Well, the Leeds seminar (held by Logicalis) was quite fascinating, and beyond the four talks, I was able to talk to an IBM rep, an VMware rep and our Logicalis rep. Looking at the options we ($dayjob) have with regards our growing disk usage and soon-to-be growing server usage, the virtualisation path is looking more and more like the path we need to go down. The most mind blowing number mentioned was 400M USD – the amount saved by Cisco by virtualising their server and storage hardware over a 3-year period.

Off to Warwick in the middle of June to see some of the IBM offerings when it comes to blades, which should be fun. They’re just 1U servers put into a smaller space, but the space saving is a useful thing. Combined with say VMware’s Vmotion capabilities, and we could replace hardware in a matter of minutes (well, 30+) to upgrade or replace the hardware. Very very nifty.

VMware’s ability to deploy from templates also looked quite sweet.  If you’ve got a base OS image (or even complete), you’re looking at less than 30 minutes (they say) to roll out a new server.  Given the way $dayjob works, that could be very sweet, especially since they give you a SDK!