Out and About Update

As part of the continuing on the road theme and series, this post is being done while traveling for this weeks adventures and events including stops in Atlanta, St. Louis and wrapping up the week in Minneapolis at the local CMG quarterly meeting event. At both last weeks events in Las Vegas and Milwaukee as well as this weeks events talking with IT professionals from various organizations, a consistent theme is that there is no data or I/O recession, however there is the need to do more with less while enabling business sustainability.

While VMware remains the dominant server virtualization platform, I’m hearing of more organizations using Citrix or other Xensource based technologies along with some Microsoft HyperV adopters in part to leverage lower cost of ownership compared to VMware in instances where not all of the feature functionality of the robust VMware technology is needed. This will be an interesting scenario to keep an eye on in the weeks and months to come to see if there are any shifting patterns on the server virtualization front while trying to stretch IT dollars further to do more.

On the Merger & Acquisition (M&A) scene, coverage of on again, off-again and recently rekindled rumored of IBM buying Sun is rampant from the Wall Street Journal to twitter and most points in between. There have been many storm clouds around Sun the past several years from a business and technology perspective, and perhaps the best thing is for Sun and IBM to combine forces and resources, bridging the gap between old physical worlds and new virtual cloud enabled worlds so to speak. Personally, I like the idea for many different reasons and think that some shape or form of an IBM and Sun deal either in entirety, or pieces is far more likely to occur and sooner, than seeing funds returned from either AIG or Bernard Madoff, the other top news items this week, nuf said for now about IBM and Sun.

Also this week, other activity included Cisco announcing that they are testing the waters to enter into the server market space to help jumpstart the converged networking space with some of my initial comments here and here. Check out StorageIO in the news page here for other comments on various IT industry trends, technologies and related activities including a recent piece by Drew Robb about The State of the Data Storage Job Market.

Lets see how this plays out with more to say later, thanks again for everyone who came out for last weeks as well as this weeks events, look forward to seeing and talking with you again soon I hope.

Cheers – gs

Technorati tags: Recession, Sustainability, Wall Street Journal, Data Center Bottlenecks, Performance, Capacity, Networking, Telephone, Data Center, Consolidation, Virtualization, VMware, Server, Storage, Software, Sun, IBM, Las Vegas, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Atlanta, CMG, AIG, Bernard Madoff, Cisco