I've really enjoyed watching the VMware IPO, and seeing all of EMC's traditional (and newer) competitors pile in to the VMware opportunity.
It's also even more fun to watch them try to pitch their old wares into the new world without having some basic understanding about how things fundamentally change when you really look at what server virtualization does to your infrastructure.
Is it that they haven't figured it out yet? Or, maybe they're suspecting that it's a bit different, but haven't fully grasped the full implications just yet ...
Sorry, there's no way I can avoid getting a bit sarcastic in this post, so my apologies in advance. I'm in therapy about this issue, but it isn't working well ...
Today, I'm going to offer a few insights to my brethren in the storage and infrastructure industry with a few examples on how some things change once you really understand what's going on here.
Those of you in the biz, you may want to drop a note to your marketing department that's churning out PDFs and webcasts to hold up a just a bit until you figure out how you want to handle some of these issues.
Otherwise you're going to have to answer some pretty hard questions.
Consider this a preview of the server virtualization pop quiz for 2008.