I started at VMware on the vSAN team 4 years ago when we had 0 customers. It’s been a pretty wild and fun ride to get to 10,000 but we’ve only just begun. Customers are seeing the benefits of HCI and vSAN for all sorts of use cases including mission critical applications, management clusters, VDI, ROBO, DMZ, test/dev, DR Sites, and IaaS at IBM Bluemix (formerly SoftLayer) and soon at Amazon with VMware Cloud on AWS.
Unfortunately, we cannot fit all 10,000 customers in one breakout session at VMworld, but we can fit 4. I’m hosting a breakout session titled:
vSAN Technical Customer Panel [STO2615PU]
(Now that the session has happened, here is the video recording:)
I hosted a similar session last year with Stanley Black and Decker, Synergent Bank, M&T Bank, and Baystate Health and it was a lot of fun with some great audience participation. For more information check here.
This year we are fortunate to have Sanofi, Sekisui, Travelers, and Herbalife join the panel. The format is this:
- Introduce the Panel
- Panelists introduce their company, their VMware environment, and their use of vSAN
- Q&A – I will have some questions for the panel but we expect the audience questions to generate some great discussion.
Let’s meet the Panelists:
Joachim Heppner
Director, Virtualization Engineering Services
Sanofi
In 2016 this large pharma needed to refresh their Remote Office Branch Office (ROBO) sites. After a successful proof of concept, 2+ Node vSAN on HPE ProLiant Servers was chosen. Since then, vSAN has been deployed for management clusters and VDI in USA and EMEA as well as in 2 of their 13 regional data centers. Next, Cloud Foundation is being considered to replace their legacy Blade servers & Storage arrays.
Michael DiBenedetto
Director, Global IT
Sekisui Diagnostics
In early 2014 this mid-size pharma needed to build a DR site and chose a 4 Node vSphere cluster with vSAN enabled. They used vSphere Replication and SRM to test and automate DR. They also moved their test and development environment to this cluster. This year they are replacing their production data center with HCI and vSAN.
Alexander Szwez
Senior Systems Engineer
Travelers
vSAN was chosen to support production and test/dev Hadoop workloads. Two other vSAN clusters are used for new application workload POC’s. In addition, 2 Cloud Foundation configurations, each with a management cluster and a VM workload cluster are being implemented to prove how the built-in automation simplifies operations.
Jaime Gurrola
Worldwide Manager of Linux & VMWare
Herbalife International of America
In early 2014 this nutrition company wanted to modernize their data center by automating IT to simplify application access and management and transform Windows delivery. Today they run vSphere and vSAN and are evaluating NSX in multiple call centers to support 4000 Horizon VDI across 5 ROBO sites and their primary data centers for mission critical applications. They’ve achieved great cost savings resulting in significantly reduced TCO while delivering exceptional performance to their users.
I’m looking forward to seeing many great friends and to meet new ones at VMworld. I hope you can come and participate and enjoy this session with these great guests.
Live Virtually 