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!!

It’s time for another #SANchat!

This month the topic is Tech Field Day, in advance of Tech Field Day 7  which is being held in Austin. Here are the details:

• Date: 8/8/2011
• Time: 11 – 12:30 Eastern, 10 – 11:30 Central, 9:00 – 10:30 Pacific
• Location: Twitter using the #SANchat hashtag. We suggest using Tweetchat to keep up with the conversation

We’ll be joined by Tech Field Day organizer Stephen Foskett. We’ll get some background and history on Tech Field Day. We’ll also talk about TFD7 delegates, and get a sneak peek at the plans for the Austin event.

As a reminder, #SANchat is a monthly chat hosted by Dell Storage. For more background on #SANchat, see this blog post over on Dell Compellent’s Around the Block blog.

Hope to see you there!

Google has released a new social media platform called Google Plus (g+). It has all the typical elements of a social networking platform:

• You can follow people, and people can follow you back
• You can organize your social connections them by adding them to “circles”.
• You can posts links and videos, and comment on posts other people make.
• You can Hangout.
  Hangout is by far my favorite feature of g+. It is basically video chat. You fire one up, and anyone can join it. So far, the most concurrent users I’ve seen in one chat is 10. There is chat functionality in the Hangout, and you can also watch YouTube videos with everyone in the chat. I experimented with broadcasting our chat on Justin.tv, but the first try was pretty bad (if not trippy). Need to work on that again.

If you are interested in a HOW-TO document for g+ check out this crowd-sourced Google doc (its a work in progress..).

My take: g+ is different because this platform is all about **you**:

• Displaying your social network: You decide how to arrange your social networks in circles, and that info is not shared. This means you can organize your connections as you really see them, you don’t have to organize people the way they expect you to organize them.
• Filtering information: You are responsible for scanning and filtering the firehose of information that comes at you from the people you follow.  Some people think this filtering should be done from the application side, but I think its something that has to be done on a personal level.
• Connecting to everyone: Depending on how you have your Google account privacy set up – anyone can talk to you, and you can talk to anyone.One of the first times I fired up a Hangout, Michael Dell was the first one to join me. The founder and CEO of the company I work for – video chatting with me. Seeing my basement, and hearing my very goofy family in the background. He was just as excited as I was to experiment with g+. I told him what I was most excited about – the serendipity of meeting people you would have never known about – and he said let’s get more people in this chat! Several engineers came in because of Michael’s invitation, and I’m still talking to a couple of them. Cool technical guys from China and Singapore who I would have never met if it had not been for that serendipitous hangout meet-up.

My tips for g+

• Don’t worry so much about how to organize your circles. Put people in circles the way that makes sense to you. Here’s how I’m organizing things:
  • Since you can read streams from the people in an individual circle, you may want to organize circles based on interest groups. Some of mine are company-based, then discipline-based, then pure personal-based
  • If one person posts lots of content it can make it hard to see posts from other folks in the circle. To solve this, create a chatty circle for the original circle. For example, I have a circle called education, and a circle called chatty education. Put the chatty person in the chatty circle, and remove them from the original circle.
• You can broadcast messages to circles. You may want to group people based on how you want to send messages out.
  • Follow influencers in your field, add them to a circle, and send relevant content to that circle (be sure to listen to that circle as well).
  • Put the people who will appreciate your weird humor in a circle, and send them the strange links that no one else will appreciate.
  • Put your mentors, or your closest friends in their own circle. Bounce new ideas off this circle.
• Get on Google plus now, while highly influential people are still accessible.
  From my level, and my job function, I may have at most been able to rub elbows with Michael Dell at an event, but not talk with him. That’s not how communications in a huge corporation are supposed to work.

  In big corporations there is a certain protocol that is followed in order to access the head honchos. So seeing our CEO embrace this cool new technology has reaffirmed my decision to come to Dell. Michael opens up hangouts and talks to anyone who shows up, and has been posting ads from the early days of the company. He’s totally embracing the openness of this platform, and that makes me super proud to be working for him.

