EMC World 2014: Dutch Delegation

Posted by on December 18, 2013 6 comments
EMC World 2014

First thoughts on EMC World 2014

Are you planning on going to EMC World in 2014? The attending Dutch people (or people working for a Dutch company) are in for a treat. Once again EMC Netherlands offers the so-called “Dutch Delegation” package. In short this means that EMC NL organizes several events during the week where you can gather with other Dutch speaking customers during a field trip, dinner or hanging out at a bar.

The full program is:

  • Round-trip to Las Vegas*
  • Stays at the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas**
  • Transfers from airport to the hotel and back (afterwards)
  • Field trip ‘Valley of Fire Jeep tour’ on Sunday May 4
  • Dutch Delegation welcome reception at Serendipity 3, Caesars Palace Hotel & Casino on Sunday evening May 4
  • Two Dutch drinks; evening in the V-Bar and the Zebra Lounge on Wednesday the 7 and Thursday the 8th of May
  • Visit to the show ‘Cirque du Soleil Michael Jackson One’, including dinner at RM Seafood on Tuesday evening May 6
  • Possibility to go shopping in a real American shopping mall (Fry’s)
  • EMC World 2014 reminder
  • Reunion-afternoon in the Netherlands

* And ** are optional

More details can be found on http://www.jibe-group.com/nl/marketing-services/emc-world-2014-dutch-delegation

In 2012 the Sunday field trip was a really nice helicopter flight through the Grand Canyon starting at the Grand Canyon Ranch including a BBQ-lunch.

In 2013 the Sunday field trip included a boat experience on the Colorado river.

And in 2014 it’s going to be a visit to the “Valley of Fire National Park”. I visited the “VoF” in 2013 and it was amazing! Check out my photos in this post!

 

See you there?

Cisco anounces their Data center Champions for 2014

Posted by on December 6, 2013 No comments
Cisco Champions badge

Cisco Data center Champions 2014

Just like other big IT names like VMware with their vExpert, Microsoft with their MVP and since last year EMC with their Elect, now Cisco started their own community appreciation program called Cisco Champions. I want to focus on Data center Champions in particular since that’s the business I’m in myself. I’m not (much) into Cisco Data center networking technologies myself (yet), other than SAN related Fibre Channel equipment, but I’d like to dedicate this post to the start of this new community appreciation program nevertheless. The “community” is all that matters these days, right? Sharing knowledge to enhance the community “brain” as a whole. Being part of the 10 original founders of the EMC Elect I know how important proper communication can be for new programs like this and since Amy Lewis was kind enough to invite Allen Ward, Sergey Kamenetskiy and myself to shine in one of the “Engineers Unplugged” series in May 2013 in Las Vegas during EMC World, I thought, let’s return the favor and promote the Cisco Champions a bit, hoping for more collaboration and improvement of the awareness that even though social networking is some way of “virtual presence to people you might not even know”,  if your network is large enough it can also be seen as your online think-tank.

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(s)low budget drives: the future of archiving

Posted by on October 28, 2013 4 comments
Flash storage

Storage growth

Most of the data we collect and store on our computers eventually ends up in some sort of archive. I think we can all agree on that, right? Do we ever throw anything away? Well, some data doesn’t really make sense after a while and can (and will) be deleted, but a lot of data “might be useful” after some time and so we keep it. And don’t forget the tons of digital memories we create using photo and video cameras!  I estimate that I’m creating about 100 GB of digital photos and videos throughout the year and that’s increasing every year as well with the new cameras we’re using. More pixels, DSLR cameras, RAW photography and HD or even 4k HD videos are probably taking up most of the space we need extra each year.

Where do we store our data?

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Social acknowledgement: Cisco Champion for Datacenter

Posted by on October 23, 2013 No comments

Cisco does Social Media recognition

It didn’t come as a surprise: after Microsoft MVP, VMware vExpert and the relative new EMC Elect program, Cisco just started another social champions program called “Cisco Champion for Datacenter”.

Who is that typical Cisco Champion? You’ve got to have passion and the desire to share your perspectives with the community. Cisco Champions are spread all over the world. Champions represent various segments across the whole IT industry and they spend their own private time to help others.

In addition to sharing their insights and expertise, Cisco Champions make a difference by:

  • Supporting their peers in social communities, forums and networks
  • Sharing their relevant experiences and thoughts on Cisco blogs
  • Providing valuable feedback directly to Cisco
  • And even more (so they say, but exactly what is still unclear)

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EMC Elect 2013 is almost over, 4 more weeks to nominate the 2014 batch

Posted by on October 21, 2013 1 comment

History in the making

Last year around this time EMC worked with the 10 Elect founders (including me) to get blog posts, tweets and Facebook messages out into the world to get people to nominate people who they found deserved it to be member of the so-called EMC Elect 2013. In the storage world nobody heard of this initiative yet and it was a 0 – 100 cold start which took a huge amount of effort to gain momentum, but I think we did well and the momentum is there! Even after the initial 75 Elect members were known in January, every single one of them promoted this program to friends, family, colleagues and even EMC people to make sure that the next round was going to be a running start instead of a cold one.

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