Posted by
gminks on Sunday, October 23rd 2011
The Dell Storage crew was at VMworld Copenhagen last week. I would have done my normal live blogging and tweeting, but I had technical issues. So I did things the old-fashioned way….I used a pen and the notebook included in the VMworld backpacks.
Digital recap
Fortunately Rafael Knuth of the Dell Tech Center in Germany was there, and captured the event. Check out his blog posts (Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3). Rafeal is also behind the Dell at VMworld Copenhagen site, which ties all of our activity together in one spot.
We’ve posted pictures of the event on the Dell Storage Facebook page (please tag yourself if you are in the pictures!), and there are more on the Dell Flickr site as well. And you can always browse our Twitter stream from the event to see what the community was talking about, and maybe even connect with folks who were there.
Event recap
The European VMworld event is a much more intimate affair than the VMWare Vegas show was. About 19K people were in Las Vegas for VMworld, there were about 7K in Copenhagen. But no one does community like VMware – John Troyer does an amazing job of connecting people and making everyone feel welcome. Even though the event was small, the community spirit was palpable.Maybe part of that is due to the incredible success of the VMUGs - they said 65K people participate in those communities. I know I enjoy the NEVMUG events (the local VMUG to which I belong), and I’m hoping to visit a couple of other VMUG events that Dell will be attending in the next few weeks.
In addition to Rafael and myself, the Dell side of the Dell Storage community was represented by Jason Boche, David Glynn, Laz Vekiarides, Luke Mahon, Ganesh Padmanabhan, Charlotte Schmidt, Christian Hasner, and Nicolai Sandager. I’m sure I’m forgetting someone, please let me know if I left you off the list! And I know, some of these folks are technically Dell Virtualization people, but our communities are so entwined that I consider them part of the storage community. It was great talking in the booth about the conference, and all of the technical intricacies of supporting our customers as they embark on their virtualiztion journeys.
The external Dell Storage community was there as well. Bruno Sousa was there asking some tough questions, and of course Fabio Rapposelli was there, I saw him in the blogger’s lounge holding court with the Italian #vMafia. It was great catching up with these guys, and meeting other members of our growing community.
It was also great connecting with folks from the greater storage community as well. I attended fantastic sessions by Scott Lowe and Duncan Epping, and got to reconnect with Bas Raaymon and Simon Seagrave when I did some hands-on labs. When you’re at these events connecting with so many like-minded people it’s easy to forget how small our storage community really is.
Where will be next?
We’re not done with conferences and event this year! We’ll be at SNW Europe, VMUGs in Atlanta, Chicago, Cincinnati, Kingston ON, and Kansas City; Dell Storage User Groups in St Louis, Seattle, Denver and Indianapolis, a European road show to talk about enterprise efficiency in Stockholm, Oslo, Warsaw, Brussels, Utrecht, Paris, Zurich, Milan, and Madrid; and a Dell Storage Briefing in New England.
Whew I’m tired just typing it out! If you need info about any of the events we’ll be at, just post a comment here and we’ll get you sorted out. We’d love to connect with you.
Of course our big conference will be in London in December – the Dell Storage Forum. We’re looking forward to connecting with our European community members January 9 – 12. Registration is open right now, and you can keep up with the most recent news about the event on Facebook and Twitter. The Orlando event was amazing, so we can’t wait to connect with everyone in London. Will you be there?
