Perhaps most exciting, if you’re a ControlCenter customer, is the chance to get an up-close look at our next major release, what we’re calling “SRM 7″ internally.  There’s going to be a dedicated system on the show floor manned by some overworked and underpaid colleagues of mine, who will walk you through some simple use cases using our latest build of our in-development product. Please take the opportunity to grill them and provide some feedback. We’re all marching full speed ahead on this product and some real customer feedback at this stage is going to be incredibly useful to us.

There’s also some lecture/demo sessions set up, including “Next Generation Ionix ControlCenter v7 is Here…What’s Next?” and “Achieving Time to Value with Next Generation SRM: An Architectural Perspective.“  Both of these will take you behind the scenes with where ControlCenter is headed.  I wish I could see them, and more than that, I wish I could hear what you the customer are saying at them.  Feel free to reply to this post or hit up the ControlCenter customer community with feedback; I promise it’ll get seen, and not just by me.

And if you’re more interested in adding value to your current ControlCenter install, don’t forget the always-popular hands-on sessions and a special demo/lecture on “Ionix ControlCenter v6 – Under the Covers.”  I imagine that one’s going to be pretty informative.

There’s a ton of other Ionix presence scheduled, including some hands-on work with Storage Configuration Advisor (the “next-gen” compliance product that got some sneak-peaks last year) and a slew of vBlock/Unified Management presentations.  It looks like quite a full menu for the Ionix fan.

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

Ionix at EMC World

It all comes together here in person for four crazy days.  We “meet” people we’ve interacted with online for months.  We learn about new products, or new directions for old products.  We teach people, we learn from people, we laugh, we cry.

I can’t decide what the single best moment was.  That first batch of feedback from our first hands-on session has to rank up there.  We took a major risk and invested incredible effort into rearranging our approach, and it was a hit.   But sitting in on Natalie’s Working Mothers Experience session was fulfilling in an entirely different way.  And of course, getting to sit and talk with Steve Todd and his wife for the first time in a long time was worth flying down here for.

The best moment may have been seeing one of my co-workers getting off The Mummy indoor roller coaster at Universal.  I won’t be forgetting that look of terror any time soon.

Now it’s time to pack up and depart Orlando, just as the sun is starting to come out.  Thank you all; I can’t list everyone who helped make this a huge success for me.  My co-workers, my managers, my online colleagues, our partners and customers, and of course the event staff.  See you in Boston next year?

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

EMC World 2009 – Wrapping Up

I was unexpectedly moved by a few of the comments and questions from the audience.  Both came from women who were not (yet) parents.  One asked about how working mothers manage to balance the conflicting demands of parenting, working, and still finding time to maintain a relationship with their partners.  Another talked about never feeling like she was fully present anywhere, since the conflicting demands of 21st-century life were forcing her to constantly multitask.  I realized that while we were there to talk about the experience of being a working mother, the truth was that we are all working humans, and that finding boundaries and maintaining balance was a continuous challenge for all of us.

Of course, the stakes are higher for parents.  It’s not just our own lives we’re messing up!  But the truth is that we all deserve a balanced and meaningful life.  And as with advancing your career, finding that balance is fundamentally your own responsibility.  Just as many managers will happily control your every task if you give them that window, your company, your team, your co-workers will happily take over your every free moment if you open it up to them.  Creating, understanding, maintaining, and communicating those boundaries is one of the greatest challenges any of us face, and in working parents it’s perhaps the defining challenge of our lives.

I’m excited that the authors of the Working Mothers Experience book have forced this issue into the light and empowered all of us to have a better conversation about it.  It’s great that we were able to take an hour out of our busy EMC World schedules to start that conversation, and have it in front of our partners and customers.  It speaks volumes about the environment we all are working in, and is one of the reasons I’m proud of where I am right now.

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

EMC World 2009 – Day Three – WME Breakfast

Scott and Ryan played off of each other well, taking up the roles of an advocate for Agentless versus Agent when discovering the data center.  At the start, the crowd was overwhelmingly in favor of agentless technology, but by the end, when describing all the challenges involved, people began to understand it wasn’t a black and white question anymore.  Of course, the real joke was when the crowd was once again surveyed, there were single-digit votes for both agent and agentless.  Everyone else, evidently, wants magic — discovering everything about the data center without agents and without needing to worry about all the problems agentless discovery brings.

