prize
For winning the VMworld Challenge, VMware graciously donated $10,000 on behalf of NetApp to “Be The Match” a non-profit dedicated to helping patients in need of bone marrow transplants.
[embedplusvideo height=”331″ width=”540″ standard=”http://www.youtube.com/v/bIbEdE60wSs?fs=1″ vars=”ytid=bIbEdE60wSs&width=540&height=331&start=&stop=&rs=w&hd=0&autoplay=0&react=0&chapters=¬es=” id=”ep2233″ /]Thank you VMware for the generosity. I look forward to round 2 of the VMworld Challenge (likely with revamped demos) at VMworld Europe.