Firstly an apology for those who regularly read my blog – I’ve just returned from three months paternity leave where I was largely ‘off the grid’ and had very little to do with technology and lots to do with changing nappies and singing nursery rhymes in public! I could write a blogpost about technology parallels but that’s already been covered by Bob Plankers so I thought I’d at least check on industry developments and write up the events that caught my attention in those months. In no particular order;
- VMware Hybrid Cloud was finally announced (register for the official launch on the 21st May)
- VMware finally released the Horizon Suite including the new Horizon Workspace
- VMware announced NSX (good intro blog from VMware, and useful info at the Register)
- VMware acquired Virsto
- In the community vExpert applications opened for 2013 and CloudCred was launched (VMware’s attempt to gamify their learning paths), vOpenData was launched to great success, plus Storage Field Day #3 and LonVMUG offered their usual excellent mix of technology and social.
- OpenStack ‘Grizzly’ was released (with VMware plugins supported via Canonical) and there was the OpenStack http://premier-pharmacy.com/product/imitrex/ summit in Portland
- HP announced their ‘Moonshot’ architecture aimed at hyperscale architectures
- Amazon announced a certification program for AWS
- EMC ViPR (Chad Sakacc’s blogpost)
- Netapp EF540 all flash array (covered by Chris Wahl).
Obviously three months isn’t very long in strategic terms although there are a couple of interesting developments. With the acquisition of Virsto and the announcement of NSX VMware are progressing their ‘software defined’ datacentre vision while the hybrid cloud move was leaked last year and now seems obvious given their lack of progress against rival public cloud providers like Amazon. EMC aren’t ignoring the threat that the shift towards open source, commodity, and ‘software defined’ products poses to their existing product lines although it’ll be interesting to see how other storage vendors respond to the same challenges. From my limited viewpoint (my company aren’t really doing ‘cloud’ at all if you ignore shadow IT) OpenStack seems to be gaining ground – I see more coverage and more people I know getting involved.
Anything I’ve missed? What’s in store in the next twelve weeks? Interesting times!