That magic is of course “passive” discovery, which we have heard is quite acceptable for many of our users.  Get “just enough” information from the switches and the storage arrays to infer management information about hosts.  The good news is that SRM 7 is being built to combine all three approaches.

The theme of “just enough” came up over and over again.  There’s a huge difference between getting all the data you need, and getting all the data there is, just in case you need it some day.  How do we get leaner and faster?  One mechanism is simply to gather less data.  I look forward to seeing how this goes.

The presentation ended with a single slide left on screen.  In twelve months, users will be able to see the first versions of a whole suite of storage management components built on this new architecture.  As someone whose developers are working on this, it was a clear message.  We have a lot of work to do if we’re going to keep this promise to our customers.

There are more detailed sessions planned for talking about our next generation of management products, and if you’re interested I suggest you seek them out.  And of course you can follow the overall RMSG approach (for much more than just ControlCenter) at their blog.

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

EMC World 2009 – Day Two – SRM Futures

I began the morning in the EMC/ZDNet Bloggers’ Lounge, a nice respite from the busy convention floor (one I’d return to throughout the day).  People stopped by all day to watch the realtime streaming of EMC World tweets and flickr images.  It was great to have a place to recharge (both electronically and bodily) and have some casual conversation with fellow netizens.  I wasn’t there for long, though, before I rushed off for the first session of the day, run by two longtime colleagues of mine, on advanced reporting integration with StorageScope.  The topic was very focused and the crowd was unusually inquisitive for 8:30 AM on the first day of the conference.

After the session completed (and while my co-workers stayed to answer questions), I ran down to the keynote (available here, along with others), for a glance at the present and future, courtesy of Joe Tucci and Paul Maritz.  Looking at the now, we heard about the realities of this economy and what impact it’s having on all of us.  Looking at the future, though, we heard about what technologies are hot, how they are going to work together, and how EMC and VMware are in the thick of it all.  The keynote was full of attendees, many of whom were passing along information from the keynote to their audiences on twitter.  I was particularly proud when Joe Tucci not only called out our awards from our customers and partners but also some of the “best place to work” recognition we’ve received.

My big test though was at 3 PM, when we all stood in a room with a hundred users of EMC Control Center and helped guide them through a series of hands-on scenarios in three areas of the product.  I’ve written earlier about how this year we took a different approach, and it definitely paid off.  Feedback, both official and unofficial, has been positive.  We heard expert users tell us they had learned new things about the product, and that was very rewarding.

The official day ended with the evening’s opening of the pavilion floor, where in a small roped-off area Scott Shaffer spoke to ControlCenter users about his hopes for our online community.

We celebrated a successful first day with dinner, and took a relaxing walk back to the hotel in the unseasonably mild Florida evening (the rain held off, magically, just long enough).

Tomorrow we start it all over again.

Points to remember from today:

• Showing my manager (Seth Silverman) a tweet that mentioned his session
• People getting their pictures taken in front of the V-Max arrays (story via Natalie)
• Standing in front of the tweet monitor with my co-workers who aren’t “into” twitter
• Celebrity impersonators on the show floor turning a few heads
• Reservations for 12 turning into 24 turning into 30

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

EMC World 2009 – Day One

Every year this release drives some interesting conversation.  In 2007 we learned we were producing more digital content than storage to archive it all (fortunately, not everything needs to be archived).  In 2008 we talked about who owned all that data (70% user produced, but corporations responsible for 85% of that).  This year is no exception — the news is that our production of information hasn’t slowed, regardless of the economy.

We may have frozen our infrastructure spending, laid off workers, slowed our buying, and so on, but our information doesn’t stop flowing.  In fact, the digital universe grew 3% faster than expected in a year when IT budgets around servers and storage took a 6% hit.  And it’s going to continue.  The problems at financial institutions will bring about more regulatory oversight, and that means more data being recorded and archived.  Stimulus efforts will create more data.  We’re outpacing our estimates, and we’re not hiring enough people or buying enough technology to keep up with it.

There’s all kind of meaty information in the study (as well as cool comparisons to “how many books” … or how many Blu-Ray discs), which you can read about at EMC’s site.  Some of the tidbits I thought especially interesting?

