Next Week, You Can Find Me at EMC World, Citrix Synergy

Next week will be an interesting week as I bounce between Citrix Synergy in Anaheim and EMC World in Las Vegas.

For those of you attending EMC World, without a doubt "Project liberty" without a doubt will steal the show. Projectd Liberty is EMC's first foray into software-defined storage. I am very excited about it and you'll find me hovering around "Area 52," the code name for the location where Project Liberty will be featured.

What is Project Liberty in plain terms? It's a virtualized-software-only VNX appliance that can be deployed on pretty much any kind of hardware, whether that hardware was purchased from EMC, a competitor or something customized from off-the-shelf hardware. 

I am sure one of you is thinking, "EMC already offers a VNX virtualized appliance, so what's the big deal?" The big deal is that the current offering is not production-ready and is meant for training purposes for the most part. Project Liberty will be fully production-ready on EMC as well as other hardware.

The great thing about this project is that it accelerates and simplifies cloud adoption. So, you will be able to deploy an instance of the VNX appliance in your preferred cloud and manage it just like you would your on-premises deployment. This enhances several cloud solutions, especially DRaaS.

There's more. You can deploy the VNX instance for point solutions like VDI. In the past, you had to acquire hardware and software from EMC or others. With Project Liberty, you'll be able to deploy the VNX appliance and leverage whatever hardware you want. This can also be deployed in remote offices where needed. The idea is to have the same software, and have centralized management of your storage environments whether it's on-premises locally, remotely or in the cloud. This approach will lend itself very well to private cloud deployments because it significantly facilitates automation and orchestration.

I am sure we will hear about integration with OpenStack and VMware vCloud at some point.

Let's switch focus to Citrix Synergy, where there's also a lot going on. I'll mainly be on the lookout primarily for XenApp 6.5 to 7.5 migrations, feature parity and feature releases. I'm also looking to get a sense for how Citrix will respond to VMware Horizon 6.

Also on my radar at Synergy is Citrix's public cloud strategy from a DaaS perspective in particular, but also what plans they have for CloudPlatform from an on-premises perspective and even more integration with the other Citrix products and suites.

Of course I cannot attend both conferences without finding that one vendor that will have some really cool technology to showcase, so I will definitely be on seeking them out.

I hope to see those of you that are attending either show out there. For those that can't make it, I promise to bring back as much relevant and interesting content as I can and to cover it in this blog. If there is anything in particular that you are expecting, hit me up in the comments section.

Posted by Elias Khnaser on 04/30/2014 at 3:18 PM