As I’m putting the last things in my backpack and suitcase to prep for a week at VMworld, I’m realizing this is shaping up to be an incredible conference. A number of folks from a cross section of teams at WHIPTAIL have put tremendous amounts of effort into the prep for the conference, and I’m really looking forward to spending time with some great people from our team.

So… what’s in store?

As we’ve already released, we’ll have Brent Spiner at our booth a number of times to sign autographs. As a kid, I was always glued to the TV for the primetime showings of Star Trek, The Next Generation. Also, whenever Independence Day is on the TV on a weekend, I always find myself flipping back to it, no matter how many times I’ve watched it. I’m definitely looking forward to meeting Mr. Spiner to see what he’s up to.

Primarily though, this show is a fantastic chance for us to showcase our customer successes and demonstrate what our product is capable of. We’ll have an INVICTA cluster set up at the booth with a full ESX cluster behind it (which is great news, because without the hardware in front of it, we’d never be able to push its capabilities) demonstrating a number of different use cases (VDI, Databases, Big Data applications, and quite possibly a couple of ad-hoc demos on the fly). We’ll also be demonstrating our integration with VMware storage frameworks on a number of fronts, and will have some jaw-dropping things to show customers for normal storage operations that may take minutes, hours, or days on other storage arrays. For us, this is often a conversation measured in seconds or faster.

The specific customer meetings I have on my schedule in addition to the booth are really interesting. I’m meeting with past and potential customers to discuss a number of different problems across various industries. The topics so far, for starters:
Concerns about the performance of a Tier 1 application as it’s moved to a virtual infrastructure.

• Performance and cost concerns rolling out VDI in an enterprise.
• Instant data analysis on large data sets.
• Infiniband connection options for a large scale video rendering farm.

Feel free to stop by the WHIPTAIL booth (#841) at VMworld. I’m looking forward to a great week!