VMworld: In the Cloud, It’s Storage’s Time to Shine

With IT managers still feeling starved for resources while craving improved flexibility and scalability, it’s not surprising that they’ve been eying the cloud hungrily. But just because an organization can put its data and applications in the cloud doesn’t mean that enterprise storage has become a non-factor. Far from it: In fact, the emergence of the cloud has ushered in a whole range of new storage usage scenarios.

That shift is drastically reshaping the requirements facing storage vendors, but it’s also laying the groundwork for an array of new solutions from major proprietary and open source storage players. They’re all looking to cash in on the potentially lucrative need to support all the exciting public, private and hybrid cloud initiatives now in the works. (After all, recall that EMC remains VMware’s controlling stockholder.)

Enterprise Storage Forum takes a look at the changing face of storage as the era of cloud computing takes hold.

This week’s VMworld conference in San Francisco highlighted how it is possible to prosper regardless of the state of the economy. Fewer than 200 people gathered at the first VMworld in 2004. By 2008, it was up to 10,000 — right when the recession hit. While some IT conferences have faltered since that time, attendance jumped to 12,000 last year and 17,000 for this week’s show here in San Francisco. Numbers aside, the event brought some youthful enthusiasm to a storage world that can sometimes be a little staid.

This week’s VMworld show featured a collection of new applications for virtual environments, a heightening of the buzz around the cloud, a couple of acquisition announcements from VMware (NYSE: VMW), and a litany of storage vendors trying to hone in on the action.

Read the full story at Enterprise Storage Forum:


VMworld: There’s No Cloud Without Storage