• Don’t turn g+ into yet another platform for messaging. Let’s take a step back and realize the potential of this platform. Instead of trying to control the flow of information in a one-size-fits all fashion, lets mentor and encourage people to break down the organizational and cultural norms that keep us from truly connecting with each other. Let’s embrace the overflow of information, and share the methods that we are personally using to make sense of the mayhem. Let’s try to connect all.

Can you believe that the Dell Storage Forum is less than a week away? There have already been some great posts about what to expect, like this one from the Dell Tech Center. You can find full schedule details on the Dell Storage Forum microsite. This post is to help you get ready for the social activities, whether you are coming to Orlando or if you weren’t able to make it this time.

Social Set-up

• Our “home-base” for social will be the Dell Storage Forum Facebook fan page. We will be adding all the links we run across to the fan page, but don’t be shy! If you write a blog post, or post a picture, or see any other good #dellsf11 content, please just post it to the wall.
• Facebook not your thing? We have a LinkedIn event page, sign up there and start connecting with others who are coming to Orlando.
• The tag/hashtag for the event is #dellsf11 – please add it to your tweets, posts, images, etc. It will help us find all the stuff you are posting.
• The Twitter account is @dellsf. We have a list of attendees, please let us know if we have missed you.
  Here’s a tip for following the conference – follow that list! Usually the people who are most engaged on social media will be using Twitter. Twitter is the easiest way for us to share content, so if you follow the list you will get the best content as it happens.
• One good way to follow the action (especially if you can’t be with us) is to use Twazzup. Once the conference gets going, it will have links to most of the content that is shared via social media

Fluid Blogger’s Lounge

The Fluid Blogger’s Lounge will be open Monday thru Thursday – officially right after the general sessions till 6 (except Monday). You don’t have to be a blogger to get in, you just need to be active in social media. The idea is to give you a place to recharge your machines, hook into ethernet for uploading videos/images, and to reconnect with others in the Dell Storage community.

We won’t have an official sign-up sheet, we are fluid, after all . We will have a sign-in board for everyone to tag the first time they visit. No fancy beverages, but we will have water and sodas. Please come by and connect with the community!

Silicon Angle’s Cube TV

Silicon Angle’s Cube TV will be broadcasting live interviews from the Forum Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. This is sort of like ESPN for tech conferences, we’ll be bringing in executives, partners, customers, and storage experts for interviews, in many cases immediately after they have given presentations. It makes for vibrant, interesting internet TV.

You can access the live feed at http://Justin.tv/siliconangletv

Tweetup – the Infosmack team will be in the house!

If you will be in Orlando, please sign up for the Dell Storage Forum tweetup. It will be at Ragland Road, an Irish Pub in Downtown Disney. You’ll need a ticket, sign up quick – there are only 33 tickets left!

The Infosmack Podcast team will be there, recording their podcast for the Dell Storage Forum. It should be a great time.

Tuesday Keynote will be livestreamed

Darren Thomas, VP and GM of  Dell Enterprise Storage, and Phil Soran, President, Dell Compellent, will share what’s new and what’s next for the Dell Fluid Data architecture during the Tuesday morning keynote.

Here’s how to connect so you can hear the keynote live:

• Dell Fluid Data Architecture
• Tuesday, June 7, 2011
• 8:00  ̶  9:30 a.m. EDT
• Password: DellSF11

Wednesday – #SANchat live from the Fluid Blogger’s Lounge

We will be hosting #SANchat live from the Fluid Blogger’s Lounge. If you are in Orlando, stop by and join in. If you are not in Orlando, all you need to do if you want to participate is sign into Twitter, and watch for and respond to the #SANchat hashtag. We recommend using Tweetchat.

Here are the details for June’s #SANchat:

• Wednesday, June 8, 2011
• 2:00 — 3:00 p.m. EDT
• Topic: Data Center Bridging (DCB)

As you can see, the social calendar is packed! Please connect with us, let’s grow this Dell Storage Community!

