We’ve heard from some of the other teams (EMC vSpecialists, XaaS Badgers) and some of the fans (@sthulin, @mjbrender). Now it’s time to hear from the only vendor neutral v0dgeball  team at VMworld this year: the Cloudbunnies.

Who are we?

We are a group of women from six different technical companies. The idea came from Caroline Orloff, now of EMC Consulting. Instead of fretting that women are under-represented at big tech conferences, why not round up some ladies and wail some balls at their colleagues.

I stepped up to be team captain. One thing that really disappointed me was that I had a very hard time finding enough techie women to make up a dodgeball team. Per the rules, we needed at least 6 members and at max 10. To date, our team only has 8 members, even after a blog post, bugging all of my contacts, and all of our partners. Some women decided to play for their companies (ahem @friea), so the pool of available technical women was very small.

One takeaway: techie women just aren’t coming to these conferences. Maybe VMworld is hard for women since it happens right after school starts. Maybe women aren’t asked by their employers to attend these events. My friend Alistair Croll, who organizes many tech conferences (Enterprise Cloud Summit at Interop, Bitnorth, Startup Festival) pointed out that if companies would submit speaker sessions led by women they would have a greater chance of having the session accepted, in large part because conference organizers are looking to diversify their speaker profiles. Big vendors, you know you have some lady tech superstars, get them presenting at these shows! Do your part to change the ratio.

Why are we doing this?

I’m proud of our Cloudbunny team. I think our collaboration across vendor lines shows what can happen when we as an industry work together. I personally feel this work cutting through the bs and uniting the practitioners of our craft to work as a team is the real “women’s work”.

But don’t think for a minute we aren’t coming to play. We are looking forward to skillfully handling our balls, and dominating all other teams.

And in all serious, we are playing this game for a really good cause: the Wounded Warrior Project. My brother is a disabled vet from the Iraq war, so I am totally behind this effort! If you are at VMworld, come watch the game and cheer on the Cloudbunnies! A $5 dollar donation to the Wounded Warrior Fund gets you into the festivities (register here) – games start at 7PM on Sunday. If you aren’t coming to VMworld, please consider donating to the cause, and let them know the Cloudbunnies sent you!

The Team

Before I introduce you to the team, I’d like to give a nod to Christian Reilly aka @reillyusa. He is the one who coined the term cloudbunnies. We thank you sir for the inspiration!

Captain: Gina Rosenthal – Dell

Chris Weil – Centre Technologies

Caroline Orloff – EMC Consulting

Michelle Peterson – Dell

Annette Cormier – Dell

Laura-Beth “LB” Hatem – iLand

Liz Pierce – Acronis

Lindsay Sloan – iLand

Coach: Vanessa Alverez – Forrester

I couldn’t think of a good way to say this – so I’m just going to cut to the chase. I’m leaving EMC. In fact, yesterday was my last full day of work.

My time at EMC has been filled with interesting and challenging roles. I started as a developer for the SAN courses. I moved on to develop courses in the Ionix space, specifically the Voyence Control suite.

At the same time I was developing the Voyence courses, I was part of the group that jumped at the chance to do social media internally at EMC. I started a blog internally that rounded up all the stories I could find about the storage industry, and I eventually created this blog. I’ve trained and mentored lots of folks, and set the strategy for social media for Education Services.

I’m going to miss working daily with so many people! First of all, members of our Proven Professional Community …. representing you internally, making sure what you share is heard by the right people, has been without a doubt the most satisfying part of my job. Everyone working with social media – how fun has this been! We’re all connected and I hope it stays that way.

Inside Ed Services – I’m going to miss you all. From the operations team (who make me miss being a sysadmin every time we chat!), to the course developers, to the instructors, to the folks that market the product, to the ladies that answer the phones and help people get registered for class – y’all are amazing. This organization is filled with so many talented, incredible people. Saying goodbye to you all is the hardest part of this transition.

