Storage Nation

Each and every day, our customers and partners are heroically driving innovation and success through the use of virtualization as the foundational step to achieving the benefits of cloud computing. This is a chance for us to THANK and showcase EMC customers and partners as leaders at VMworld 2010. EMC Journey to the Private Cloud Awards winners will receive an honorary award from EMC and be recognized among their peers during an EMC Customer Appreciation event at VMworld 2010 in San Francisco, August 30 – September 2, 2010. Additionally, winners will receive complimentary passes to VMworld 2011.

I’m going to keep updating this this post as things get closer and closer – but there’s already a ton our customers and partners can start planning for… You can get the summary at the video below…    For those of you who can’t make VMworld Americas, but will be at VMworld Copenhagen – no worries – we’ll be mirroring the bulk of this there as well! You can register using the EMC link and get the EMC discounted rate! If you want detail on sessions, hands-on-labs, those face-melting demos and more – read on! First of all – sessions .    There are 20+ sessions that are led by EMC, or have EMC participating in a support role.  As of 7/29, many of the date/times are not final, will update this post as they are finalized.  We’re furiously working on the content, demos and more.   Look we know that people don’t want vendor commercials.  They want content that is technical, practical and helps them get it done.   This year, end-customers voted for the sessions – except the partner session and the platinum keynote – all the other sessions are things YOU voted for.  I’m working to make sure the content are “vendor commercial free zones” (at much as I possibly can).   The only ones that weren’t voted on by attendees were the ones we get as a diamond (top tier) sponsor.   We submitted almost a hundred, and a lot of good ones got rejected – but I’m very pumped about the ones people picked.

Customer feedback on these keep getting better and better, so we need to continue to dial it up!   August is dominated by vSpecialists, including our very own Scott Baker, the inimitable Scott Lowe, and Tee Glasgow.   Brian Henderson is too cool to be a vSpecialist (he really is very, very good and will be covering Exchange 2010 on Private Cloud models. I’ve asked these to always be technical, and focused.   Give me feedback on the content, the sessions, and what you want to see next…. As always – same bat time, same bat channel – every thursday at 8am pacific, 11am eastern. You can register for any any all – in one convenient place – right HERE

Many of the IT organizations I speak with have started their journey to a private cloud model. Every road has its speed bumps: knowing what they are likely to be helps a great deal. I thought it'd be useful to simply share my perspectives of likely issues, concerns and challenges that tend to show up in each phase of the journey

If you've been following this blog for a while, you know I've been describing how EMC's IT organization is progressing in re-envisioning our IT capabilities based on a private cloud model. You've seen bits and pieces here on this blog, as well as EMC IT's own web site . Today, I received a nice white paper entitled " EMC IT's Journey To The Private Cloud: A Practitioner's Guide ".  While not as complete as many of us would like, it does serve as a nice contextual overview of of our journey: the rationale, the phases and the results to date.

I've been living with the private cloud journey since well before my first public post at the beginning of 2009. The appeal of the private cloud model has steadily grown in the last 18 months, and shows all signs of becoming the primary cloud adoption model for most typical enterprises. And, over that time, I've seen my dialogue with customers and partners evolve from… "what is a private cloud and how is it different from other proposed cloud models" to ..

A few weeks back, I joined Sanjay Mirchandani (our CIO) and Tom Roloff (heads up EMC Consulting) on a neat simulcast that was beamed to multiple locations around North America. The content mostly focused on EMC IT's journey — results, challenges and lessons learned — but we spent a lot of time answering questions as well.  Despite our best efforts, there were many good questions that we just didn't have time to answer

Hi everyone.  I had the pleasure of jumping over to Paris to deliver a short keynote this week.  When I do this, sometimes I use material I've used before.  Other times, I try and mix it up a bit and try something different.  Such is the case here. I wanted to make this presentation all about the big ideas that are going on in our industry today, especially as it applies to IT infrastructure, since it directly and indirectly impacts all other aspects of IT.  I wanted to make a point to try and stay away from individual technologies (and their associated product incarnations), and focus instead on how technology is being built, deployed and consumed. See if you agree with my choices …

These days, there's a lot of new and radical enabling technology to discuss in the storage domain.  Automatic tiering technologies like FAST.  New approaches such as global federation that's built on distributed cache coherence. And — out there on the horizon — is a technology that has the potential to completely redefine how we think about information storage

We talk about IT-as-a-service all the time — or at least, we should be! Whether we're large enterprises, or service providers who desire their business — you're providing a service, what does the service cost? It's turning out that this mental leap is proving difficult for many IT people.  For decades, they've been focused on the cost of the ingredients, rather than the price of the meal