I’m sitting in a car on the way to San Francisco airport to catch a plane back home to Cincinnati.  For the past several days I’ve had the pleasure of being a part Storage Field Day 7. SFD is an independent event bringing community influences together with vendors to discuss technology solutions and provide open and honest feedback.  It’s a great even to connect with other community members, discuss challenges and solutions, and create content for the community benefit – all of which I’m a supporter of. Since this was my first time going I was surprised at how different it is from watching the feeds and video, especially for someone who doesn’t do a lot of public presentations. I didn’t anticipate how difficult it would be to find time to ask a question.  Growing up in my house it was a huge “no no” to interrupt someone while speaking, but the limited amount of time atRead More →

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As I posted here and here I am attending Storage Field Day 7 as a delegate, which is going on right now in San Jose, California. We had no presentations today; instead it was more about getting to know the other delegates and having a room time. After a day of travel some social interaction was welcome and the SFD7 crew did not disappoint.   A quick informal lunch turned into a 3-hour discussion about the industry and challenges we’ve all faced. The entire crew piled into transportation to head to dinner. What happened next set the tone for the evening. Stephen welcomed the new delegates by starting a starburst throwing war. Apparently throwing things isn’t always frowned upon! Dinner was southern Indian food at the Zagat rated Dasaprakash. The food was tasty and different than the Americanized Indian food I’m used to. We also had a Yankee Gift Swap. The idea is everyone brings a wrapped gift containing aRead More →

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In: Tech Field Day

Next week I will be attending, for the first time, Storage Field Day in San Jose! I’ve been a fan of all the previous SFD events hosted by Stephen and his team at Tech Field Day, so I’m very excited to be a delegate.   It’s a chance to connect with some familiar faces and meet a few new friends while discussing the latest in storage technology.  I have met several delegates and engaged with many of the other delegates on social media, and can’t wait to sit down with them and talk in more than 140 characters. Arjan Timmerman has written up a very nice round up of the entire delegate crew. I’ve had a chance to meet Christopher Kusek at VMworld last year, and it turns out we may have met at a small conference in the 90s as well! He has given me some excellent advice in dealing with vendors during deal negotiations.  He’s seriously one of the funniestRead More →

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In: Tech Field Day

It’s odd to think that 2014 has been over for two months.  It seems like it was gone in the blink of an eye.  One of the surprises in early 2014, for me, was my induction into the EMC Elect program.  Being recognized as a community influence led to my recommitment to becoming active in the community.  I think I did a fairly decent job, especially in the first half of the year.  Here we are in 2015 and I’ve been included in the EMC Elect 2015 class as well!   The EMC Elect Program was created to recognized support of the EMC technical community. From involvement in events, participation in beta programs, and access to technical resources EMC has been ever active with the Elect community.  I am honored to have been named a member of the EMC Elect program for the second year in a row.  This year the program has 101 people, which is justRead More →

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In: Speaking

In just a few weeks Tech Field Day will be hosting it’s 7th Storage Field Day with a nice list of sponsors and presenters including a new secret company.  I’m excited to be a TFD delegate and join with some friends to listen, learn, and share my experience.   If you don’t already know the folks over at Tech Field Day host a bunch of events like this focusing on different areas. Brining innovative vendors together with free thinkers in the field to discuss technology and the industry leads to some top notch content.   I look forward to sharing and learning at SFD7 and beyond with the community!Read More →

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In: Tech Field Day
VSPEX BLUE

The modern IT infrastructure is has become far more demanding that ever before. To meet that rising demand we have learned to be experts at “knob turning” to ensure peek performance.  We have implemented high performance, but rigid, systems in our attempt to keep up with the growing demand for great efficiency and agility.  All this effort we have exerted to turn complex rigid silos of compute and storage appear as a single optimized solution comes as a cost – lost time that could be spent in IT transformation.  The lack of simplicity can be countered by the use of Converged Infrastructure.   Until now EMC has been walking the edge of the infrastructure convergences market with its VSPEX reference architectures and it’s partnership with VCE. It has not, until now, offered it’s own converged infrastructure solution. Today EMC has announced its EVO:RAIL offering dubbed VXPEX BLUE.  With this all-in-one Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Appliance EMC is hoping toRead More →

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In: Converged, EMCWorld

It’s almost time for my first departure to VMworld in San Francisco. As most of you know this is my first, hopefully of many, VMworld. I’ve got a lot going on – so much that I had to map my time out in a spreadsheet. What i’m looking forward to at VMworld: Some definitive information about Marvin or Whatever. We’ve been hearing and reading about Marvin being some type of hyper-converged offering from VMware, but not much else.  VMware has always stated they are a software company,  not a hardware company.  So I’m expecting some type of partnership or certification process for hardware vendors. It’s going to be interesting for people like Nutanix as this could open up that market in a vastly different way. CloudVolumes.  Oh man,  VMware recently announced this acquisition with a lot of social media buzz.  I see this as VMware’s answer to the container craze being drive by, largely, Docker.   I’m sureRead More →

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In: VMworld

I know for many of you this will be the umpteenth time you’ve been to VMWorld,  but for me this is my first chance to go! I want to start by thanking the people who’ve helped me go, from the VMWare marketing guys giving me a blogger pass,  to a friend letting me crash at their hotel,  and everyone else – a HUGE thank you for making this possible for me.  I’ve excited tocatch up with people I’ve met on social media the last few years,  and hearing whats up and coming from VMWare and other vendors.   i wanted to share  from of the sessions i’m most looking forward to. 1)  EUC1155 – Enabling True Mobile Productivity John Marshall – SVP & GM, AirWatch Chris Hazelton – Research Director, Enterprise Mobility, 451 Research Tuesday, Aug 26, 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM 2) INF1864-SPO – Software Defined Storage – What’s Next? Chad Sakac, SVP, Global Systems Engineering Tuesday, AugRead More →

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In: VMworld

My passion, like many of you, has always been technology. It all started when my dad bought me my commodore VIC-20 when I was just 5 or 6 years old. I remember the using the external storage at the time, a Datasette. It was the first, of many, technological advances I’d see with magnetic tape and data storage in general. I guess I’ve come full circle now working in the world of Enterprise Storage and Backup for the past 15 years. We’ve seen a huge amount of change and advancement. From DASD to FICON to FAST the landscape is an ever involving one. Passion. It’s what drives us to explore new things, rise to challenges, and advance and support our environments. That passion is what excites us to share knowledge and absorb knowledge shared by other. That passion is what makes part of being EMC Elect special. To be grouped together with so many engaging export whoRead More →

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