• The average data center disk drive costs over $35/year to power and cool.
• Storage scales, but does information management software?  Searching, archiving, protecting, managing all that data, policy metadata for the same … it’s intimidating.
• The amount of data which is security-intensive is growing faster than the amount of data overall.  Good news for RSA.

The release of this study every year is the one time I can count on EMC showing up on the relatively mainstream tech blogs and such.  Always fun, and glad they joined it up with EMC World this year.

An interesting question to ask yourself is whether you’re in a place to grow with all this information?

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

Digital Universe: What recession?

We have a two-hour session, divided into three parts.  Each part presents the user with a different ControlCenter application and a non-trivial problem (or set of related problems) to solve using that application.  Attendees will be presented with the problem and some hints, and a handful of EMC representatives will be pacing the floor helping out.  If anyone wants to see the “right” answer, they can just follow the directions in a handout.  After letting people explore each scenario, an EMC presenter will showcase a few highlights from the directions before moving on to the next scenario.

The problem is easy to anticipate.  Though this is marketed as an expert session, not every user will be an expert in all three applications. And while the StorageScope Custom Query exercise might be trivial for one user, that same user would likely be completely stumped by the Performance Manager Links View exercise.  In each session of 100 users, we are sure to have attendees who are frustrated by the simplicity of an exercise, and those who are frustrated with the difficulty of another.

One way to approach this is to have a core problem, followed by optional deeper tasks.  You may have been able to figure out that the cluster is misconfigured in 30 seconds (while your neighbor needs 20 minutes), but can you pinpoint the root cause?  Could you fix the problem?  Of course, that introduces a new challenge … none of the EMC representatives are expert in all three of the applications being used.  So when users begin deviating from the script and exploring the application in more detail, it’ll be harder for us to step in and offer assistance.  And that’s far from a new problem; we faced it last year as well.  The truth is ControlCenter is a large and complex set of applications and you’re going to be hard pressed to find many EMC employees who can rattle off the details of every dialog in each of its components.

But if we’re flexible and attentive when the scenarios are being explored, if we’re as careful as we can be in constructing and documenting the approaches, and if we keep the sessions staffed with a variety of experts, we should be able to keep people relatively happy.  We’ve got a busy 2 weeks before the conference, and then a busy 4 days of executing against the plan.  Hope to see you there!

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

Hands-on with 400 users

I attended my first real prep meeting for the hands-on session Friday and I like the new direction they are taking with the session.  Last year we had detailed scenarios and walked users through them.  There was a lot of hand-holding.  This year it looks like we’re trying to be more exploratory, give the users some guidelines and talk it through with them in the lead.  It will be more challenging but it should feel more organic.  It will keep all of us on our feet working the crowd though.  Last year every session was full, so if history repeats itself I expect to be answering a lot of questions about the three deep-dive use cases we’re using this year.  So that means some time spent learning areas of ControlCenter I’m not very fluent in.  Nothing wrong with that!

Last year I remember the “EMC Twitter” crowd (made up of employees, analysts, and partners) comfortably fit at one lunch table.  I think the times are a wee bit different now.  It’ll be fascinating.

I’ll continue to write periodic posts as we prepare for EMC World, and of course the event will take over my blog in May.  Sneaking off to find time and space for quick blog posts last year is an enduring memory, but hopefully this year I’ll be better prepared!

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

EMC World 2009 – Preparations begin

A responsibility to my co-workers

First off, the buildup to the event made it clear that there was a hungry audience inside of EMC looking for information about EMC World. I knew at least one person who was supposed to attend and who couldn’t, at the last moment. I knew of multiple people within RMSG who were going to be looking for news. I felt like I had a responsibility to keep my fellow employees up to date, to do it in a timely fashion, and to do it in a way that brought the event home to them.

The timely stuff I accomplished with Twitter. To make it more personal, I kept notes. I always take notes when I travel (for work or for fun) because it helps remind me of the little details later on. This time, the notes fueled blog posts both inside the firewall and outside, with the intent of keeping things real and personal for my fellow EMCers.  Instead of the notes forming the basis of a postmortem several days after the event which only a few people would read, they formed the structure of my blog posts which were fresh and timely (sort of … see below).

