There are nine cities down and two more to go for my 2014 Truth in IT seminar series, “The Truth About Virtualization.” As I wrap things up in Miami and Tampa, I’ll be looking forward to my 2014 schedule, which takes me to fifteen cities and sees a shift back to storage.
Florida in December? Not Bad!
Let me start off by inviting you to attend my seminars in Miami and Tampa, Florida. These will be held December 10 and 12, and all end users are invited to attend free of charge. Just hop over to the Truth in IT site to register!
- Miami, Tuesday December 10, 20131 Register now!
- Tampa, Thursday December 12, 2013 Register now!
These dates wrap up my 2014 content, which focused on virtualization, including a dive into storage and servers, VDI, and the cloud.
Audience response has been incredibly strong. Most attendees tell me they wish they knew ahead of time how good the session was! This is my goal: To make it entertaining and informative enough for busy IT pros to take a day out of their schedule to attend. Many use vacation days or forego pay to attend for the day, and I sincerely appreciate their participation!
The Truth About Virtualization
If I had to sum up my stance on the state of virtualization in 2014 it is this: The IT industry is changing dramatically, with server virtualization becoming a standard datacenter component and VMware and Microsoft leading that charge. There’s no denying the impact of the hypervisor on the modern datacenter, and companies new and old are rushing to bring virtualization-specific products to market.
Rather than just consolidating physical servers, virtualization is enabling critical IT capabilities including high availability and disaster recovery. At the same time, server virtualization is altering the product mix in the modern datacenter: Virtual shops are moving to simple “hyperscale” servers rather than complex and expensive rack and blade servers and are beginning to investigate radically-converged solutions that mingle server and storage in the same box. Flash memory has become a key component as well, and companies are finally beginning to offer intelligent, integrated solid state storage rather than just throwing SSD’s at the problem.
Yet just as the enterprise datacenter gets virtualized, cloud computing is about to take root. The next wave of applications will use cloud platforms rather than running “bare” on conventional operating systems. Microsoft is a key player in this market as well, with Azure emerging as the default platform for enterprise apps. Although IT pros are worried about public cloud, they seem much happier to accept “cloud as platform” in their own data centers.
Stephen’s Stance
This is the truth about virtualization: Everything has changed, with server virtualization becoming the key infrastructure component for modern data centers. But everything is about to change again, as cloud platforms become another key element, alongside virtualized open systems servers and mainframes.
I hope to see you in Miami or Tampa, and please join me for Truth in Storage: The Next Generation, coming to a city near you in 2014!