Did you recently do a Google search for cloud computing or virtualization? ‘virtualization' (together with the British English version of ‘virtualisation') brings up more than 16.000.000 results, and ‘cloud computing' is even higher with more than 31.000.000 hits. Wow - that must be a hype :-).
Being now for more than fifteen years in the SAP business and being happy and proud to work on virtualization during the last seven I am excited that meanwhile more and more SAP customers take advantage of these great technologies, be it for development and test systems or be it even for productive usage. But the number of SAP systems running in a virtualized X86 environment (e.g. on VMware's vSphere or Microsoft's Hyper-V) is still not that high, compared to the total number of installations of our more than 92.000 customers. What is the reason for this?
Well, very often customers tell me that they don't virtualize SAP landscapes because of lack of knowledge how to do it correctly, so to get the best benefit, lowest TCO and highest ROI at the end of the day. There is a strong need for best practices, to hear from other customers and SAP and his partners how to deploy a virtualized SAP installation, how to arrange the application instances on the pool of virtual machines, how many cores or virtual CPUs should be used, how much virtual memory, etc.
Besides many good information sources like the virtualization pages here on SCN (
http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/virtualization), white papers written by SAP and partners or our notes on the SAP Service Marketplace there is one thing, one event - to be exact - every year which brings together everyone being an expert around SAP and cloud computing and virtualization; all SAP colleagues working on virtualization in development, solution management, ecosystem, consulting etc.; all partners of our virtualization ecosystem like VMware, Microsoft, Intel, NetApp, Citrix, ... just to name a few; and last but not least the best information source of all: our customers, the ones already having experience with virtualized SAP environment and the ones being eager to learn about it.
‘Which event is this I don't want to miss' you ask?
Well, I am talking about the SAP Virtualization Week.
We started the event series of the SAP Virtualization Week in April 2007 with 150 guests at the Co-Innovation Lab at SAP Labs in Palo Alto. Last year in 2009 we could welcome almost 400 guests, onsite and online using virtual event technology. (An interesting fact from last year's event: one of our event campaigns on Facebook reached 3.2 million impressions).
Today I am very happy and excited to write here on SCN that
the fourth SAP Virtualization Week will take place during the week of April 12, 2010 at SAP Labs Palo Alto.
The final agenda will be published soon; in general we will have a partner day on Monday, April 12, and then three exiting days on April 13-15 with lots of sessions and great content presented by customers, partners and SAP; and of course (I've been told by our alumni that that's priceless): networking, networking, networking. You really have all experts in one place.
A training day on Friday, April 16, will close the event. (If you want to see last year's event agenda and content don't hesitate to go
http://www.sapvirtualizationweek2009.com/.)
Sounds exciting, doesn't it? Don't miss it!
Now let's talk about the main reason for me writing this blog:
the call for papers process. It starts today!
We plan to run three different tracks at the event:
- Cloud Computing
- Virtualization
- Green IT
So, if you are
- a customer being interested to talk about your experience/strategy/ideas around these topics to other customers and partners,
- a partner being eager to tell the latest information about your products,
- an analyst talking about market trends and opportunities,
- an SAP employee being involved in development, product management, consulting, partner management, etc. around cloud computing, virtualization or Green IT, or
- a community member just having a great story to talk about
please don't hesitate to submit your session proposal via
http://www.sapvweek.com/
The deadline of the call-for-papers process is on January 31, 2010. I know this gives you only two weeks, but looking back at the last years I know that this won't be a problem. The virtualization ecosystem is a super active one, I am confident that we will get many good proposals during the next sixteen days.
The registration process will start soon as well. As we have a limited number of onsite seats available (they go quickly!) I encourage you today to save the date (April 12-16, 2010) and to follow us on Twitter (
http://www.twitter.com/sapvweek; hashtag #sapvw), so you won't miss the registration process and any other important information.
That's all for today. We have 86 days to go until April12, and I am looking forward to meeting many of you at the SAP Virtualization Week 2010.
Best regards,
Roland
