Takeaways from VMworld Solutions Exchange Floor
After four days of working the Infoblox booth at the VMworld Solutions Exchange this week in San Francisco, I wanted to share a few highlights and key takeaways I gathered from talking to hundreds of customers, prospects and partners.
– Growth in virtualization and cloud is enormous – Being a VMware-sponsored event, you would expect high penetration. But comparing the past 3 years I’ve worked the show, the growth in current use and expected plans has been exponential comparing year over year. Two years ago, basic server virtualization was widely deployed, but production environments of public/private/hybrid clouds were very small or still in lab environments. This year, both the size and the amount of deployments moved from lab to production has skyrocketed.
– Size doesn’t matter – Before the show, I had the perception bigger companies were doing more than smaller companies, but cloud and virtualization is rampant regardless of size. While bigger organizations may have more in terms of sheer volume and complexity compared to their smaller brethren, they also typically have larger teams and can have more specialized roles.
– IP Address Management still a major problem – I am still amazed at the percentage of people I spoke with that still use spreadsheets for managing IP addresses. Every time someone answered “Excel” when I asked how they are managing and allocating the IP address space, they also typically shook their head and added, “Yes, I know I shouldn’t but that’s what we do today.” And with the growth in servers, virtualization and over all number of IP-enabled devices, using spreadsheets is getting harder and harder.
– New virtual instances still take too long to implement – A common problem is a new instance needs an IP address and DNS record to work. The pain revolves around the fact the server team is responsible for the spin up, but the network team owns the IP address or DNS record. Too often, the manual processes, out-of-date spreadsheets and over worked staff can cause a “simple turn up” to take hours or days. This doesn’t even include the lack of clean up that occurs when the virtual instance is spun down.
I just wanted to share a few of the highlights from the show floor. I want to thank the prospects, customers and partners that stopped by the booth. Infoblox loves being a preferred partner with VMware and be sure to check out and see how our integration can help with workflow to reduce the pain associated with IP address provisioning and management.
-Matt Gowarty