Live blog…as always, I don’t necessarily expect new content in a keynote but do always find it interesting what EMC chooses to focus on whey have a huge audience (12,00 onsite 

Jonathan Martin – Chief Marketing Officer – taking the stage. 2,761 people have done the Water Walk to raise money for charity.

Now discussing the Hybrid cloud challenge – if it will be done by this afternoon.

Area 53 this afternoon – Jon Landau (producer of Avatar) will be there. Sneak peek of Avatar behind the scenes footage from next movie.

Now more “Game of IT” videos.

Gelsinger on stage…

• First time he was at EMC World he was a silicon guy.
• Let’s look back at 1989 – huge shifts – year of Berlin Wall coming down, dismantling apartheid in South America, earthquake in LA
• DEC was at its peak – #2 tech company in the world. 125,000 employees. On track to displace IBM.
• Gelsinger wrote paper predicting death of minicomputer and mainframe – was right on minicomputer, eventually right on mainframe.
• Ken Olsen, CEO of DEC – “The PC will fall flat on its face in business.” 
• Two paths forward – hardware-defined or software-defined.

More after the jump…

• 3 strategic priorities – 1) Software-Defined DataCenter, 2) Hybrid Cloud, 3) End User Computing (won’t be able to cover this one much today).
• SDDC – Compute, Network, Storage, Management – starting with Storage
• 25-30 years ago – it was all DAS – see screenshot of evolution (will add later).
• Pulling the control plane out of the storage – this is really just a recap of general Software Defined Storage strategy.
• VSAN Adoption – 12,000+ Beta Participants.
• Building a storage array is like singing the blues – have to hurt for a while to get it right.
• vVols – extending the policy layer for the VM directly into the external array. In a perfect world VMware should have delivered vVols before vSAN
• <brief customer sidebar for 10 minutes unfortunately>
• Defining challenge of mobile-cloud era is response time to the business – balanacing speed and agility with control and efficiency.
• Hybrid cloud – where’s the growth?
• On-premise/private cloud = 4% growth in 2013-2017 but $2 trillion in spend.
• Off-premise/private cloud = 50% + growth but only $44 billion in spend.
• 70% of spend by 2020 is still predicted to be on-premise.
• vCHS = 7x storage performance of Amazon.
• Last announcement = Pivotal CloudFoundry available on vCHS – last year announced CloudFoundry w/vSphere, now on vCHS
• First hybrid PaaS layer available in the industry.
• Early access available today.
• 3 Tectonic shifts – 1) move from client/server computing to mobile cloud era, 2) future of IT is software-defined, 3) Hybrid-cloud world (on-prem won’t go away for years).

Maritz on stage

• Threats are opportunities, opportunities are threats.
• Pivotal = intersection of Apps, Analytics, and Data at huge scale.
• GE made investment in Pivotal – because GE is playing in the “Internet of Things”
• Apologies for not doing much live bloggin on this Pivotal section – John Troyer stopped by so I ended up talking with him for a while about his new ventures.
• I like to think that John Troyer leaving VMware is like unleashing a “Weapon of Mass Creation” into the social landscape.