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Blogging from VMworld: Day 1 -- Excitement in the Air

Jerry_Gowen
Level 2
Employee
There's nothing quite like being a first time attendee at one of IT's largest events -- VMworld 2010. First up was a meeting with Deni Connor and Jim Bagley from Storage Strategies Now. Deni has been covering the storage space for many years as one of the most respected technology journalists and has witnessed first hand the growth of VMware and the adoption of virtualization. As we highlighted our new solutions for the VMware platform -- Symantec ApplicationHA and Symantec VirtualStore -- she shared how impressed she was with the reality that customers can now ensure their business critical applications are always available inside the virtual machine. Our customers have told us they are wanting to virtualize these applications but have faced challenges with what Symantec is labeling the "last mile" -- our theme for this year's event. Deni isn't the only one interested in high availability for VMware. Symantec and VMware co-presented a session on application awareness with VMware HA that was standing room only.

Later in the day when the exhibit hall opened there wasn't even standing room at Symantec's booth (#513). Attendees packed the area to see Symantec's broad portfolio across virtualization including security, storage management and data protection offerings. Customers tested their knowledge of Symantec in a game show setting and earned some nice prizes like free Norton subscriptions, noise-canceling headphones and even an iPad. Jerome Wendt with DCIG stopped by for a demo of VirtualStore and believes customers will need to adopt solutions like this as we see continued proliferation of virtualization in 2011. Stephen Foskett and the Gestalt IT bloggers also paid a visit to the Symantec booth wanting to see the new solutions first-hand as a follow up to learning about them previously.

While the afternoon was rapidly coming to an end, it was only the beginning of my day 1 VMworld experience. An evening welcome reception, Microsoft Tweetup and Symantec's Last Mile customer and partner event at the St. Regis hotel were all packed with participants soaking up the excitement in the air here at VMworld 2010. I can't wait to see what Day 2 has to offer...