Today is the first day of the Dell Storage Forum in London. Yesterday lots of people started to arrive, and I was amazed at how many people wrote pre-show blog posts:

• vInfrastructure: Italian | English
• IT from Planet Zorg

Let me know if I missed your post!

Someone asked me about pictures and videos. Check out this set on the Dell Flickr page, we’re working on the updates right now.

Keep the twitter questions coming! We’ll try to get to more during the keynotes tomorrow, and we are tracking all of them.

OK, here’s what’s up tonight. We have an official sponsored Dell event at the Anchor Bankside Pub. There are buses available to take you there. This event is from 6-8.

Immediately after, there is a #storagebeers scheduled at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese Pub on Fleet Street. From 8 – whenever. We walked it last night, and its not that bad of a walk, maybe 10 minutes (we got lost so it took us about 20 minutes). Maybe we can all meet up and leave at the same time. Who knows, maybe we can commandeer a bus to drop us off right at #storagebeers.

The event officially starts today for partners. Keep an eye on the #DellSF12 hashtag on Twitter!

Watching this recap video of the Dell Storage Forum in Orlando made me a little nostalgic. So, Just like I did for the inaugural Dell Storage Forum in Orlando last year, I thought I’d write a post with helpful hints for those of you coming to the Dell Storage Forum in London next week (as well as some tips for those of you playing from home).

Social Media

Facebook

The fabulous @AlisonAtDell will be posting all of the blog posts, videos, pictures, etc she finds to the Dell Storage Facebook Page. But don’t be shy – if you write something or take an awesome video, please feel free to post it to the wall! Also – you have “liked” us haven’t you?

Storify

Alison will also be creating a Storify page for the event, in case you just want to see the highlights of each day.

Twitter

We’ll be tweeting from the @DellSF account. If you have questions, or need info, please give us a shout! The official hashtag is #DellSF. We have a list of blogger and podcasters who will be at the event, as well as a list of event attendees. Please tweet us if we need to add you to either list.

If you are following the event remotely, try using an application like Twazzup or Tweetchat. Just remember to log in to Twitter to interact.

Bloggers

In addition to Dell Storage bloggers (including myself, Jason Boche, and Lance Boley), we have invited some of the best known bloggers in the storage world to join us at the first European Dell Storage Forum. We’ll have Martin Glassborow, Chris Evans, Nigel Poulton, Bruno Sousa, Hans Deleenheer, Barry Coombs, Greg Knierieman, Ed Saipetch, and Stephen Foskett. This crew should make for some excellent storage conversations!

Flickr

We’ll be adding pictures from the event to this set on the official Dell Flickr page. If you upload pic to Flickr (or any place else), please tag them with DellSF12 so we can find them!

Mobile-enabled site

If you are coming to the show, the mobile enabled site can be accessed via your mobile phone via http://www.eventmobi.com/dsflondon . You’ll need to log in with the email address you used to register for the event.

If you are going over from the US, you probably want to turn OFF data roaming and access this site (and all your mobile apps) via WiFi at the conference site.

Day-by-Day plan

#storagebeers + NekkidTech live recording!

Martin Glassborrow called a #storagebeers during the time folks are in town for the Dell Storage Forum. It will be Tuesday 1/10 at ‘Ye Olde Chesire Cheese’ on Fleet Street in London. Things will get started around 8 pm, and lots of us are planning to head over to visit.

Greg Knierieman and Ed Saipetch will bring the NekkidTech podcast to #storagebeers – they will be recording live from the pub. It will be good to see these guys in action!

I probably should call out that this is NOT a Dell-sponsored event. So please treat it like any other #storagebeers. It should be a great time – hope you can come round if you are in town!

Live #SANChat

January’s #SANChat will be live from #Dellsf12. It will be Wednesday, 1/11 at 5pm GMT (12 PM EST, 11 AM CST). If you are in London, we’ll gather at the Fluid Data Lounge. We’ll continue the conversation we started with Mike Davis about dedupe and compression. Remember, #SANchat is all about the technology, so its vendor neutral. Please join us! We suggest using TweetChat to keep up the conversation.

