50mu – about storage

EMC World 2013, day 3

Breakfast

Wednesday started with breakfast in the great food room in the basement. I don’t know any other name for this enormous place. And for the second time this week I ran into Sergey on my way there. I think he was following me around, I’m not sure. Hmmmm.

Engineers unplugged

The whole day Amy Lewis (@CommsNinja) was running around preparing for her “engineers unplugged” video shoots and white board sessions in the EMC Elect lounge.
In that perspective Allen Ward (@AllenFWard), Sergey Kamenetskiy (@Dynamox) and I did an EMC Ask the Expert discussion on ECN, the EMC Community Network. It was all about “Fibre Channel Routing” and we decided to conclude this topic live on a white board in the exclusive EMC Elect lounge during EMC World! All three of us were nervous, but Amy talked us through it and was very positive about it all. It’s only 9 minutes, she said. I was afraid it was becoming the longest 9 minutes this year 😉

Although the actual discussion was already concluded on ECN, we did a small wrap up with some basic differences between Brocade and (orf course) Cisco. The video that Amy made was hilarious, especially the final part where we were supposed to draw a fibre channel unicorn! I mean, WTF?? But it was hilarious! Not all discussions should actually be taken seriously I guess and we enjoyed our moment of fame.

Pavillion

After this nerve wrecking session with Amy 😉 I spent some time in the Pavillion where I attended a number of sessions from various vendors. I must say that I didn’t see that much new technology, so I ended up trying to find details about equipment that I already knew. I was in fact hoping for the VNX2 or a new V-MAX, but I guess we’ll just have to wait a bit longer for that. But I did get to meet the famous Storagebot though!!

V-bar

To relax after a day’s walking, waiting and listening to so many different stories I spent some time in the V-bar with the Dutch Delegation. Relaxing, calming down and getting ready for the next thing:

Bruno Mars

Personally I like his music, but his targeted audience is probably female and half my age. Last year Maroon 5 performed and Adam Levine (the singer) mentioned it also: “I’m not quite used to performing for so many guys” and that was exactly what we thought about Bruno as well. He opened with a bunch of covers from other artists and after half an hour and only one of his own songs I decided it was time to leave the concert.

Nine fine Irishmen

So I entered this “co hosted” meeting with some great social networking gurus over at the New York, New York, “Nine fine Irishmen”. And I finally met Stephen Foskett (@SFoskett). What a great host he was. He actually welcomed us and made us feel comfortable. To me he’s still a god, but having met him makes it a whole lot easier to read about his work. I sure hope to meet him once more in a more private environment se we can actually talk about tech stuff or social networking for that matter. And another reason to be in that bar was that I finally was able to meet Gina Minks (@gminks). Gina used to be the social guru for EMC and she was the one that promoted the so-called “EMC World Wide Proven Professional Day” as her baby. Once a year, during EMC World it’s WWPPD and a few years ago she really was one of the pillars of ECN I think. Too bad she left, but tonight I finally had a chance to say hello and meet her for real. It was a great night and EMC World 2013 was actually turning into THE social event of the year for me.