Just a quick post to share a rather cool video with you that covers an area that I have been involved with in the past year or so here at EMC … the EMC vLabs.  Fellow vGeek and all round top guy (also my boss, though in all honesty that doesn’t change my opinion of him) Chad Sakac takes you through a demonstration of the EMC vLab environment, which provides on-demand access to an extensive range of EMC’s products for EMC pre-sales and technical consultants along with EMC partners at level: Affiliate Elite and Signature.

The benefits of the EMC vLabs are that they provide fast and convenient hands-on time to EMC products that you would not always have access to.  This, as you can probably imagine, is fantastic for product familiarisation, training/up-skilling and for demonstration purposes.  Getting hands on time with software and kit is usually a common issue in most companies but by providing this on-demand vLab environment overcomes any of these limitations. Anyway, take a look at the first half of this video where Chad talks about and then demonstrates the EMC vLab environment, it sure has been fun to be part of.

As Chad mentions in the video, the EMC vLabs are run out of the “EMC Demo Cloud” which is located in Durham, NC (USA).  The backend infrastructure for the vLabs is running on VMware vSphere on top of VCE Vblock technology, which I’m pleased to report has proven to be a very sound platform from which to run it from, especially since the significant increase in demand for the vLabs that we’ve seen in the last 10-12 months.

Although the EMC vLabs may not be directly applicable to all of you out there I thought I’d mention Chad’s video as it provides an insight into one of the cool things myself (as part of the vSpecialist Technical Enablement Team) and the Demo Cloud Team have been working on internally which will no doubt provide real value to internal EMC’ers and partners.

Going forward we will continue to produce plenty of useful new hands-on vLab demo content for internal, partner and trade show use. 2012 will no doubt continue to be another productive year.