Tower of London

The Fluid Foundation celebration is Wednesday evening right after #SANchat. I’ve never been to the Tower of London, looking forward to wrapping up the week at such a cool venue.

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?

Note: This is my (almost) live blog from yesterday’s session with Andrew Corcoran & Ed Casmer.

Traditional dcs are too rigid for evolving biz needs

IT has too spend most of the $$ supporting existing infrastructure, not expanding to new techs

virtualization + automation helps w costs, CapEx limits

1.2 Trillion spent annually just to “keep the lights on” (not reinvesting, getting better/more efficient)

Check out www.dell.com/powersolutions for lots of technical information.

Dell’s efficient IT strategy: Standardized, Simplified, automated plus using tech innovation that is open, capable, and affordable
that provides greater IT efficiency. Measure so TCO can be shown back to the biz.

30 – 70% of storage is typically underutilized

Rule of thumb: 1TB can add $1million to budget

Dell’s POV on storage:
Innovation through storage virtualization/automation
Eliminate fork-lift sw license renewals
Storage fabric no longer differentiates produccts
Tiered storage recoups up to 50% of your costs

Compellent Storage Center
EQL – iSCSI with DCB support

Audience question:
EQL – FS7500 Block & File level access? what access? Either CIFS or NFS
Integrates w others EQL if the software is at the latest level
Compellent – what is min block size? 512K

Symantec products that integrate with Dell Storage:
Data Protection: Backup Exec, NetBackup
Archive & Storage optimization: Enterprise Vault, backup exec dedule & archive option,
Storage management & availablity

Note: these are my (mostly) unedited session notes. The session focused on backup best practices for virtualization. Other live blogs from VISION can be found here and here.
70-90% of backups are not restorable
Backup windows are huge
Virtualization makes these problems worse
easy to make VMs, VM sprawl etc, portable, VDI (great target for deduplication)

Majority of restore requests (80%) are individual backup restores, not an entire VM

Guest level backup – (agent on every vm) <-traditional
Image level backup – (VMFS volume) <-better way

Top 5 pain points for data growth & backup administration
Tiered storage build out
no one wants chubby primary storage
tech refresh
backup redesign
consolidation
Virtualization adoption
(via The Info Pro 2010)

Best practice 1: online data protection using integrated tools (array-based snapshots, etc)

Best practice 2: Network efficient backup & recovery using advanced disk-based backup
PC DL B2D Appliance – preloaded with Symantec software
doesn’t negate backup to tape necessary
but customers are finding they don’t need tape at all
Can handle 32 TB of deduplication pool

Best practice 3: Deduplication is key to virtualization backup
Group vms in 2 groups – Backup group every other week, with 2 weeks of incremental backups.

Avg VM size is 30 – 45G

EqualLogic protection with offhost backups
App servers write to EQL
DL B2D creates snaoshots
Data is backed up from the snapshots & deduped

Dell AIM – giving personalities to servers. Assign a persona so server can be moved around, so VMs can be moved to different servers as needed

Note: these are my (mostly) unedited session notes. This session focused on Dell DX object storage with Symantec Enterprise Vault

Data starts when the data is created. Need bigger backups, need more primary storage.

Storing is not the hard thing, the harder thing is managing the data.

90% of errors are human errors. So risk to manage data is as important as storing data

There is a decline in budget, but applications are making more and more data

Data should be classified, and sent to the right tier based on what type of info it is.

How long does it take to restore from tape? What happens if you have to freeze data based on a court order?

According to symantic – nearly half files backed up are over 90 days old.

Files over 90 days old occupy ~17% of toital storage (abt 4.8T)

From audience: files may be over 90 days but you still need them for a biz reason, dedupe and archiving helps with that

From audience: why does it have to be object storage?

