Today was the second and final day of BriForum taking place in London, today’s main focus was the breakout sessions. Again I sat on a number of sessions and spent a lot of time catching up with VMware and other vendors in the main hall.
My best session was that by Ruben Spruijt for a second day, this time Ruben was joined by Login VSI, they jointly contribute to the site and whitepapers of Project VRC. They were presenting the initial findings of a year long piece of work to understand the impact of various anti virus software on VDI and SBC saturation. If you haven’t check out project VRC I highly recommend you do, those that have know that the analysis so far has concentrated on the saturation point of a HP DL360 G6 with various VDI and SBC workloads. The initial findings that were presented cover Trend, McAfee, Symantec and Microsoft Forefront, one of the biggest findings was the impact of not completing a full scan prior to rolling out your VDI desktops from the golden image, without this initial scan the saturation point of the server was near instant. The surprising winner at this time appears to be Microsoft Forefront with the least impact on the saturation point. Many including the presenters pointed out however this maybe inline with the features offered from the products and no comparison of features was carried out. They are currently completing this analysis and you should see the white paper on their site soon.
Another session I enjoyed was that of Nutanix, who were launching in EMEA today, as mentioned yesterday Nutanix is a building block approach to delivering compute and storage, the CEO Dheeray Pandey was presenting around the subject of big data and how their product takes from the learning’s of Google Approach by adding storage locally alongside compute. Their technology uses a number of new technologies to ensure the storage is highly available (Appearing as a NAS to vSphere) but ensuring the storage is kept local to the VM where possible. They do this not in a traditional VSA way but by using their controller VM on each host to directly interact with the local, Fusion IO, SSD and SATA storage using RDM’s and Direct Path IO. They went on to talk about their unique distributed metadata service medusa and distributed disk maintenance service curator to help allow them to scale but keep availability and performance at the forefront of the solution. I was also lucky enough to have a hands on demo with Rob Tribe the new Regional SE Manager EMEA , I was pleased to see that not only is Nutanics addressing a need particularly for VDI I have seen for some time but they are doing it with a very simple user interface. Watch my blog for a dedicated post on this subject as I dig further and get access to their lab.
The day was rounded off with Brian Madden thanking the attendees announcing that they were looking into doing a BriForum in Australia in November (To the surprise of Gabe and the TechTarget staff, as I understand its only in the investigation phase at present) A large number of attendees then went over to the Nutanix launch party at The Grand Union Bar where announcement’s were met with beer and food. It was good to catch up with fellow vExperts Darren Woollard And Greg Robertson as well as chatting with Brian Madden about everything other than work including Gin and Curry amongst other things.
All in all I have had a very good couple of days, picked up some good tips, made some good contacts and caught up with some familiar faces, I’m looking forward to watching the sessions I was unable to attend. All I would hope for the next year is that the vendor sessions could be tweaked, I know these guys sponsored the event but a number of the vendor sponsored sessions were over an hour of a sales presentation rather than the subject that was in the show guides.
If you get the chance to go there is another BriForum in July in Chicago and Brian suggested that they would be back in London again next year.
Resources
Virtualised Reality 