Grasshopper,
Thank you for your kind words and I make it a point to try and never tear anyone’s head off, (besides the mess) it’s entirely counterproductive.
That is a very good presentation, I wish I could have been there (Slide 30 & 31 anyone?). And agreed, I think most institutionalized companies still think in terms of these huge, monolithic deployments. If you’re not spending a million plus on hardware it must not be enterprise quality gear. The point often missed (as that presentation points out) is you don't need all the 9's in the hardware if you put them in the application and topology, and application and distributed topology 9's are exponentially less expensive than hardware 9's.
We are one such company that desperately needs to change our architectural model if for no other reason than trying to keep up the phrase of the day, “Big Data”. I recently added over 230 drives to one of our SANs because one of our customer facing SQL DBs just crossed the 7TB mark, and this SAN is just over a year old. We can’t continue to sustain this growth under our current hardware infrastructure (slide 13 - we’re the basket on the right). We need to move to a more distributed model and I would love it to be based on ESXi running on a lot of less expensive hardware across multiple locations vs. two locations with huge blade centers & SANs! Throw-away whiteboxes with zero hardware support contracts for all! The savings of the 24x7x365 hardware service contracts alone is more than enough to finance a third location running clones. Oh, and incase someone from sales is reading, the money saved on hardware and hardware support contracts would go to you. Wait, you voted to cripple the software, never mind.
But alas, one can only dream at this point. I think VM will ultimately have no choice but to acknowledge and embrace this trend, the real question is will they do it in time? Hopefully someone in sales & management will take slide 30 to heart and really do something about it.
The bottom line is very clear, no one can catch VMWare unless VM lets them, period. If someone does it won’t be because of a superior product either, it will be superior listening and timely response to the customer/user community followed closely by marketing and management. Sad, but true.
Cheers,
Rockingly