So what’s more important? meta data? tiering? object storage?
It depends. Scalability, non-classifiable data (x-rays),

Mail admins – psts and local machines. Worst case scenario for mail admins cuz you dont have access to pst on local laptop

DX based on rack-based x86 server platform

From audience: In small environment wouldn’t another EQL rack fix problem? It depends. DX may be the solution if you are in a regulatory situation

DX objects are ideally suited for unstructured data, just add nodes as you need them.

from audience: does object storage have enterprise vault installed on it? Answer: yes

American Systems reduced backup time by 65%

Formula 1 team had a 50% reduction in email storage and server infrastructure

Mitel saved 8million (US) in labor productivity gains, const savings, etc

Understand customer needs, and build based on numbers gathered, etc

Solutions are co-engineered and tested

Note: this is as close to live blog as I could get … I couldn’t get on the wireless and then I realized I left my adapter in the hotel room. This is my first time covering a conference in Europe for me…I’m learning! I’ve edited the notes mostly so they would make sense to others (not just me).

Waiting for the keynote – there is **live band**. Pretty cool! It’s probably a good thing I’m not tweeting, I don’t think I can overemphasise the coolness of the live band. The band is Jeff Hanson and Blue Stone Circle. I was told that the band members are actually Symantec employees..can anyone confirm this?

They are showing a Symantec video and the track is the live band.

Steve Morton, VP product marketing for Symantec, hosted the keynote. I really liked the format, it was casual. No one went through PowerPoint presentations. It was more like a David Letterman show. Everyone just talked.

1st Guest: John Brigden, Sr VP Symantec for EMEA . He said his customers are asking for more for less and virtualization is biggest topic with customers right now. He also said cloud adoption in Europe is challenging because of secuirty and EU laws. He did a demo from his iPad, which the camera guys captured for the audience (fingerprints and all).

2nd Guest: Enrique Salem, President CEO of Symantec, laid out the themes for the conference:
1. Information explosion
2. Threats – 71% EMEA companies targeted by threats. Targets = individuals, businesses, governments
SCADA attacks - espionage –> sabatoge. (I have to read more about SCADA attacks..).

3. Mobile – Dec 2010 more smart phones sold than PCs – those go out of store onto your network. 68 million iPads by end of year. Mobile data usage up 4K%

4. Virtualization – everything virtualized. By 2014 70% all servers will be virtualized (according to Gartner).

5. Cloud – how do we manage security, keep systems highly availables, slas etc. 80% in EMEA have cloud projects, only 20% completed due to lack of expertise

Symantec’s vision is world revolves around people and info. There should be device independence
Environments should be more scalable, more cost effective, and customers should have access to info where ever they are.

Taming info explosion starts w categorization
Backup windows need to be eliminated – 1st step should be deduplication
Threats: reputation based security. 75% of attacks hit less than 50 computers (customized threats)
Mobile: anywhere, any time, any device.
Need comprehensive endpoint protections, encryption, identification, data loss prevention, & device mgt
Virtualization: application ha
Cloud: does not come in a box
Onscreen blurb: Do virtualization & cloud change the fundamentals?

Guest #3: Anil Chakravarthysr VP Storage & Availablity Management Group Symantec. His mission: get the private cloud you want from the infrastructure you’ve got.
Any complex biz service (eg SAP) is a group of applications running on different tiers, different platforms
Second demo on an Android hand-held device. This time they cleaned the screen first (could see fingerprints on the last demo).

Customer – Dr Udo Seidel of Amadeus. Travel business. Huge capacity problem during the iceland volcano issue.

Guest #4: Steve Shakespeare, Intel European director of software sales and marketing. He said the tones for Intel are called the “Intel bong”. Get vouchers for going to Intel sessions, and you can go to a website to donate for charitable things Intel. He talked a bit about Intel’s built in hardware tokens (I need to read more about this). Encryption – Intel calls it anti-theft. Built into chip. Disk can be totally encrypted, discs are bound to the physical device. Also ability to send a poison pill to turn pc into a brick

Trendwatch 2011 (I told you this was like a Letterman show…):

• Angry birds is hot 50 million users, most of them at work (Symantec gets requests from companies needing to block Angry Birds)
• iPhone 5: announced today
• Gold covered tata nano 3.5 million euro

Guest #5: Sean Regan Director Product Marketing Information Management Group Symantec
v-Ray from Symantec – idea you need xray vision into your physical and virtual machines. Most recoveries are for an individual file.
You can’t protect what you can’t see.

