May I

It's May - which means that global IT flocks to Vegas for their spring pow-wow's. Starting this week is EMC with IBM next week and others to follow.
So for today, let me focus on the most recent EMC announcements and give you a couple hints on where to find the details.

First, read an overview and summary of the Day 1 announcements here and here!
One of the more exciting - but less visible news seems to be the vVNX (read: virtual VNX or software-only entry storage) offer which shows up in the EMC store - check it out here!

A slightly older post by EMC president Jeremy Burton from two weeks ago also helps to position and understand the strategy behind these announcements as well as his take on how and when last year's DSSD acquisition ("..an insane server-attached flash thing..") will start to be visible in products.

Big news also on the VCE side of the EMC federation: they use the EMCworld platform to make noise about the VxRack (based on VMware EVO:Rack) solution to be shipped around Q3 this year.
Read the overview here and some insights by VCE CTO Trey Layton here.
Lastly, for an understanding what's under the hood in terms of VMware technology, you'll have to scroll back to this VMworld blog entry from last year by VMware Fellow Raj Yavatkar here.

Now wait, before we all get too excited about this, let's put this into perspective: "...Thus hyper-convergence is a special class of server SANs where VM workloads run alongside the storage workloads. It was conceived of to be cheaper, denser and more appealing than legacy convergence. Data centre convergence is a special class of hyper-convergence."
And lastly, there is (always) the issue of pricing, as is outlined here.