Originally posted by: TonyPearson

The day included presentations done at a conference call, along with exhibition booths.

We had an exhibition booth exclusively for "storage virtualization" featuring our IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (disk virtualization) and IBM System Storage TS7520 Virtualization Engine (a virtual tape library, or VTL).

People who were logged in were represented in silhouette form. When someone walked into the booth, our army of "booth reps" were able to chat with them and answer their questions. They could also peruse the various online materials we made available about each product.

Here are some of my observations:

• A lot of questions were related to IBM's support for VMware. Although VMware is now currently owned by EMC, pending a spin-off IPO, IBM is its biggest reseller, given IBM's vast experience in server virtualization. Ironically, IBM's SAN Volume Controller supports VMware better than EMC's own storage virtualization product, Invista.
• This was a good opportunity to discuss all the other forms of server virtualization available, such as Xen, Microsoft Virtual Server, Advanced POWER virtualization inside our System p server line,and running thousands of virtual servers on our System z mainframe machines.
• People also familiar with Second Life thought this 2-D "silhouette" version eliminated the need to configure and dress up your avatar as is required in participating in Second Life events. However, being only ableto chat, send e-mail and show web pages seemed less immersive than what Second Life can offer.
• This event generated over 60 leads. We will pass on the contact information to the appropriate sales team.

technorati tags: IBM, SAN Volume Controller, SVC, TS7520, VTL, disk, system, virtualization, tape, library, EMC, Invista, VMware, SecondLife, Xen, Microsoft, Virtual Server, mainframe, silhouette, IPO