There have been so many people that have inspired and encouraged me that I’d like to be able to give a personal thank you to every one of you; since this is a bit difficult, I thought I would do even better and send you all a personal holiday greeting from the President of the United States – just click here.

Maybe it’s because I watched the holiday greeting from the President, but I’m very hopeful for 2010.  I’m looking forward to 2010, where one of my activities will be to bring information and people from EMC’s Innovation Network outside of the firewall where we can share and discuss with a broad audience. What are you looking forward to in 2010?  The Olympics?  The final space shuttle missions?

To get you ready for the new year, here’s a calendar widget from EMC’s thought leadership group which you can add it to your favorite site (click the “Get & Share” button):

Wishing you a happy and healthy holidays and new year!

Stuart Miniman

http://blogstu.wordpress.com

On December 15th and 16th, Cisco will be hosting a virtual trade show to highlight the Journey to the Virtualized Data Center.  Cisco has brought together 11 partners to share with you the best ways to solve the toughest data center challenges in networking, storage, applications, and physical infrastructure technologies.

Chris Carrier, Director of Marketing for EMC’s virtualization practice and I will be doing a Live Chat (Tuesday, December 15th, 1pm Eastern, 10am Pacific) from the EMC booth in the virtual trade show.  In addition to the top ten considerations for virtualization from Chris and the top ten considerations for networking from me, we look forward to answering your questions.

It’s been a busy year in both the networking and virtualization spaces; as we wrap up 2009, we hope you’ll take the opportunity to join us for this discussion.

For more on the conference, see Cisco’s Data Center Networks blog and register at the DCoF site.

If you are interested in continuing the discussion on storage networking, please consider subscribing to this blog.

Stuart Miniman

http://blogstu.wordpress.com

I saw TweetClouds from Hutch and thought I’d post my cloud for the last year

According to Tweet Cloud, these are my most frequently used words over the last year:

1. blog
2. post
3. fcoe
4. thanks
5. nice
6. social
7. media
8. world
9. cisco
10. innovation
11. video
12. time
13. cloud
14. people
15. looking
16. business
17. facebook
18. bloggers
19. friendfeed
20. forum
21. vmware
22. week
23. live
24. conference
25. storage
26. google
27. lots
28. check
29. hope
30. list

Interesting that Google (Wave, etc), Cisco and VMware all make my list, but not my own company (EMC).

I also compared this year list to the last six months and found that more tech topics trended up – cloud (#3) and vmware (#7) and more general social media (FriendFeed and Facebook) dropped off the list.  It’s good to see that for the most part, my Twitter Cloud does match my Twitter bio topics – social media, innovation, storage networking and virtualization.  I was a bit surprised that “thanks” dropped off the six month list; so in case I haven’t said it enough, Thank You for everyone who has stopped by or had conversations on line.

Stuart Miniman

http://blogstu.wordpress.com

How do you determine what blogs to read?  There are millions of choices and most people reach a point where they either become inundated with too much information or they stop adding new sources.  Of course, if we continue to go to the same sources, we will be finding less new ideas.

Finding and sharing the best blogs

I read plenty of articles and there are a small percentage of blog posts that I read that I would like to be able to go back and read again or reference in blog posts.  After reading articles from Louis Gray about Google Reader, I learned that not only can I keep a history of the articles that I enjoyed most, but I can also share the links with others.  I find that one of the best ways to stay energized with blogging is to keep reading different viewpoints, and by looking at the shared links of friends, coworkers and bloggers, I could read the “expertly filtered” articles from many more sources than I would ever have time to read.

If you enjoy my blog posts, you might have interest in the items that I share since they are part of the inspiration for what I write.  If you would be interested in my shared items and use Google Reader, go to Sharing Settings (which you can go find a link to at “Your Stuff” towards the top of the left bar) and in the “Find people sharing in Reader” put stuminiman@gmail.com.  For other feed readers or to see the shared link page, you can go to this link.  [Note that making connections through Google accounts can also allow you to connect via Gmail, Google Chat and Google Wave]

I addition to sharing through the Google Reader interface, you can also use the bookmarket to share any item that you are reading around the web.  There are other options for sharing such as social bookmarking and Twitter – and if you can, I recommend using multiple options – but only in Google Reader can you read the full articles and share them from a single screen.

Whether you are an active blogger or reader of the web, it is a simple thing to share articles.  It not only helps to promote the best articles that you find, but allows your contacts to spend less time in finding some great resources.

