With all these bloggers, keep checking back and scrolling down — the Wi-Fi in the sessions looks like it’s working, so I’d expect the posts to keep coming:
The morning general session was good as usual. One of the most
interesting things was VMware’s emphasis on saving the world from
global warming… I think it was said a little tongue-in-cheek, but I
could be wrong, they are from California! …The last bit of the general session was an industry perspective from a
few big dogs… Marc Andreessen (wrote mosaic), Andy Bechtolsheim (a
chief architect at Sun) and David Cheriton (a professor of computer
science at Stanford). It was mediated by Lee Gomes of the WSJ. This may
have been the most entertaining and insightful part of this session.
Cheriton, from academia was ranting (and mostly rightfully so) about
how little attention is paid to quality in today’s programming.
Andreessen likened PERL to crack and Bechtolsheim impressed everyone
with his ability to wear a suit and tie WITH berks – and get away with
it! He was the only one of the panelists who did not want to say
anything specific about the topics… seemed he was worried about being
misquoted or something. Anyway, it was all good stuff.
It was interesting to hear Diane Green talking about virtualization,
the future of VMware, Desktop virtualization and the focus on
power/cooling savings.
What was really amazing is the announcement from PG&E to give
customers up to $1350 for every physical server they virtualize and
unplug its power cable.Of course, there is a cap …..$4mil per
customer.
Alex Weeks of vi411.org:
ESX Storage: A Pluggable Architecture
This session was targeted around where the future of ESX storage is going.
One interesting idea that was announced was a redesign to the
storage design. This new design will include a “Multipathing Plugin”
layer that will allow storage vendors to create their own multipath
software for use in ESX.One of the nice things about ESX is that you currently do not need
to pay $1000+ for multipath software like Powerpath. However, this will
allow for specific vendors to write plugins optimized for their array.
It will also allow VMware to “support” more arrays in a more timely
manner.