Ed Services folks will know the background story on this dollar:

Its hard to see I know, but here is what is written on it:

Think big

Think different

Connect all

Connect all – that is my mantra. The storage industry in which we work is really a very small industry. But it is probably one of the most important industries there is – we are responsible for storing the world’s information. I believe its vital to connect all to live up to this responsibility.

So please let’s stay connected! Or connect with me if you haven’t already! For me, its on to new, exciting adventures.

It’s that time of year again – time for EMC Education’s annual survey of storage and IT managers and individual contributors. Cutting to the chase - this is the link to the survey.

Every year we reach out to information and storage professionals, excluding any EMC employees, and ask them to give us feedback on the challenges they are seeing in their environments, as well as trends (what technologies is everyone using, what are the new technologies that are actually being adopted, what things do people no longer use).

Each year we publish the results at EMC World. Last year’s survey results can be downloaded here. One place the results were discussed last year was in the Proven Professional Community. Last year’s survey had questions that specifically addressed how the downturn in the economy in 2009 had impacted storage professionals, and those results were pretty telling.

This year, the survey will attempt to measure the impact of virtualization and cloud computing on our industry. Understanding this impact is important from an education perspective – do we have enough skilled workers to meet the demands of virtualization and cloud computing? What skills do they need to know? Is expanding and building on their current set of knowledge skills enough to bridge any gaps identified?

Its also important from a planning perspective. If  I manage a data center, info on emerging trends can help me identify hiring and training needs for the next year.

The survey is not for EMC employees – we are looking for participants who are in the trenches in data centers every day, either building, managing and maintaining these systems, and also the people responsible for managing these sorts of teams. Of course we’ll reach out to the folks who manage EMC storage, but the intent is to create a comprehensive industry survey. So please consider participating even if you don’t have any EMC arrays in your shop.

Once again here’s the link to the survey. We have a discussion started in the Proven Professional Community – if you have any questions about the survey logistics please let us know! We’ll also be previewing some of the findings in the community, so keep an eye out for that!

Please help us spread the word!

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

This blog is cross-posted from the EMC Proven Professional Community on the EMC Community Network (ECN).

Here in the States, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving is pretty much this week’s Friday. So everyone gets the bonus of an early EMC Proven Professional Roundup! Here are some of the highlights from the past week in the Proven  Professional Community:

New exam building workshop/review dates are posted

If you are a certified Proven Professional, the schedule is posted through April.

Use this link to troubleshoot access problems.

New EMC Academic Alliance University Spotlight

November’s University Spotlight is on Ball State University. Learn how Ball State University prepares Master’s candidates to face the challenges of managing data – using the EMC Information and Management course.

Are any of you Ball State University students or alumni?

Blogs of interest to Proven Professionals

• Cloud
  • Chuck Hollis talks about the challenging transition ahead of us as we move to real cloud environments
  • Dustin Smith of the Exchange in the Private Cloud blogs about a white paper that shows how to deploy Exchange on an Iomega IX12
• Virtualization
  • Gregg of EMC Consulting posted a HUGE All Things Virtual roundup
  • Virtual Winfrastructure has links to three new EMC solutions docs for Microsoft Hyper-V
• Steve Todd blogs about his time at the RSA Archer roadshow <– good read if you are interested in IT governance
• Certification Exams
  • I announced on my blog I’m planning to take the E20-001. Who wants to help me study?
  • Jas Dhaliwal blogged about his experience with the VCAP-DCD datacenter design course & exam

What were you up to this week?

It’s almost December everyone! If you are studying to take an exam this quarter — its crunch time! Make sure you let the community know if you need some help or encouragement.

That’s all I have for this week. Keep safe, and we’ll do it again next week!

This post is cross-posted from the EMC Proven Professional Community on the EMC Community Network (ECN).

Here are some of the highlights from the past week in the Proven  Professional Community:

Who is studying for the EMCISA?

Byte posted a nice wrap-up of study resources. I’ve decided to take this exam before the end of the year, I’ll be blogging about my experience. Stay tuned for details!

