The VMworld 2010 general session on Thursday, September 2, gets kicked off by pictures of the party last night and opening remarks by Rick Jackson around innovation and the definition of innovation. It was nice to see VMware “tip their hat” to IBM for the creation of virtualization.
The first guest speaker to come up and discuss innovation is Pranav Mistry, who spends some time discussing some of the various next-generation interfaces that he’s created and worked with—things like a virtual mouse, a pen that allows designers to draw on the screen, or a paper interface to computing devices. His ultimate goal is to integrate digital information into the real world. He wants to stop having different interactions with digital and physical and have only a single set of interactions. He shows off a few very interesting demonstrations of an experimental project that involves a device integrating a small projector, a camera, and devices that track hand movement to integrate digital information into the real world. It’s pretty interesting and shows off some exciting integrations that lie ahead.
The next guest is Natan Linder, an Intel fellow and member of the MIT Media Lab. He focuses his discussion around adding I/O to the real world and creating new interfaces. The key project is the LuminAR, which is a robotic lamp that provides a natural interface to the digital world. It’s a pretty interesting project that “breaks pixels free of the screen” and allows you to interact with the digital world wherever an whenever you need. The project is different from Pranav’s in that Natan’s project is focused around augmented reality; Pranav’s work focuses on removing the barriers between digital and physical.
The third and final speaker is Tan Lee, founder of Emotiv Systems, who focuses on a new remote control that uses brain waves to control digital devices. Emotiv is working on “brain computer interface technology”. After discussing what Emotiv has been working on, she invites Steve Herrod, CTO of VMware, who will help demonstrate the Emotiv technology in action. Tan walks Steve through some training actions, and then demonstrates how the system actually works. The demonstration is very impressive, and truly does look like some sort of science fiction technology. It’s quite amazing.
At the completion of Tan’s demonstration, all three speakers join Rick Jackson on the screen for a brief panel discussion.
After the panel discussion concludes, Rick Jackson finally answers the question: what do the Golden Tickets mean? Each Golden Ticket holder will receive their own Emotiv headset. Awesome!
Tags: Virtualization, VMware, VMworld2010
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Hi Scott,
I saw you wrote I had attend the Cisco UCS training before in your blog, so can you remember the name of training institution, how to contact them?
If can, could you pls mail the info to my email (leon3020@gmail.com)? -
I was pretty let down with your class entitled “Virtual Storage and VMware vSphere: Best Practices and Design Considerations”. I didn’t see EMC anywhere in the name of the class or description, but it seemed to be only discussing EMC storage and vPLEX/metro architecture/design for the first 20 minutes. There was nothing at all vendor agnostic, so many of us left.
EMC has the highest percentage of market share in mid tier storage, but that is still a hair less than 25%, leaving a lot of your audience wondering why they were there. Now I don’t blame you or EMC for having a class like this, but please be honest in the class descriptions next year.
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Leon,
It was a partner-only training event hosted by Cisco directly, so I’m afraid I can’t really help here. Good luck!
Carl,
I’m sorry that you had the wrong impression. The session was submitted to VMworld as an EMC-specific session and was always positioned as an EMC-specific session. It was never positioned as a vendor-agnostic session, so I’m not sure how that belief got started.
Now, having said that, a number of the design considerations I mentioned—and I stated this in the session a number of times—also apply to *any* storage that offers stretched clustering functionality, meaning those recommendations are, in fact, vendor-agnostic.
Best of luck to you!
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Hey Scott,
Thanks for the updates all week. I was there, but spent most of my time standing in lines waiting to stand in other lines or leaving a session early to go stand in a line.
To some degree I can agree with agree with Leon – some of the sessions seemed a lot like hour long infomercials without the cheap pricing at the end. VMware puts little squares/triangles/circles, etc… next to it to delineate if its a partner-only training or whatnot. Most people don’t see these or look them up.
I still don’t know what exactly makes up a ‘super session’.
I think it may have to do with the titles of the sessions – they don’t (usually) say that a class is specific to the 1000v or the NetApp, or the UCS, etc… they usually title the session using words like ‘networking best practices’, or ‘storage hints and tricks’, etc…
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Sketch,
The lines were pretty long, that’s for sure!
As for the comment regarding sessions and “infomercials,” I tried as much as possible to focus not on VPLEX per se but rather to discuss vSphere design considerations. In addition, as I mentioned above, I noted that these considerations often apply to *any* storage solution offering stretched clustering. In the end, though, it was an EMC-specific session. I’m sorry that people had the wrong impression. I’ll do my best to avoid vague and ambiguous titles in the future, if that will help.
Thanks!
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Scott,
I’m sorry – I wasn’t referring to YOUR parts on the program. I was talking in general (Also, I’m biased since we’re an EMC shop, anyway). my comment was aimed more at VMworld and the the folks that put it together. If the session is in fact a ‘partner-only’ session, then I would expect it to be vendor specific. VMworld just didn’t do a very good job in making that known – the same problem last time I went in 2008.
This was my first time in SF, and I guess I was spoiled in Vegas. I expected so much more from the conference this year. I was lucky if i made 2 full sessions a day. If they had 17,000 people there on a down economic year, it looks like they will have to split it into 2 VMworlds (East & West) or something that will make things more palatable. thank goodness the slides will be put online for us… Any idea when that will be?
Thanks again for the hard work, public speaking and all.
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Hey Scott,
I looked in the course book and it clearly says “on EMC storage”. I also looked on the vmworld scheduling app as well and it mentioned it as well. Please disregard, my bad
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Disclosure EMCer here – The key thing that I would add to the comments, the content in Scott’s session (I was looking through it) was actually pretty generally applicable to a topic that is coming up more and more – geographically dispersed vSphere clusters.
Most customers like the idea, but don’t think through the VM HA considerations, the partition (either side losing connectivity with the other) behavior, or the effects of single vCenter on DR. The part that was VPLEX-specific was it’s exact storage behavior on partition (IO suspension) which is material (it affects VM HA behavior).
In future vSphere releases (particularly as these geo-dispersed storage models become more widespread) this topic will become more and more material.
Just my (admittedly biased) 2 cents.
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