EMC WORLD: DAY 3 RECAP

Q: How can you tell a conference is a technical conference?

A: When the ratio of PDAs to attendee approaches 2 to 1.

The amount of IM, Twitter, SMS, email, and phone calls was amazing. All kinds of devices: iPhones, Qs, Nokias, and of course Blackberries. Lots of people doing the “Blackberry Prayer” with heads bowed and hands folded over the keyboard.

Important to engineers is their professional certification. Not only is this important in peer review, but for career purposes as well. The industry leading, award winning EMC Proven Professional program was on hand at EMC World. As I mentioned in my Twitter stream on EMC World, certification tests were being offered for half price during the show, and within the first two days 122 tests had been taken. They were expecting 250 total by the end of the week, with many new specialty certifications conferred for the first time.

Wednesday afternoon, on the main stage, the Proven Professional Awards were given. VP of EMC Education Services, Tom Clancy was on hand to launch and EMCee (pun intended) the ceremonies. Tom set the audience at ease by introducing himself humorously and presciently by saying “Hello, I’m Billy Crystal and welcome to the Academy Awards.”

Tom introduced Frank Hauk, EMC Executive VP and executive sponsor of the program spoke of the importance of this program in the industry and academia. He mentioned that the program has grown from 20K to 30K certified professionals in just one year. He also mentioned that EMC would continue to invest in the program. Last year’s awards at EMC World in Orlando were presented in a rather small room… that was overflowing. This year and into the future, the awards would be presented as a main event.

Alok Shrivastava, Senior Director responsible for the Proven Professional program awarded the Knowledge Sharing Awards — white papers on Best Practices in storage. He and Tom Clancy also awarded raffle prizes to the assembled Proven Professionals. They each had on their Proven Professional shirts, a light blue, not unlike the Science Division in the original Star Trek.

Web 2.0

One thing new this year is the amount of Web 2.0-style coverage of EMC World. The conference website itself uses a Flash-based “information growth ticker”, social networking opportunities, AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML) based agenda builder… and links to EMC bloggers, some of whom are blogging about the show itself.

I’ve mentioned Twitter a few times. For the first time this year, Twitter has been used by attendees to “micro-blog” about EMC World in real-time. These posts, hash-tagged with “#emcworld” could be aggregated and sorted by a variety of tools, creating a virtual news stream. See my link at the bottom as an example.

On Wednesday, a special lunch gathering for those Twittering about EMC World was convened impromptu. And in a rather solipsistic manner, it was set up using Twitter. Half a dozen of us collected and spent an hour and a half discussing social media as a way to connect, enhance and improve communication with Partners and Customers.

Customers

One of the reasons customers attend is to save money, lots of money, on how they manage their information infrastructure. I spoke with one presenter who said he had spoken to a customer after his talk, and was able to show them how to consolidate in a way that would save them half a million dollars a month in energy costs.

Keynotes

On Wednesday, Mark Lewis, President of EMC’s CMA Division did a presentation on what’s coming from the Documentum division of EMC. He showed Knowledge Worker, using the Firefox browser, a powerful web-based tool for code and content development teams to create and manage custom enterprise applications The Web 2.0 integration was impressive. Also demoed were a variety of mashup, social networking and folksonomy tools. He discussed “Project Magellan”, which will be released in Q3 for free.

Thursday, Dr. Stephen Herrod, Chief Technology Officer of VMware offered a fascinating tour through VMware’s product stack, and a demo of the newly announced “Site Recovery Manager” which virtualizes an entire site for the purpose of automating the work flow of a “run book” in restarting a business in a remote site.

In conclusion

Q: How can you tell a conference is a technical conference?

A: Wednesday night, the show’s entertainment was Billy Crystal, Emmy winner, Tony winner, and past host of the Academy Awards ceremonies. He began the evening by greeting the room with:

“Good evening and hellooo nerds!

There are attendees here from 79 countries. It’s like being at Angelina Jolie’s house.

Nothing says Las Vegas like 7,000 engineers.”

A great conclusion to a great show.