Last Friday I presented at the ASTD New England Area 2011 Conference. ASTD is the American Society for Training and Development for my storage friends. The conference had an underlying theme of getting everyone comfortable and participating with social media. This was the brainchild of Jean Marrapodi. (Brilliant idea I must say!!)

All of the speakers have posted their presentations in the ASTDL20 Facebook Fan page, and follow-up blog posts have been posted there as well. My presentation is embedded below. My presentation was about how to deal with naysayers. There was a great discussion in the room – special thanks to Jim Storer of The Community Roundtable for all the great contributions!

Things have changed since I started giving this presentation – people are now coming to conferences with concrete objections they encounter when they propose social media initiatives. It’s obvious people are moving past fear of social media, and that they are starting to think about how to systematically, strategically implement social media applications to facilitate social learning in their orgs.

The thread of every presentation I attended was that learning professionals are in a position where we can help organizations tame the overwhelming amount of information being created in the digital era. It’s interesting, because as storage professionals we’re working on ways to help our customers deal with the sheer amount of data being created – the actual 1′s and 0′s. Learning professionals are best positioned to help organizations make sense of all the information contained in that data. Kinda cool to be at the intersection of those two disciplines.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been at a forum or read a blog that talks about all the trust issues with the cloud – no security, lack privacy, doesn’t stand up to regulations, etc. Everyone seems to think of the cloud still as the wild-wild-west and yet I think by this time that we have a pretty good handle on what the problems are – now we need to really focus our efforts on how to solve those problems.

In October of this year a friend of mine – Dr. Jeffrey Voas, a computer scientist at NIST, co-authored a paper called “In Trust we Trust”in IEEE Computer Magazine.  In the article they made the statement:

Trust isn’t a static property and must be evaluated continuously

Cloud embodies one of the most dynamic computing environments so how do we engender an atmosphere of trust?

If you want to build a house that will stand the test of time (and the elements) you find a good contractor, one you can trust will do a great job.  And that contractor will  employ (or contract) trusted partners for materials and specialty functions like foundation teams, masons, and most important the architects who are going to specify how the structure is built and what the materials have to be to make the structure safe and pass the regulations.

It’s the same with technology. Have you ever walked into a technology Value Added Resellers (VAR) lobby? I have had the privilege of visiting many of EMC’s partners (VARs), and the first thing you always see is in their lobby are the plaques and awards from the vendors they resell for.  The execs at these partners will lead you down the hallway of their greatest assets – their technical people. They will talk about the years of experience on their technical staff and how they have built the best all-star team. Many of these technical people will have plaques, awards, and most importantly certifications showing their deep expertise in multiple related technical disciplines – security, networking, virtualization, or specific applications. The partner execs make sure you see this as part of their trust campaign – so that you see that they are serious and committed to making the investment in the technologies that they want to help you purchase and implement successfully.

There are many things we do at EMC to help our customers with their journey to the cloud. EMC Ed Services is no different with a great curriculum already in place designed to prepare technical people and turn them into EMC Proven Professionals. Our mission is now extended to help our customers, our partners, and our own internal technical talent become better trusted technical resources specifically in cloud and virtual data center certifications - so that all of us can build better trusted clouds.

I’m looking forward to learning even more about the cloud through more research and through the process of teaching. I know I’m going to meet a lot of really smart people, hear their stories and challenges, hopefully see a few light bulbs go off, and  then watch them take what they learned to new and more trusted heights.

/wayne

Cloud….it’s the hot new word in technology. But how can you tell when something is actually a cloud technology or offering, or if it’s just an old application with a fresh paint of cloud?

What is cloudwashing

Cloudwashing is when a company takes an existing offering and gives it a cloud label. The idea came from the term greenwashing – which is when marketers put the word green in front of everything (come on, can cleaning products that you use once and then throw away really be called green?). Now it seems like the same thing is happening with the term “cloud”.

If you are like me, you have seen advertisements for products and thought- well they are calling it cloud, but it just sounds like the internet. What makes this offering “cloud”?

It’s important that technologists – people like us who have been building, maintaining, and managing data centers – understand what cloud computing is, and what it’s going to take to move from our traditional understanding of data centers to virtualized data centers and finally to the cloud.