Blogs of interest to Proven Professionals

• VMWare
  • Chad Sakac posted the slides and recording from this week’s Atlanta VMUG – they talked about storage and VMware best practices.
  • Great posts from Proven Professional TechHead this week…PPT and visio VMWare images, and vChat 11 covered vSphere questions and free tools.
  • Gregg’s blog (EMC CONSULTING) has the breakdown of what it was like to sit in the VMware vSphere: Manage and Design for Security Course.
• Cloud
  • Virtual Winfrastructure has a post about their new white paper about virtualizing Exchange on Hyper-V
• Chuck Hollis talks about EMC’s Isilon acquisition
• Chuck also talks about PowerPath <— if you are new to PowerPath or if you are starting to virtualize your servers, you should check out this article!
• Proven Professional Steve Todd talks about designing an IT infrastructure that can support innovative applications...things like embedding smart chips in running shoes.

What were you up to this week?

In the US we’re getting ready for a holiday next week…will any of you be studying?

That’s all I have for this week. Keep safe, and we’ll do it again next week!

Here are some of the highlights from the past week in the Proven  Professional Community:

Miss a past issue of the Proven Professional Update?

Not to worry! We’ve posted them in the Proven Professionals Only community!

Access issues?

The exam team has updated the exam building workshop/review schedule

If you are a Proven Professional, why not help us write/review new revisions of the Proven Professional certification exams?

Access issues?

What do you do once you have passed the EMCISA?

We had a couple of community members ask this question this week. What do you think? Go share your experience here or here. Or if you have a totally different request for help, please start a new discussion!

Blogs of interest to Proven Professionals

• EMC Consulting has posted some open positions
• Cloud
  • Chad Sakac has pointed out that many solutions docs are available on vce.com, including the one he posted on View 4.5 via NFS/FAST Cache on Vblock 1
  • EMC Replication Enabler for Exchange and Microsoft Hyper-V from Dustin Smith from the Exchange in the Private Cloud blog
  • Nice post from SharePoint in the Private Cloud that touches on the silos that exist currently in the data center (and how we’re gonna have to do something about that as we virtualize everything!)
  • vChat from VMworld Europe was about the lab in the cloud
• vSpecialist Scott Lowe also does a tech roundup!
• Storagezilla has a post about security and encryption
• Just starting out your career in information and storage management? Read Chuck’s post about backups to get some insights on why you need to learn how to do lots more than just configure the backup software your company is using.
• Steve Todd has a post on how EMC engineering is working to “componetize” things

What were you up to this week?

I know for sure lots of you are studying – let us know if you need any help! And be sure to answer requests for help from your fellow community members, that is what this is all about!

That’s all I have for this week. Keep safe, and we’ll do it again next week!

This post is cross-posted from the EMC Proven Professional Community on the EMC Community Network (ECN).

Hi everyone! Time for the EMC Proven Professional Roundup! Here are some of the highlights from the past couple of weeks in the Proven  Professional Community:

Welcome all of our new community members!

We’ve had lots of posts in the last couple of weeks from information and storage management “n00bs”. Welcome!! Keep asking your questions about the best certifications for people new to storage, how useful the EMCISA is, and what someone should do once they have the EMCISA. These are great questions!

So if you are new to the industry, and have questions about what to study, or what you need to learn or get experience with to meet your career goals, ask the community your question! Also you can search in this community, we’ve been open here for over a year so maybe your question has been asked before. Also, watch for this round-up – its designed to keep you up-to-date with the cutting edge news in our community and industry.

And if you are an experienced person in our industry – please help out the newbies! Tell your story of how you got to your position – what learning and hands-on experienced helped you get where you are. I know you are reading posts – go ahead and write a comment. You have nothing to lose, and the community would really gain a lot from your insights!

November’s Proven Professional Spotlight is on Ben Dingley

Ben is a Proven Professional who is currently focused on designing and delivering Cloud and Virtual Data Center solutions. He is a 2010 Knowledge Sharing winner for an article that examines what IT departments have to think when they restructure their support models for the virtual data center age. Go learn more about Ben, and check out his article (and tell him hi while you are at it!).