A new audience

I also knew that EMC was pushing Twitter as a way to distribute news to people at the conference (via the @EMCWorld account) as well as a way for people outside to follow the goings-on (via the #EMCWorld hashtag). So I could be sure that new faces would see my name if I could find things to tweet about. So I did.  I made a point to Twitter as often as I could and to combine the obligation above (timely info to my co-workers) with the opportunity here (finding a new audience). It kept me engaged and interested in everything going on, and it many times influenced my choices as to what I would do and how involved I would be in it.

Maybe I was guilty of too much information, but I wanted a mix of what was going on in my life along with the cold press-release style of “And here comes Tucci taking the stage” tweets. I liked how it came out.

As a side note, it’s very empowering to realize you’re one of a dozen or so people real-time covering an event of almost 10,000 people.

The guilt trips

Of course, Las Vegas is a town where if you are asleep, you’re doing something wrong. I stayed up late, a few times very late. My online time was limited and my best way to do anything was on-the-go. This meant my blog updates were not timely. I was writing every day, but not at predictable times, and not on things that had happened that day. I felt like I was letting my readers down, and shirking my duties. Never mind that my job was to deliver the hands-on sessions, and that everything else I was doing was of my own volition. The fact stands, I stood up and told the world to come find my posts, and I was delivering them slowly.

I also make it a rule not to carry my Blackberry with me 24/7. A couple of trips “out” I might have had the opportunity to Twitter about interesting events (like our dinner for 14 at Bellagio) but I had left my device charging in my hotel room. This is one of those “can’t have your cake and eat it too” scenarios. Can’t stay connected if you don’t want to, well, stay connected.

Falling behind

As I struggled to keep up with email, I watched as dozens of emails from our internal social media site got skipped over. I’m behind on blogs, I’m behind on new communities, I’m behind on discussions. I wasn’t able to stay involved. I just didn’t have time to keep up with everything.

It’s one thing to fall behind in your job. I expected that!  It’s another to also fall behind in the overall social community. For some reason, I wasn’t prepared for that.

Wanting better

What does this all boil down to? I want more, and I want the stuff I have to be better.

• I want better mobile access to our internal site. I don’t know what I want, exactly, but I know I want more.
• I need to set up my own blog for email posting, to make it easier to update with small posts on the run.
• I felt like the Twitter support sort of dried up mid-conference (even though individual Twitterers were quite active).  That could be improved.
• Future events like this, I need to budget time out of busy schedules for online activities.
• Having an employee intranet lounge where we could access our intranet in a physically secure location would have been awesome.
• Charging mobile devices is vital. Lose power, lose connectivity, and everybody loses out, not just you.

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

What I learned at EMC World

Everything I need to know, I learned in Las Vegas

• You should describe your technology in terms of words which make people laugh at how they sound (see: fungible).
• Zillow.com gets its home sale data from craiglist (uhm, ok).
• The walk from Excalibur to Mandalay Bay gets longer as the week goes on. There is fell magic at work here.
• Billy Crystal can get a lot of laughs by calling your work boring.
• If they go out of their way to call it free, there is a catch.
• Women are polarized by the appearance of a man in a skin tight superhero costume.
• Everybody loves trick shots.
• There’s free wi-fi at the airport, but not at the hotel.
• If you want positive feedback, have your session on the last day when nobody’s awake.
• Black bean and chicken spring rolls are actually vegetarian, “except for a little chicken.”
• Just because someone gives you a free shirt doesn’t mean you should wear it.
• Just because your event is in Las Vegas doesn’t mean you’ll find time to gamble.
• Joe Tucci doesn’t need to know the date. He has people.
• People magically acquire nicknames in Las Vegas.
• Some people are still running ControlCenter 5.2 SP3. They are nice folks. Insane, but nice.
• ControlCenter 5.0 was “the first ControlCenter.” (uhm, sure)
• Report a product bug severe enough to occupy a development team for a month, and they will remember you 3 years later and laugh with you over drinks.

I’m sure as soon as I finish this post I’ll think of some new things I learned, but it’s 5 PM on a Friday and the long weekend is about to start. See you next week.

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

Casual Friday: EMC World 2008 Wrapup