TheCube Beyond Storage Virtualization Spotlight at VMWorld 2011, part 4 of today’s session, included Wikibon’s Dave Vellante as the moderator, along with Wikibon CTO and Senior Analyst David Floyer, Hewlett-Packard’s Marc Farley and Steve Kenniston of IBM (full video below–see parts 1-2 here, and part 3 here).

David kicked off the discussion by saying that the title virtualization architect is going to expand to encompass other areas as well in the near term.

“The most important person in datacenter is going to be the virtualization architect. He is going to be the center of storage going forward for the next few years. Storage administration is going to get absorbed into that layer of management, and the decisions in that area are going to be made more from a system point of view than the traditional storage point of view.”

From here on the conversation shifted to storage innovation, and the role of the cloud service provider. Farley said he thinks SSDs and flash are among the biggest disruptors we’re seeing right now, and Kenniston added that the simplification of the stack is leading to lines blurring, and networking/system/server administration collapsing into one role. Storage innovation is now enabling cloud services to do what wasn’t possible 10 years ago without multitenancy, and security plays just as big of a role as the latter these days.  The ‘true’ cloud service provider is making a comeback.

Kenniston highlighted that cost-efficient innovation is another big trend – companies are looking to extract the highest value out of their data, and out of their storage. He noted that this was also one of the most interesting things he noticed at this year’s conference.  In turn, Floyer mentioned the upcoming concept of putting all the datasets under one VM, and Farley pointed at Cisco’s new Virtual Extensible LAN protocol. Dave Vellante interviewed Soni Jiadani, SVP at Cisco about the product launch.


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