November’s Knowledge Sharing Articles have been posted

Here are the latest Knowledge Sharing articles that have been posted. You’ll need to be a Proven Professional to access the articles in the Proven Professionals ONLY community, or a Powerlink account to access the articles on the EMC Education portal. Links to the articles are here.

• Enterprise Content Management: Yesterday’s Lessons and Today’s Challenges
• The Union of Backup-Based Snapshot Technology and Data Deduplication
• Failure Points in Storage Configurations: From the Application to the Physical Disk
• Scheduling Operations in NetWorker

Want to help write a Proven Professional certification exam?

If you are a certified Proven Professional, you can actually help write the exams! In fact, the exam writing team is looking for help with the Exam Building Workshop for the E20-651 Connectrix Specialist Exam for Platform Engineers. Find out if you are qualified to participate. Fibre channel switches and SAN not your area of expertise? Check out the other areas where they are looking for exam writing participants, or just read more about exclusive Proven Professional benefit of exam building. You must be a Proven Professional to participate. Trouble accessing links? Click here for help.

Blogs of interest to Proven Professionals

• VMware
  • Listen to this video from Chad Sakac from VMWorld  2000 in Copenhagen. If you are interested in how virtualization is presenting new challenges for information and storage management professionals, you’ll learn a lot. (Tip: you don’t have to actually watch it – its over an hour long. Put it on, and listen to it while you are doing something else. I listened to it as I prepared this post! ). It will be interesting to see if any of these issues are addressed in the 2010-2011 Managing Storage Survey…
  • Check out Nick Weaver’s new powershell cmdlet library for EMC Celerra
• Cloud
  • Reflections on the Open Data Center Alliance from Chuck Hollis
  • Chuck also talks about how cloud may really be about how IT can serve users better
  • Chuck also points to out the need for a CFO (chief financial officer) type role for information. Great things to think about if you are plotting out where your career needs to be in a few years…
  • One more for Chuck – what really makes up a Vblock.
  • Chad’s evaluation of the VCE alliance at its 1-year mark
  • Mark Lewis talks about a technology-free cloud. I loved this quote from the article:
    If you make a living from IT, it’s tempting to view “the cloud” as a technology platform–a way to lower costs, meter usage and scale more efficiently. But describing the cloud as a technology platform is like describing Elvis as a ’70s act in Vegas. It’s true, but the significance gets lost.

• From EMC Consulting’s Grace Mollison: post where she talks about the challenges of a architecting a software project using AWS (Amazon Web Services – so public cloud). If you are someone just starting out – these sorts of posts can give you an idea of the skillsets you need to pick up!
• ECM (enterprise content management) is also rapidly changing. Andrew Chapman talks about what is needed to commoditize ECM and he starts with virtual documents.

What were you up to this week?

So who out there has purchased an EMC Proven Professional Starter kit? Don’t forget to sign up your advocate – if you don’t have an advocate I’m sure you can find a Proven Professional here in the community to help you out. Just ask!

That’s all I have for this week. Keep safe, and we’ll do it again next week!

This post is cross-posted from the EMC Proven Professional Community on the EMC Community Network (ECN).

Hi everyone! Sorry its been a few weeks since we had a round-up. I took a couple of weeks off to get married. But now its time to get back into the swing of things! Lots of stuff happening that Proven Professionals may be interested in, so lets get started!

Here are some of the highlights from the past couple of weeks in the Proven  Professional Community:

EMC Proven Professional Advocacy Program

If you are a certified EMC Proven Professional, become an advocate for the storage industry! Learn more in the Proven Professionals ONLY community.

If you are not yet a certified EMC Proven Professional, check out the EMC Proven Professional Starter kit. It has everything you need to get started — and you know the community will be here for you as you start the process!

Set up your access for the Proven Professionals ONLY community!

