VCE is kicking off the year with a blow-out event planned for Cisco Live in London.  Having arrived on Sunday morning, the booth-building and setup was in full swing through Monday afternoon.

If you haven’t been to one of the major industry shows lately, VCE has really done a great job of putting together content and people that provide a lot of value.  For Cisco Live, in addition to all of the normal content (speaking sessions, breakout areas, partner visibility, etc…) we’ve also introduced a Hands-on-Lab area where attendees can get real stick time with the new version of UIM/P, one of the unique differentiators of the Vblock platform.

The people we bring to these shows are incredible.  Most of the field enablement team that I’m part of will be here, with Jae Ellers bringing the VDI, FastPath and Always-On love and Tom “Mr. Vblock” Chatham taking care of the infrastructure and making the magic happen on one of the coolest demos we’ve had in the booth (more on that later).  We also have Kenny Coleman and Aaron Delp from the M&O team, and Aaron is also giving one of the sessions, “Converged Infrastructure Platform Management and Orchestration with Cisco’s Intelligent Automation for Cloud” on Tuesday afternoon.  Trust me, folks, we don’t bring a marketing crew.  There won’t be anyone in the booth who can’t have a technical or business conversation with you about what we do and how we do it.

This event we’ll also be working with our EMC brethren to give everyone a live demo of the joint VCE/EMC Workload Mobility solution using VPLEX between two Vblocks on the floor of the show.  Active/active storage (not a stretched array cluster, but one fully redundant array on each side) being used to power a live VMware vSphere environment should be an interesting sight!

If you are at the show this week, stop by and say hi to the team!