What’s a technologist to do?

One way to help us get up to speed on cloud is today’s announcement from EMC Education Services. There are 2 new Proven Professional certification tracks:

• EMCCA – EMC Cloud Architect

• EMCDCA – EMC Data Center Architect

The idea is that it’s going to take a team of architects to get organizations from where we are now to the cloud. First of all, there is a need for cloud architects – people who will create the designs for virtual and cloud environments. There is a also a need for data center architects, the folks with deep domain expertise in servers, storage, backup and recovery, data center networks, and security, to use and further develop their skills to move these domains into the virtual world (with an eye to moving them to the cloud).

These new certifications were designed the same way the EMCISA was designed. They are open, meaning it they aren’t focused on EMC technologies but on the underlying concepts for cloud and data center design. The EMCISA is a prerequisite for both of these new certifications. I guess now y’all know why I’m studying for it – I want the EMCCA certification!

Come let us know what you think about these new certifications over in the Proven Professional Community. And remember, its up to us to prevent cloudwashing!

I read this post (via the Geek Feminism Blog) and I just have to respond. The post is titled “Why women in tech need to stop whining and start to nurture our own”. I think the gist of the post is that women need to encourage other women to be techies. I can agree with that. What I can’t agree with is the language she uses to address women who speak out when they have experienced discrimination (and yes Margaret, women still face discrimination in the workplace).

I think the best way to explain is to tell a story that happened to me about 5 years ago. I had just started a new job as a Linux sysadmin in a small company. During the first week, one of the blade servers we were planning to deploy had some issues. I did a little troubleshooting, determined it was a bad component, and called tech support. We had purchased the server from a big corp that sells that sort of thing, and we also had tech support.

I figured this would be an easy call. I had all the facts, all the symptoms. I needed the tech support person to gather the info and dispatch the part. Of course, tech support people make you go through some troubleshooting on the phone with them – only fair they shouldn’t send out parts unless something is broken.

Here is where it got weird. The guy on the phone asked me: “Let me ask you something – do you like to bake?”. It took me aback, but I played along. I needed the part…I figured he was making small talk till a screen he needed came up. So I said “yeah…..”. And he goes, in a very belittling voice: “Ok well this is going to easy, just like baking a cake. Inside the server is all of the different ingredients, and we are going to mix them all up and have a nice cake!”.

I was SHOCKED. I told him: “Is that seriously on your tree? I am an experienced UNIX sysadmin, I have technical degrees, I just need you to get to the point where you dispatch my part”.  I think he apologized…but it still it rattled me.

Here’s where speaking the language of the enemy becomes dangerous. And let me be clear – the enemy is not “MEN”. The enemy are a-holes. This support guy was a total a-hole. The guys I worked with back then were not a-holes. When I told them what happened, yeah they laughed their butts off. The term “then you bake a cake” became part of our culture when someone couldn’t figure things out. But they also couldn’t believe I didn’t tell the guy off – they knew I could stick up for myself.

Why didn’t I stick up for myself? I could have never imagined I’d encounter that type of thing, especially from a vendor that we were paying for support no less! And  I had a job to do – I needed that part! I just wanted to get through that call and get a part tracking number so we could deploy the server.

So if some women in tech have never experienced sexism, that is truly wonderful. Lots of us have. Bless your heart if you have never had to deal with the second-doubting that comes when you realize you have been discriminated against. We need to be able to talk about this, we need to share strategies for dealing with it, we need to remind each other that it doesn’t come from all men, it comes from a-holes (of both genders!).

But calling us “whiners”, that discussing this means you are having “little girl temper tantrums”, or that we are creating “silos of pity parties” is speaking the language of the enemy. This is the same language used to shape our world view as little girls – be quiet, don’t complain, stay in line. When you grow up and face discrimination this sort of social shaping kicks in – you don’t fight back as aggressively as you should. This sort of language makes the problem even worse.

And I swear I better not hear anyone tell me if I want to make a cake!