Storage Nation

This is part of a series of posts with video recorded at the HP Blades Day in Houston, February 2010. Previous posts: HP Blades Day – Lab Session: Clip 1 HP Blades Day – Lab Session: Clip 2 HP Blades Day – Lab Session: Clip 3 In this final post from the Lab Session, James Singer discusses more about airflow and the chassis design.  The video doesn’t always follow the subject (due to my quality videoing techniques; in fact I was trying to pay attention), however the soundtrack is accurate

This is part of a series of posts with video recorded at the HP Blades Day in Houston, February 2010.  Previous posts: HP Blades Day – Lab Session: Clip 1 HP Blades Day – Lab Session: Clip 2 This is another post for the hardware geek in you.  James Singer discusses fans; air moving devices is you’re familiar with the IBM lingo.  You’d think fans weren’t that important, but in the C7000 chassis, they are super efficient.  In fact, they were designed with the assistance of model aeroplane experts.  A quick word of warning; this clip is a little noisy towards the end, when James demonstrates the fan’s power. Enjoy! Click here to view the embedded video

Ok – it’s VMworld season starting    Seems like just yesterday I was in Cannes   We’ve got a series of session proposals that have made it to the voting round – I’ve nominated my “Top 10”, but please peruse and if you are interested, please vote! Public voting will close on May 26th. For each track there is a direct link.  You need to have a VMworld login, but that’s cake (just register) Hybrid and Public Cloud: http://vmworld.com/community/conferences/2010/cfpvote/hapcloud Private Cloud-Management: http://vmworld.com/community/conferences/2010/cfpvote/pcmanagment Private Cloud-Business Continuity: http://vmworld.com/community/conferences/2010/cfpvote/pcbusiness Private Cloud-Security: http://vmworld.com/community/conferences/2010/cfpvote/pcsecurity Enterprise Applications: http://vmworld.com/community/conferences/2010/cfpvote/eapplications Desktop Virtualization: http://vmworld.com/community/conferences/2010/cfpvote/dvirtualization Technology and Architecture: http://vmworld.com/community/conferences/2010/cfpvote/tarchitecture Virtualization 101: http://vmworld.com/community/conferences/2010/cfpvote/v101 Read on for my “Top 30”, and an complete listing of submissions we’ve made.  Customers, EMCers, EMC partners – heck anyone interested – please check them out, people are working very hard behind the scenes to make it useful to all…  I’m enforcing a “no commericals” rule for the EMC sessions (worked to ensure that none of the ones that sound like commericals made it into my Top 30 – and that I know that the presenters will keep it real).

Not being a blades person “per-se”, I was looking forward to the lab session at HP Blades Day where we’d get to understand the physical hardware in more detail.  The video here shows James Singer taking us through the hardware and explaining the basic concepts of how the it is constructed.  What shows through this video is the passion these guys have.  You can tell they live and breathe blade technology.  I really enjoyed this session as I saw it as the starting of my personal vision on where HP are headed in their converged architecture.  Enjoy.  More to come (oh and apologies for James going out of shot – I wasn’t paying attention . Click here to view the embedded video.

This session was fun and was repeated twice (recordings of both are shown below).   I can’t believe how many of you stuck it out until the end…. I’m pretty sure that this session shut down the show – finishing around 6:15pm on Thursday On the panel were the inimitable Scott Lowe, Duncan Epping, Tom Howarth Rick Scherer (who also moderated) and myself.   The questions were great, but considering all the stuff out there (vCenter, scheduler, 3rd party management tools, process, general best practices questions, etc), I was just taken aback by how many questions were storage related.   Someone suggested that it was because I was on the panel, but look at the luminaries there beside me on the panel

This is the coolest thing I’ve seen all week.   The RSA crew the VMware security team and the Nexus 1000v  folks have been working together for a while, and things are starting to come out that are REALLY REALLY cool.

There’s going to be a ton of good stuff there, as always.  If you want to see what EMC is doing – which is going to be MASSIVE, you can check out my earlier post here (which includes a funny video that makes fun of my tendency to wear suits, and also includes the way to get a discounted pass!).   In our 12 VMware/EMC-centric sessions, I’m really excited about: the keynote (we have a lot of announcements around vStorage, platforms, and vCenter integration and also demos of the future – folks who have seen me do these before, I try to highlight what we’re doing together with VMware both immediately and mid and long term).   The EMC Ionix management stuff is REALLY REALLY cool .   We’ve been quietly building a massive portfolio in the management space around the virutalized datacenter (which I truly think is as important as anything else).   I’m pushing to make the VM appliance variants more out there for play, but will do posts and demos of this soon. The RSA gang and VMware teams have been working intensely since Jan, and there are fruits of that now starting to show up, so that will be cool too. In the booth, we’re pushing hard for a lot of 10GbE and FCoE stuff in the booth (and giving away iomega ix2s) – will be pretty fun! From a personal standpoint the one I’m looking forward to the most is the “Ask the Experts” panel – TA2259. On the panel it will be a great group with popular blogs: Scott Lowe , Rick Scherer , Duncan Epping , Tom Howarth , and myself.   I really want to hear YOUR questions!   If you want to submit a question in advance, simply fill out the form below and your submission will be sent for review, around the beginning of August we will be notifying the submission owners if we will be using their submission or not.