By Ian Selway, Worldwide HP StorageWorks Solution Manager

I've just arrived back from London and I'm looking forward to Day 3 at Microsoft TechEd Berlin. Today we've supported Microsoft in their exhibition area, manning a partner kiosk and demonstrating our LeftHand and EVA integrations with Microsoft Server 2008 R2. We had Matthias Popp from our SSI team present on this integration during Microsoft's Multi-Site Clustering with Windows Server 2008 R2. It was a full session with over 300 delegates in the room, and a further 120 or so who couldn't get in. Matthias received a large ovation after his presentation, and a good deal of the Q&A at the end focused on what we could do with LeftHand and EVA and Microsoft Live Migration. As with previous days, traffic in the exhibition halls was very busy and there was lots of interest especially in our MDS600 tear down unit.  I spoke with one customer from the UK who wants to take the unit home as he has an immediate demand for this type of JBOD unit to provide him lower cost bulk storage for his Exchange users and to archive off his SAP database. The way he sees it, he has a 400GB SAP database and he's more than happy to give them a 1TB SATA drive in the MDS600, and let them have as much space as they want. He also salivates at the thought of offering his mail users 5, 10 or even 20GB mailboxes because of the bulk storage he'd have with the MDS 600.

Another customer we met with today is a large Swiss company who are about to run a proof of concept with Server 2008 R2 and was pleasantly surprised with the Live Migration capabilities of EVA with CA/CLX. It bodes well for the testing and they should make a great reference customer for us, if they deploy as planned. The Microsoft virtualization marketing team were really happy with our support of their partner kiosk, and we spent time with them exploring where we could work together in future engineering and marketing activities to further promote our abilities together.

Tonight is a customer appreciation event in partnership with Brocade  and AMD. It promises to be a great evening and apparently there's an all female brass band called the Venus party band so if you can read German you're welcome to explore what we're in for. More from TechEd day 4 tomorrow.......

(Editor's note: I'm leaving on vacation tomorrow morning; Ian's Day 4 post up may not happen until I return.)