We caught up with Gordon Haff, Red Hat’s Cloud Evangelist, on the floor of VMworld last week and grabbed a short interview with him. In the discussion, we touch upon what the cloud really is, and where it makes the most sense in terms of enterprise use.

To round out our visits with the major hardware vendors, we stopped by Hewlett-Packard’s booth. We had our new pal Steven give us a walk-through on their newest big x86 iron – an eight-socket monster (64 cores total max). The system is composed of two 4-socket chassis, each of which sports up to 64 DIMM slots – meaning that filled up, you can get 2TB of RAM to go with your 64 cores of processing.

The next stop on our tour of hardware vendors was the Dell booth. We talked to a good guy named Matthew who gave us a look at their latest server. He tried his best to stay on script, while I tried my best to take him off of it. He walked us through their latest tech stuff and talked up the merits of their modular design.

While wandering the floor at the recently concluded VMworld 2010, we stopped by the IBM booth to take a look at their wares. We ran into an old pal of ours, Bob Zuber, and he walked us through their MAX 5 memory extension feature.

VMware is taking some big steps in the security and network management arena with their vShield product set. I sat in on a deepish dive into the somewhat new security products being offered by VMware to deliver on the ‘secure’ part of their “Secure Hybrid Cloud” initiative.

The speakers went through each of the three offerings, along with outlining VMware’s security philosophy, at a very brisk pace. VMware hasn’t yet provided the slide sets from the presentations, so I’m left with my cryptic and sometimes indecipherable notes. (I hate it when my fingers land at the wrong place on the keyboard. It results in sentences like this: “85 43wuo5w 8h w3n53w3w lik3 5hiw.’)

In terms of messages around VMware’s security offerings, I took away the following broad points:

One of our first meetings at VMworld was with BlueLock, who have the distinction of being one of a small handful of cloud service providers participating in VMware’s big vCloud Datacenter initiative. We spent a bit of time grilling Pat O’Day, BlueLock CTO, in their booth and learned some new things about the cloud value proposition.

Full disclosure: I’m underwhelmed by the cloud concept. To me, private clouds are the cat’s ass (meaning: good), but they aren’t a mystery – they’re just a combination of sophisticated and robust virtualization with IT best practices.

GCG staff were summarily kicked out of the VMworld press and analyst area this morning. Our crime? Trying to have a short meeting with an industry contact while sitting inside the cordoned-off analyst/press corral. Last year, and in years past, we routinely took briefings in this area with no trouble.

The problem was that our contact didn’t have a press/analyst badge, and he was sitting on the forbidden side of the divide. I proposed a workable solution – moving the table a couple of feet so that his chair would be on the other side of the rope barrier, while we sat legally inside the designated area. That wasn’t acceptable. I guess it violated the spirit and sanctity of the press/analyst area.

Here’s another “How HPC saves your worthless hide” type of story that comes along every once in a while. Our pals at InsideHPC publicized a collaboration between the Federal Aviation Administration and the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) that should increase air safety for people riding on planes and for the people standing around underneath them.

ScaleMP made some HPC news lately by announcing that the Bielefeld University Physics Department has selected ScaleMP’s vSMP Foundation software. This comes on the heels of another announcement, a few days earlier, that the University of Florida’s Interdisciplinary Center for Biotechnology Research made the same decision. Both of these organizations will be using ScaleMP’s software to aggregate large amounts of memory that sit on distributed systems into a single, very large, memory space.

The Large Hadron Collider has been operating for a few months now, and it hasn’t ripped apart the space/time continuum – not where I live, anyway, and that’s mostly all I care about. Of course, it could be that it’s still early, and that the cumulative effects of accelerating particles really fast could still spell the end of – well – everything. Until that happens, the LHC is generating enough data to keep scientists busy from now ‘till doomsday (unless doomsday is in the next couple of years).