Guest #6: VP & GM PLE Dell – Stephen Murdoch
Everyone spends too much on storage. Fluid data architecture + symantec can reduce costs by 80%
Liquid finds most efficient path – same w data. Get it to right tier, at right cost, at right time.
Compellent has unrestricted thin provisioning.
Not all data is created equally – of all data created 90% is never looked at after its created
Remaining 10%, only 2/3 is looked at only once. Can’t all go to tier 1 -
Symantec + Dell: Dell’s promise is open, capable, affordable.  Symantec is true to that principle
Hot Seat:
1. Will you be wearing a kilt? few legs look as good as his!
2. Why can’t you just call yourself Steve: Steve is an English derivative. Scottish people will say “Stevie” but its hard past the age of 10 to go by that
3. Whats your fav Scottish invention: no definitive proof haggis or bagpipes are Scottish. Scottsman organzied American Navy and telephone.

Guest 7: CJ Desai Sr VP Endpoint & Mobility Group Symantec: Continue to see increase in malware

Guest 8: Art Gilliland SR VP Info Security Group Symantec
3-5% data in orgs = structured data. Mobile devices – need to protect data on device and access from devices. Apple ios is being supported by Symantec DLP. Symantec wants to help IT orgs embrace new tech w/o losing security best practice etc

Customer: Ariel Pisetzky CIO of 888 Holdings (a gaming company). They watch internal and external movement of data.Gaming customer – most important data to them is customer info.

Interesting – political silos around information was mentioned as an endpoint

Side note – no women on the stage? Maybe tomorrow will be better on that front (fingers crossed!).

This week is slamming for Dell Storage – we are at four conferences! We’re at the Microsoft SharePoint conference. Jeff Sullivan and Alison Krause are at Oracle Open World. Dennis Smith is at Interop. And I’m at Symantec Vision.

“VISION” is Symantec’s annual user and partner conference, organized in venues around the world. This week VISION is in Barcelona. Dell will be showcasing all of the Dell Storage products in our booth along with the relevant Symantec solutions that can be used to manage and use these platforms.

In addition to Stephen Murdoch  delivering the opening keynote session, we have 3 breakout sessions:

• Store, Manage, and Discover Critical Business Information with a Complete Archiving Solution: The Dell DX Object Storage Platform and Symantec Enterprise Vault
• The Value, Volume and Velocity of Data Is Changing—Come and Learn How Dell Compellent and EqualLogic Storage with Symantec Software Can Help You Intelligently Manage Your Data
• Dell Storage and Symantec enable the full benefits of server virtualisation

If you are at VISION, we’ll be giving away a Dell Inspiron Duo at each of our breakout sessions. We hope to see you there!

I’ll be live tweeting and blogging. I’ll post pictures soon, Barcelona is a gorgeous city. Be sure to follow all of the action on twitter with @dell_storage and @gminks.

I’m still going through all of the amazing content that folks posted from VMworld. I love this pic that @wsellers posted, it’s my fav #cloudbunny pic!!

I can’t believe it’s already Day 3 at VMworld here in Las Vegas. I’m blogging this during a session just to give readers at home a little taste of what’s going on here.

There are over 20,000 people at this show. I’ve run into just about everyone I know from the storage industry, and met lots of very interesting people. The conversations have been amazing, lots of VDI talk, visualization talk, and talk about business operations.

The Dell Tech Center guys have been blogging about what they are seeing at the show:

• Dell | VMware vExperts & vCloudy with a Chance of AwesomeSauce at VMworld 2011
• Solutions by Engineers for Engineers Presents Dell | VMware vCloud #SUP1012 at VMworld
• Dell TechCenter crew at VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas – Day 1
• Dell TechCenter New-V at VMworld 2011
• VMworld 2011 & the Dell Management Plugin-in for VMware vCenter – Systems Management for Virtual and Physical Machines

One of the biggest social events I attended was v0dgeball on Sunday. (read more about it here).

Here is the Dell Storage team:

Here is the Cloudbunnies team:

I’ve posted more pictures on the Dell Storage Facebook page. You can also check out the VMworld or Dell Flickr streams to see more of the action here in Las Vegas.