By the way, I’ve reported more details via Twitter. These can be found in the news stream when you click here

Thanks for coming along,

BillPetro.com

EMC WORLD: DAY 2 RECAP

EMC World, in its 2nd day in Las Vegas, is by and for engineers. While there are more suits present than in previous years, nevertheless most of the presenters are usually not polished marketing presenters but often the software developer who wrote the code for the product. This provides a level of unparalleled access for attendees.

I had lunch with a SAN Administrator for a state government office and we discussed data replication at a pretty deep level. This gentleman was a heavy user of the technology and was particularly impressed with EMC’s RecoverPoint technology. I asked if he found the price-point to be prohibitive. He assured me that it was quite attractive: the price had dropped since the product was initially released, and it offered so many features and such great capabilities that it eliminated the need for spending money on lots of other technologies. He found it to be ideal in a VMware environment and was excellent in the event he needed disaster recovery.

I’m typing this article in the Cyber Cafe, a number of stands with numerous laptops set up for attendees to use between talks and strolls through the Solutions Pavilion (Exhibit Hall). The EMC sysadmins have done a great job setting them up, with easy access to web browsers. They told me, however, that some will unplug them so that they can plug in their own laptops to charge them. Bad idea. The batteries have been removed from these laptops — I’m told they tend to grow legs and walk away — and as soon as they are unplugged, they shut down.

Speaking of the Pavilion, I spent some time speaking to a variety of exhibitors today. Not only are there “the usual suspects” but as in years past, some competitors on the floor as well, showing the openness of the show. Here’s what caught my eye and ear:

• Intel SS4200-E

With a name that rolls off the tongue, this is the Intel version of the product I mentioned in my previous post yesterday that Dave Donatelli referenced as the perfect graduation present — a sub-$500 external Network Attached Storage (NAS) device for consumers, that leverages EMC’s LifeLine software. The demo is a device that takes 1-4 internal drives (sold separately) that can provide RAID protection as well as a variety of media services. For example the device can speak to an Xbox as a bridge, display movies to a widescreen TV… display photos to a digital picture frame… provide web-accessible photos to a remote device like an iPhone… play MP3s through an iTunes server… etc.

• Iomega

While slightly later to market, and with the intention of addressing a slightly different market than Intel, Iomega — currently being acquired by EMC — also previewed their LifeLine-based offering. It will be available in different configurations than the Intel offering, but with all the same capabilities. This is one to keep an eye out for.

• Retrospect

Acquired years ago by EMC as part of the Dantz acquisition, this well respected consumer and small business backup solution was, 20 years ago, the only 3rd party backup product for the Macintosh. This is features as part of LifeLine, and new features and capabilities are coming that will make this a compelling offering for both local and cloud-based backup

• Mozy

Speaking of cloud-based backup, this popular technology, acquired last year by EMC, allows consumers and small businesses to have SAAS (Software As A Service) backup for pennies a day. An application on a Mac or PC backups files over the Internet in encrypted form, initially as a full backup, then block-level incrementals thereafter. Offsite backup without having to move backup media offsite.

• 3D or Data De-Duplication

Mark Twomey, also known as Storagezilla, was in the EMC booth explaining the new data de-duplication capabilities of the EMC Disk Libraries. Mark knows everyone.

I’ve reported more details via Twitter. These can be found either at:

• http://twitter.com/billpetro and search on the tag “#emcworld”

• http://twemes.com/emcworld and search on author “billpetro”

Thanks for coming along.

BillPetro.com

EMC WORLD: DAY 1 RECAP

A full and rich day in the “city by the sand” Las Vegas. I attended a variety of talks during the day, but the best was:

• Virtualization Technology and Directions offered by David Black, PhD of EMC. He covered a discussion of a variety of virtualization techniques, but spent most of his time talking about virtualizing servers and virtualizing storage. There was much discussion of VMware technologies, but also detailed discussion of Storage Area Network (SAN) virtualization using EMC Invista and File (NAS) virtualization with EMC Rainfinity. Full marks.

The keynotes were huge, the plenary talks in the huge hall at Mandalay Bay Conference Center. EMC’s President, CEO and Chairman Joe Tucci kicked it off with a fascinating set of information. This year’s EMC World has:

• 9300 attendees
• 56% of them are new this year
• 556 sessions

Further, there are about 120 exhibitors here this year. And a tour of the Exhibit Floor seemed to confirm this. It was packed with Partners and people.