If you are a certified EMC Proven Professional, its very very important to get your access set so that you are able to access the exclusive Proven Professionals ONLY community. Its really very simple:

• Your ECN email address and your CertTracker email address must match
• If you use Powerlink to log into ECN, your Powerlink email address, your ECN email address and your CertTracker email address must match

• Why should you visit the Proven Professionals ONLY community? Once you are in, you can…
  • Find details about the Advocacy program
  • Sign up to help write new certification exams
  • Read Knowledge Sharing articles from the past few years
  • Sign up for live knowledge sharing events, or browse the library of previously recorded events (trust me, you do not want to miss the next Engineer to Engineer webcast!!)
• Need help figuring out if your email address are aligned? Click here.

New Information Intellegence Group (IIG) Proven Professional certification credential

The IIG team (formally known as Content Management) announced a new certification credential: Application Developer, EMCApD Content Management xCelerated Composition Platform (xCP) Specialist Version 1.0.

Abstract submissions for the Knowledge Sharing Competition are now closed

Good luck to everyone who submitted an abstract! If you have any questions about the process, see this document or contact ddProven.

New University Spotlight

This month’s university spotlight is on the International Institute of Information Technology. Are you a student, or an alumnus? Check out the great work those students are doing as they study information and storage management.

Blog posts of interest to Proven Professionals

• Cloud
  • Chuck Hollis gives us an Atmos update
  • Yo Delmar has an interesting post about business processes, monetization, and the cloud
  • Chad Sakac covers the UIM (Unified Information Manager) 2.0 release
  • Proven Professional Steve Todd talks about his award-winning entry to the EMC Innovation Conference
  • Proven Professional Mark Storagezilla Twomey gets the scoop from Greenplum co-founder/CTO of EMC’s Data Computing Product division Luke Lonergan
    • More on Greenplum from Chuck Hollis
  • Proven Professional Lawrence Hart gives his opinion of what the leadership changes at Documentum mean
• VMware
  • Gregg’s blog has a great post on updgrading from ESX,VMware Update Manager and Virtual Centre 4.0 to Version 4.1
  • Gregg also has a nice wrap-up of VMworld Europe
  • Chad Sakac posted on Oct 8 about all the jobs available in this space… most of them sound like a sweet spot for Proven Professionals!
  • Chad also posted a reference doc for Citrix XenDesktop 4 on EMC Unified, leveraging NFS updated to incorporate the required info for FAST Cache, FLARE 30 and DART 6.0.
    • He also posted links to a PowerShell commandlet library and a PowerCLI cheat sheet.
  • TechHead posts a link to a fee NTP time service
  • Proven Professional Nick Weaver posted a GUI tool that configures the DHSM setup for the Celerra and Unified plug-ins. During the EMC Innovation Conference. Insane!
• Storagezilla also posts a nice comparison between NFSv4 and NFSv3

WHEW! That was a lot! I promise not to get this behind again…

What were you up to this week?

Share your week with us…if you are in the northern hemisphere are you enjoying the fall weather? Those of you in the southern hemisphere – how is spring coming along? I know lots of you are studying – let the community know if you need support or help!

That’s all I have for this week. Keep safe, and we’ll do it again next week!

Today was EMC’s annual Innovation Conference, and I was lucky enough to be able to attend in person again.

I wanted to blog this before the conference – and I wish I would have because I was very surprised that what I wanted to blog about was discussed by several of the speakers.

Here is my opinion of the ingredients needed for innovation:

• Firm understanding of the fundamentals. This is where education comes in. You need to understand the concepts of a discipline, you need the vocabulary and current theories.
  You also need to understand the history of your discipline – because all concepts and theories are formed from political and other filters (they are never 100% scientific and neutral).
• The ability to try and fail – over and over again. Once you are armed with a firm understanding of the fundamentals of your discipline, you need to be in an environment where you can test out theories.
  You have to be in an environment where its ok to say “I wonder what would happen if I…….”. If the idea fails, you need a safe environment to learn from the failure and try something else.

Both of those points were made over and over again today at the Innovation Conference. It was great to hear!