Today kicked off the US VMworld 2014 conference in San Francisco and it was pretty exciting. The first of two VAPP1428 sessions took place this afternoon where I had an opportunity to talk about the exciting work I have been doing the last year at Adobe to build out a Hadoop-as-a-Service offering. It was a great talk and Andrew Nelson was an awesome co-presenter who offered great insight into what VMware is doing in the virtual Hadoop space.
A few hours later, I was fortunate to have an opportunity to sit on a panel with several other distinguished guests to talk about best practices around Hadoop and Big Data in a virtualized environment. In that session we were able to share our insights into the decisions that each of made for our organizations and the successes we have seen in the space utilizing not only VMware but also understanding Hadoop for our individual workloads.
It was great to hear Chris from FedEx talk about how they too are utilizing the EMC Isilon HDFS plugin to offer out a unified HDFS layer to the virtual environment for Big Data Extensions to build compute clusters. We have been able to do some great work with EMC the past few months — details to be provided in a future post — around how using the Isilon storage that is already within our data centers will allow us to offer a robust storage layer to our Hadoop clusters.
All in all, it was a great first day of the conference. There were many exciting announcements made during the keynote, not the least of which was the partnership VMware now has with both Docker and OpenStack. There are a lot of exciting things happening in that space and as I look to the future it is pretty awesome.
A big shout out to all the individuals who came and asked questions. It is my hope that everyone who attended walked away with at least one positive takeaway. If you have any additional questions, please reach out to me on Twitter (@chrismutchler) or through email.