Joe announced right off the top EMC’s interest in helping with the China earthquake relief effort by the use of matching gifts. Head to the Cyber Cafe.

Joe’s theme was the phenomenal growth in online information, where it comes from and how it’s going to be stored, protected, managed and wrapped in intelligence.

How much information are we talking about?

• 173 Exabytes of information, 1773 Exabytes in 5 years. 10X growth, or 60% Compounded Annual Growth Rate for storage on disk arrays.

Where will this new data come from? IDC has done research on this. By 2010:

• 70% will come from individual creation

• 85% will become the responsibility of organizations: YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Google

Digital Footprint Calculator: Track “Your Star” in the digital universe.

Further, IDC has developed a Personal Digital Footprint Calculator. Using Joe as an example of how many photos he creates, music he gets, etc., they calculated he uses about 4GB of data daily. If he’s typical, multiplying his number by the number of attendees at EMC World:

• 4GB/day x 9K attendees = 35TB/day

To this end, Joe announced a new division at EMC responsible for Cloud Computing Services and Infrastructure. All to address what he calls:

• Information Centric Computing

Howard Elias, EMC President of Global Services and Resource Management Software picked up this theme and talked about:

• Liquid Computing requires Liquid IT Management

He spent time discussing how the new rules of computing require new ways of managing. He mentioned EMC Smarts “model based” management, as well as Voyance, a relatively recent EMC acquisition.

Dave Donatelli, President of EMC’s Storage Division wrapped up the morning keynotes.

He reminded us that this is graduation season, and a great gift would be EMC’s:

• $500 personal storage platform, that can be backed up via Software As A Service (SAAS) Mozy.

He also announced de-duplication in the new:

• LAN Backup to Disk (B2d) and Disk Library

Real-time updates

I’ve reported more details via Twitter. These can be found either at:

• http://twitter.com/billpetro and search on the tag “#emcworld”

• http://twemes.com/emcworld and search on author “billpetro”

Thanks for coming along.

BillPetro.com

LAS VEGAS AND EMC WORLD

I’m in Lost Wages, Nevada for the EMC World event being held at Mandalay Bay. The first night’s entertainment, the Goo Goo Dolls. 9300 attendees so far. While I’ll be writing daily about this huge show on this blog, for the first time, another technology will be used to update information more quickly: Twitter.

To follow my “tweets” or my more frequent posts, you get them at http://twitter.com/billpetro

I have written about it before, but the use of the technology continues to evolve. It is at least 3 things:

1. Micro-blogging technology that allows one to write just 140 characters
2. Broadcast Instant Messaging that is not just one-to-one, but one-to-many, as many chose to “follow” you
3. Presence-management or status-management as it is often used to tell others where one is or what one is doing

More recently companies and professional bloggers are using Twitter to make product announcements, press releases, and references to news stories. There are technologies, for example, that sent out “tweets” (Twitter posts) to all followers after a blog article has been posted. This is true on my group of blogs. Other tools allow presentation of blog posts to social networks like Facebook.

For EMC World, there is a group of bloggers and twitterers (is that even a word yet?) who will be writing posts about the event, and their adventures in Las Vegas during the event. These can be tracked by the “tag” that is used in tweets of “#emcworld”. So, you can use a Twitter aggregator to filter all tweets with the tag “#emcworld” and see what the twittersphere is discussing. For example, a visit to http://twemes.com/emcworld will show who is talking about emcworld, including me.

Thansk for coming along,

BillPetro.com

EMC WORLD

This year’s EMC World, at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas May 19-22 promises to be the event to showcase EMC’s products around hardware, software and solutions. Having attended last year, it’s the best place to get access from EMC’s engineering, marketing and executive staff. Expecting about 10,000 attendees, the exhibit floor will showcase solutions from EMC and Partners.

I’ll be in attendance this year, blogging about what’s hot from the keynotes, sessions, and entertainment.

An added bonus will be the Sunday evening concert with the Goo Goo Dolls, and Wednesday evening’s event with comedian Billy Crystal.

Will there be a test? If you want, EMC Education Services will offer discounted EMC Proven Professional exams right onsite.

Come along with me.

BillPetro.com