By Ian Selway

Day 1 at Microsoft TechEd EMEA and it's nearly 4 PM and the keynote is just about to start.... Which is a pity as I have to leave for the airport for a one day visit to the UK. The HP booth seemed to be far and away the busiest of all the vendors attending, and the new HP booth branding is superb... great kudos to the EMEA team for such an outstanding job of setup. The event is fully booked with over 7,500 attendees and it felt like a good number of those attending came and visited us today......

So far the outstanding impressions from Day 1 has been the level of activity on the HP booth, and the interest level around power and power management during the HP breakout session on 'best practices for implementing Windows Server 2008 R2 on HP servers'.  Included in that track was a really great demonstration of migrating a hundred plus mailboxes on one Exchange Server 2010 to another server in a remote data center. What was amazing was that it had zero impact on the users who could still access their mail system while the Live Migration was taking place. This is a great proof point for the integration of HP StorageWorks with Microsoft Server 2008 R2. The most asked about piece of storage on the booth was definitely our HP LeftHand P4000 SAN Solutions. I met with one European medical university running 300TB+ of LeftHand storage.... Many of the customers wanted to understand what features we have with LeftHand integrated with Live Migration, and were glad to see how we have integrated Cluster Migration to enable the moving of storage from virtual machines in one cluster to another. The other capability they liked was the disaster recovery functionality of the multi-site SAN capability. So whilst I leave for the airport, the rest of the booth staff is off (along with another 100,000 or so visitors) to see Bon Jovi play at the Brandenburg Gate... Wonder if Bon Jovi will mention HP storage...LOL!

There's a great buzz here and it really seems like the IT business is on the uptick with lots of customers talking about buying this year. More from TechEd later this week.....