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Nordic VMUG User Conference 2013

This will be a short summary from todays Nordic VMUG Conference held at Bella Center in Copenhagen. First of all, there were about 600 attendees and that is a really great number. There was even an exhibition area where the sponsors presented their products, the concept of the VMworld event but in small scale. Really good job by the Danish VMUG community.

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See this link for more information about todays event.

The day started with the opening keynote presented by the VMware EMEA CTO Joe Baguley who did, as always, a really great job while presenting todays topic “Thoughts on the Industry”.
I specifically liked the comparison between a chicken farmer and a system administrator in terms of control and manageability. It’s the same topic as the blog post “Who feeds Paris? Changing the mindset of IT”  by Kit Colbert touches since both expands on the topic that the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework/processes we have struggled to get in place over the past 10 year might not fit in the new requirements seen in IT today.

During the breakout sessions i picked up quite a few things around NSX and VSAN and I’m even more convinced that VMware among others are on the right track. Love the concept of keeping the data as close to the source as possible no matter if it is network or storage related traffic.

I spend quite some time in the exhibition area talking to different vendors and i mostly focused on the backup & recovery, e.g. phdvirtualVeeam & Zerto and the converged compute infrastructure vendors, e.g. Nutanix and Simplivity. There was however one vendor i didn’t have time to visit and i can’t recall their name. The had a concept or product for VMware Horizon View disaster recovery. If anyone knows their name please send me a message.

VMware has started an initiative in the Nordics to increase the number of VCDX’s in the region, i’m still the only one since 2010. During lunch, at the VMware both, we had a spontaneous session where people interested in the VCDX certification could come by and ask any type of VCDX related questions. Myself, Duncan Epping and Frank Denneman represented the VCDX’s.

Chad Sakac presented the closing keynote and the topic was “The Nature and Impact of Disruption”. The presentation was spot on regarding things i see during my day to day job when it comes to talk with customers about changes. There are always different reactions but one thing that always comes up, in one way or another, is fear.
A really good statement included in the presentation was “Disruption is characterized by change and fear”.
Both Joe, during the opening keynote, and Chad discussed the massive increase of storage usage we see today. They presented the largest, i think they said, EMC deal and it included 85 Petabytes of data. It required about 20 000 HDDs shipped in 8 lorries. This is really massive for one customer order.

The day ended with free beers and pizza in the exhibition area. Unfortunately i had to catch the flight back to Sweden and drive my car back home so i didn’t try one out. Almost looks as good as the VCDX beers i received last christmas:)

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