PEX2010 Impressions
I finally got one of my senior executives out to a VMware event, and we had a fantastic week. I've spent the last few hours working on an Executive Briefing for my employer for Monday, so I thought...
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Hands on With Type 1 vBlock
The next two weeks are going to be exciting for us, as we join both the EMC vSpecialist team (Chad's Army) and the EMC lab team in a green-field of a type 1 vBlock, complete with Cisco Nexus...
View ArticleDisk Sizing Dilemma
My company offers a number of different "enterprise cloud" product for our customers, and one of them is a Hosted VM offering. Customers can choose the level of availability and SLA they want (from...
View ArticleSnippets
Man, this has been one of those weeks where there's so much out there to comment on, that it's hard to keep up. Rather than try to put together a full post about each of them, I'll point out the stuff...
View ArticleMy Virtual Machine Teleporter Isn’t Quite Ready
With all possible respect to Chad Sakac (and his post here) I'm still waiting for my VM teleporter. As a service provider, my customers aren't interested in moving VMs 65 miles, they are interested in...
View ArticleViva Opportunity (Hopefully…)
I've spent the week at EMC World, and it's been an interesting event. It's my first EMC World, and I've been impressed with the technical level of the event. There has been a good contrast between...
View ArticlePower of Personality
So, I have to say that the coolest part of EMC World so far was the event I just left. A couple weeks ago I got an invitation to an "EMC Private Cloud Connection" meeting, with little additional...
View ArticleAnd That’s a Wrap!
My first EMC World conference was definitely a success, and since it's a little depressing to see the world's most efficient tear-down crew pull everything apart it's time to head out. I'd like to...
View ArticleCold Hearted
For those of you who haven't seen it yet, Chuck Hollis from EMC has started a(nother) blog, this one specifically about the SP business and how it relates to EMC. I couldn't be more excited. One of...
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VNX/VNXe Arrays Announced: Simplicity Rules the Day
One of the challenges with enterprise storage, is well, it usually takes an enterprise full of people, or with some vendors a healthy PS budget, to install, upgrade and maintain them. With some...
View ArticleBiting the Hand that Feeds You
I saw this link come across Twitter today courtesy of Mike Laverick (@Mike_Laverick, http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk) and wanted to make a couple comments about it because it's a subject really gets me worked...
View ArticleVblock: Smart People Understand the Difference
Note: I've gotten a couple comments (thank you Greg Mulholland and Scott Lowe) and wanted to make one clarification. To my knowledge, no one at NetApp has ever directly stated that a FlexPod is...
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EMC World 2011 in Words and Pictures
I’m in the air and on the way to Las Vegas to participate in the largest EMC World conference ever, and can’t wait to get there. EMC has been gracious enough to plug me into their Social Media...
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EMC World 2011, Monday Recap Part One: Beginning of the VCE Avalanche
Day One is in the books, and man was it a crazy one. After getting to sleep around 1am, everyone reported bright and early for the vLabs role-call at 6:30am. The team did kick-ass work getting...
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EMC World 2011, Monday Recap Part Two: Showing the SPs Some Love
One of the things that I’m excited about at EMC World 2011 this year is that it feels like EMC is (finally?) coming around to really embrace the Service Providers as a business model, and more...
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EMC World 2011, VCE Recap: It’s All About the Vblocks, Baby…
I apologize that this post is so long in coming. Thanks to everyone who asked if I had more content coming, I’ll try and get everything dumped over the next couple days. I appreciate everyone’s...
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Infrastructure is Boring: The Next Phase
The VMware keynote at EMC World 2011 focused on defining the move into a "post-PC" world. It's been a fairly common refrain for VMware for the last couple years, but in this particular keynote I got...
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The Expanding Digital Universe: Challenges and Opportunities
With my employer having EMC as a parent company, it’s not surprising that data, and all of the ways it impacts the strategy, operations and execution of businesses of every size, is a topic that comes...
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VMworld 2011: Recap Day 1
The first day of VMware is always a tone-setter for me. Sunday is a way to ease in, get your bearings, try and sync up your body clock and get ready, but Monday really determines what kind of...
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VMworld 2011: Recap Day 2
And the hits just keep on coming from VMworld. Day two kicked off with Steve Herrod’s keynote, and he introduced a couple new VMware projects. Appblast, which allows you to start a Windows App on any...
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What’s in a Reference Architecture?
Over in the Twitter-verse there was a question asked by @aneel: It got me thinking, especially since Cisco (@aneeI’s employer) tends to leverage them to a significant degree and VCE (partially owned by...
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FAST and FAST Cache for the Service Provider
I had almost the exact same conversation with three customers over the last few weeks, and one of them ended with the EMC vSpecialist who had invited me to the call telling the customer “Keep an eye on...
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A “How To” Series, Converged Infrastructure Style
For the next three weeks VCE is starting off 2012, and celebrating a pretty impressive 2011, by holding a series of sales/technical kickoff meetings in Dallas, Boston and London. These three day...
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Cisco Live, London–Day T-1: VCE In the House
VCE is kicking off the year with a blow-out event planned for Cisco Live in London. Having arrived on Sunday morning, the booth-building and setup was in full swing through Monday afternoon. If you...
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VSPEX Revealed, Finally
Having being involved in a number of EMC product releases over the last couple years, this one may have garnered the most wildly speculative pre-launch chatter from the market. While some of it was...
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Vblock 300: Flexibility Without Risk
One of the core value propositions of the Vblock is the reduction of risk and increase in speed-to-market for our customers as they build out their own private cloud or consuming it from one of our...
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VMAX 40K+Vblock = ((Powerful, Trusted, Smart) ^ More) – Risk
Chad Sakac and Chuck Hollis have done a fantastic job of introducing the world to the VMAX 40K in all it’s peerless splendor, but of course there’s one more question being asked: when will we get to...
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One from Many: VCE and DNA Inheritance
Chuck Hollis has a way of taking a good story and putting an interesting perspective, on it, and his latest post, a look into the long and fruitful partnership between EMC and Cisco is no different....
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Corporate Communities, Large and Small
Over the last few weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about communities, and the different kinds of communities that are needed in a corporate environment today. Working through this in my head helped me...
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Sometimes the Data Matters
Finally. Finally. I’ve been waiting a while to put this post together. Most of you have read about the dustup between Tesla founder Elon Musk and the NYT reporter who wrote a critical review of the...
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Why I Love My Job
Ken Hui and I started with VCE roughly at the same time in mid-to-late 2010. We were both able to participate in the EMC vSpecialist on-boarding as part of Team05, and he quickly emerged as one of the...
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