Stuart Miniman

http://blogstu.wordpress.com

Last week, Steve Todd and I heard Gary Hamel challenge modern companies:

How do you build an organization where innovation is everybody’s job?

How do you build an organization that INSPIRES extraordinary contributions?

This week, EMC held its third annual global Innovation Conference.  For some background on the event and the contest, check out my previous posts.  It has been amazing to watch the growth and reach of the conference.  The first year was a single site, the second year was a single site with some remote participation, and the third year was over a dozen “globally local” conferences: two one-hour segments broadcast from India and the rest of the day was different at each site.  Not only are dozens of hours of material be posted internally (EMCers can find the Innovation Café here), but some information is being shared externally through blogs, photos, videos and soon on the ECN site.

Contest Winners

One of the primary components of the conference is to celebrate the teams of innovators and their submissions, and to choose the winners.  As a conclusion to the selection process, all three top winners this year were ideas that the selection committee, rather than the community, moved into the semi-finals.  The second place winner was a combination of two similar ideas (one of which was popular in the community voting).  The “People’s Choice” award was a tie between an idea from India and an idea from Cork, Ireland; not surprisingly, both of these ideas reached the semifinals through community voting.  Beyond the winners, I know that many people were inspired either by having feedback on their ideas, or even by being able to review ideas from others. The community involvement in voting greatly broadened the visibility of the contest and conference around the globe.

Day of Innovation

We had a stacked day which, thanks to much help from many people, went very well.  The innovation contests have helped to move towards Hamel’s goal of engaging everyone in innovation.  This can’t be done without strong support from senior management.  Here is a short video from some of our executives discussing innovation and the innovation conference (we were especially pleased to get a few words from new EMCers Pat Gelsinger and Frank Slootman):

The day was anchored solidly at the beginning (Vice Chairman Bill Teuber) and end (EMC RSA Division’s president Art Coviello) with live EMC executive presentations.  Polly Pearson spoke about how innovation is a brand value and key piece of EMC’s culture.  Our keynote speaker was Dave Ritter of InnoCentive whose presentation on open innovation resonated strongly with us.  Completing the rest of the day was not one, not two, but three panels (as my esteemed colleague and this year’s third place winner, Dr. Dave Reiner would say: two’s company, three’s a cloud).  The first panel was on how we are innovating locally (which includes how we connect globally); see panelist Jamie Pappas’ blog for more on this.  The other two panels were on cloud computing from the business and technical points-of-view.  Judith Hurwitz (consultant, analyst and author) and Wayne Pauley (EMC) did a great job of moderating panels which covered a lot of ground and went beyond some of the hype and blue-sky thinking of cloud.  Even though this was an internal event, we invited Judith Hurwitz and Christofer Hoff (Cisco) to give additional perspectives and to help keep us from talking in an echo chamber.

After the conference, about eighty of us got together to discuss the ideas of the day.  Gina Minks took some video for me, capturing some of the discussion.  For me, the highlight of the conference was that there was so much passionate support to put on this event.  “Innovation” related activities can brings out the creativity, passion and initiative of people for more than a day.

As a final note – a special thanks to Mary Henderson who took my offer to help out with this year’s conference and turned that into an amazing (if exhausting) journey of putting together the local event (with lots of help from her and some of our events experts) and help out the global team.  I know that I learned a lot and made new—and strengthened old—connections.

If you are interested in continuing the discussion on innovation, please consider subscribing to this blog.

Stuart Miniman

http://blogstu.wordpress.com

What pulls people into conferences? Big name speakers, a nice location, and all of the trinkets that you can fit while not going over your luggage weight limit (or in yet another conference bag)?  Of course not, it is the information that is important.  At the World Business Forum this week, it was the connections to ideas and people that made the event worth attending.

While I have never presented at such a prestigious venue as Radio City Music Hall or in front of thousands of executives, the basic requirement of a speaker is to understand his/her audience and craft the message accordingly.  Many of the speakers did a great job at connecting with the audience and hitting the critical issues in the world today.  I plan on writing a number of posts on the speakers that connected strongly with me.  I have added to my reading list – Bill George’s book was given to all participants, I plan on picking up Pat Lencioni’s soon and I’ve subscribed to Gary Hamel’s blog. The reading will help to reinforce the ideas that I connected with so that they don’t fade away 72 hours after the conference.

