January VMUG Meeting Recap

First off, many thanks to Data Domain for sponsoring an excellent event last night at Old Ebbitt Grill. The venue was fantastic and the acoustics were a bit more favorable than our first meeting. Seth Scharf and Steve Bergmann from Data Domain gave a presentation on data de-duplication and its powerful benefits in the data center. In speaking with a lot of those that attended, it seems like 2008 will be the year of conserving power and of conserving data, whether it be the data that’s backed up to tape or the data that’s replicated across the wire. I’m hoping to have a publicly available version of the Data Domain presentation in the next day or so and I’ll add it to this post for those that could not attend, or those that would like to see it again. It’s worth the read.

Also a big thanks goes out to Mike Szafranski from VMware who managed to line up John Norton to be our guest speaker for the evening. John is the Director of Operations at Avectra and gave a convincing ROI presentation that I’m sure many of us would like to poach for our own needs. It included hard numbers on data center cost savings by going to a virtual environment. My favorite [paraphrased] quote of the night came from John, “It would cost us $10k a month NOT to virtualize.” Pretty compelling stuff. Thanks again to John for his time and his real life experience.

As always, if anyone has feedback on how to improve the VMUG meetings, I’m all ears. We had a marked increase in attendance last night and I’m hoping we can continue to increase the size of the group. Thanks to newcomers like Daphne Gaither from Booz-Allen and George Park from CES for coming out to talk about their interest in virtualization technology. In an effort to include the major tech corridors of the DC Metro area, our next DC Metro VMUG meeting is tentatively booked for April 23rd and will be held in Reston, VA. Details forthcoming.

The main presentation from last night can be downloaded here:

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