As for the people that I connected with, I don’t expect to be hanging out with George Lucas in the future, but I do expect that I will keep in contact with many of the bloggers that I met.  In addition to the bloggers that I knew from the World Innovation Forum, I communicated with some of the bloggers prior to the conference on LinkedIn as we prepared for the event.  Two days of blogging, Tweeting and a couple of meals together starts a nice connection.  Through social media, those of us that share common interests can stay connected easily.  Below is the group photo of the bloggers on stage – if you click on the photo, it will take you to Flickr where I have tagged people.  I have also created a Blogger’s Photo Wall (see the “page” or “tab” at the top of this page).

Here’s the backstage video of us on stage (I apologize for some of the fast moves):

To continue the discussion and follow my posts, please consider subscribing to this blog.

Stuart Miniman

The first day of the World Business Forum was great.  I am going to take a little time to process my thoughts and notes (see my Twitter feed for some of my initial thoughts).  The barrage of speakers was a fire hose of information.  I am very impressed at how many blog posts have already been written by some of the bloggers that are in attendance.  Here is a shot of the Blogger’s Hub – we were in the 3rd mezzanine which is a great view.

30 of us went out for dinner at the Beacon Restaurant.  As I hoped, we had a fantastic meal and wonderful conversations.  Despite having a very full day, every time I looked around the room, people were deep in conversations on everything from analyzing the day to discussing the latest FTC rules on disclosure.  [My full disclosure: HSM gave show passes to all of the bloggers, but we are free to write about everything; the Beacon Restaurant provided great service - we all paid for our own dinners; I MET GEORGE LUCAS]

Since I coordinated the dinner, I did ask that everyone say hi on video.  The light in the restaurant was dim, so the footage is a little dark.

For more of my coverage of the World Business Forum, see http://blogstu.wordpress.com/tag/wbf09/

For an aggregation of most of the blogs and Twitter activity from the conference, see the FriendFeed room which I set up: http://friendfeed.com/world-business-forum-wbf09

Comments are questions are always welcome and please consider subscribing to this blog.

Stuart Miniman

Here is the 3rd video in a series to help educate on Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE):

For a full list of EMC FCoE resources, see my previous post The current state of FCoE.

Additionally, on the question of “end-to-end Ethernet”, see the discussion on Scott Lowe’s Why No Multi-Hop FCoE? blog post.

Both Cisco and Brocade have made announcements about new products for expanding the FCoE ecosystem.  Cisco’s Nexus 4000 provides the blade switch functionality that I discuss in the video.  They also have a whitepaper on FIP (FCoE initialization protocol) and FIP snooping which is part of what is needed for a multi-hop environment.  Brocade announced an FCoE blade for the DCX FC director product line.

Let me know if there are any related topics that you would like to see covered.

Comments are questions are always welcome and please consider subscribing to this blog.

Stuart Miniman

http://blogstu.wordpress.com

Nigel Poulton has been posting some good articles about FCoE on http://blogs.rupturedmonkey.com/. It’s good to see a good discussion taking place, many people still don’t understand the basics, so it’s good to repeat and if you look at the details hopefully people will understand that FCoE shows great promise, with the caveat that we are still very early in the maturation of the technology.

A brief update on FCoE related standards

T11 FC-BB-5 has been ratified by T11 (so it is “done” although it still goes through some processing which is typically a “rubber stamp).

T11 FC-BB-6 is starting up and while the charter and timeline are not finalized, it will be discussing how to create larger FCoE configurations (allowing for creation of a “CEE Cloud”).

IEEE Data Center Bridging: the link level components (Priority Flow Control, Enhanced Transmission Selection and Data Center Bridging Exchange Protocol) are defined and should be ratified soon.  Congestion Notification is a 2010 target.  Layer 2 multipathing will be handled by the IETF TRILL standard which is defined, but not yet in products.

For more on the standards, see the presentations and papers below.

Product configuration today

EMC is supporting FCoE switches from Cisco and Brocade; Converged Network Adapters (CNA) from Emulex, QLogic and Brocade; OSes supported are Windows, Linux and VMware [as always, see the E-Lab Navigator for the latest]

Today, the configuration is from a CNA to FCoE switch (must have a switch, no support according to FC-BB-5 for server to storage w/o a switch; if you need this, use iSCSI) and from the switch you can then plug into the existing LAN and SAN.  Storage can either be plugged into the configuration via the SAN (through existing FC switches) or directly into the FCoE switch (today via FC or via FCoE when available).  Note that configurations of having FCoE traffic go through multiple FCoE (Ethernet) switches will require the updates which are being worked on in FC-BB-6 (although a small expansion of configurations specifically with blade servers should be able to be supported soon).  FCoE today is a consolidation at the server and access layer – full end-to-end solutions with larger aggregation will take time.

I have worked on a lot of FCoE collateral over the last year and thought it would be useful to create a list for reference:

YouTube

Intro to FCoE w/ EMC http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZWaOda8mVY – basic 101 of the technology

Deploying FCoE w/ EMC  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6IHMXEGRXs – the new equipment that you’ll need including cables, adapters and switches

FCoE Ecosystem http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExxilbDvZ1g – see FCoE Ecosystem post for more details

FCoE discussions w/ Kash Sheik of Cisco on the Storage (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTz9S0cSdNo) and Network (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1mI-eB8-iE) implications of fcoe

Presentations

My EMC World 2009 presentation: Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), iSCSI and the Converged Data Center – http://www.slideshare.net/stuminiman/fibre-channel-over-ethernet-fcoe-iscsi-and-the-converged-data-center

Innovation Network Lecture – Journey Towards the Converged Data Center (archived webinar) https://community.emc.com/docs/DOC-4398

Papers

Introduction to Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) http://www.emc.com/collateral/hardware/white-papers/h5916-intro-to-fcoe-wp.pdf (Updated Nov ‘09)

Fibre Channel over Ethernet Techbook [from EMC E-Lab] http://www.emc.com/collateral/hardware/technical-documentation/h6290-fibre-channel-over-ethernet-techbook.pdf

Between end of quarter activities and gearing up for both the World Business Forum and EMC Innovation Conference next month, my time for blogging has been a little tight.  The World Business Forum website has a nice bio on each of the speakers, below are some additional resources to help you become familiar with the speakers and their subjects before the conference.  Most of the speakers have books which I wish I had time to read, but blogs and videos will have to do.

Bill George: Bill has lots of good information on his website – http://www.billgeorge.org/ including information on his best-selling book and a blog. He also has a Twitter account. His 7 Lessons for Leading in Crisis:

• Face Reality, Starting with Yourself
• Get the World off Your Shoulders
• Dig Deep for the Root Cause
• Get Ready for the Long Haul
• Never Waste a Good Crisis
• You’re in the Spotlight: Follow True North
• Go on Offense, Focus on Winning Now

Bill Conaty: Some background on him from a 2004 HR Executive of the Year post: http://www.hrexecutive.com/HRE/story.jsp?storyId=4222837 Video on the HSM Americas site: http://us.hsmglobal.com/contenidos/videoteca_detalle.html?idAdjunto=40680

Patrick Lencioni: Articles and “point of view” posts are on his company’s website: http://www.tablegroup.com/pat/

Jeffrey Sachs: A collection of articles are available on his university website: http://www.earth.columbia.edu/articles/view/1804 The website for his book Common Wealth is http://www.sachs.earth.columbia.edu/commonwealth/

T.Boone Pickens: A very interesting character – his website (you can skip the registration page): http://www.pickensplan.com/ Also, here’s an interview on The Daily Show from last November: http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-november-12-2008/t–boone-pickens

Kevin Roberts: He has a website – http://www.saatchikevin.com/ – which includes his blog.  Blog post from WBF Blogger Andrea Meyer did a nice summary of his webinar, Creating Loyalty in a Recession: http://workingknowledge.com/blog/?p=735

George Lucas: Beyond making some of my favorite films of all time (Star Wars series and Indiana Jones – did I mention that my dog’s name is Indiana?), Lucas has transformed the film industry with his company LucasFilm.   As noted in Wikipedia: Skywalker Sound and Industrial Light & Magic, the sound and visual effects subdivisions of Lucasfilm, respectively, have become among the most respected firms in their fields.

Gary Hamel: Two great blog posts from Hutch Carpenter – Gary Hamel: Hierarchy of Employee Traits for the Creative Economy and Gary Hamel on Management Innovation and Enterprise 2.0

In considering the Creative Economy, Gary put forth his own hierarchy of employee traits that will define the winners in the future. His representation of this hierarchy is below:

Irene Rosenfeld: NY Times article discussing her history of success: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/business/09food.htm

Paul Krugman: His blog on the NYTimes: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/ Interview on The Colbert Report in July: http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/233364/july-13-2009/paul-krugman

Bill Clinton: The final speaker needs no introduction, but for an update on his recent activity, check out the Clinton Global Initiatives website: http://www.clintonglobalinitiative.org/.  President Clinton was also on The Daily Show recently – you can watch the interview here: http://www.thedailyshow.com/videos/tag/Bill+Clinton

Two weeks until the conference!  Please share any additional resources that you have.  I am also still looking for your questions for the speakers.

Stuart Miniman

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