Research for the World Innovation Forum 2010

I will be attending the World Innovation Forum in NYC on June 8-9th [disclosure: I have a free pass to the conference as a blogger; I am under no obligation to write anything].  I’ve done some background checks, researching the line-up of speakers, and wanted to share what I’ve found.  I like to understand a bit of their backgrounds so that I’m ready for the rapid-fire rotation that we’ll see.  I find that reviewing the speaker’s most recent book summary, blog posts and Twitter are useful, so I created a spreadsheet with all of this information (click on the image below to be taken to the Google Document Spreadsheet).  On the spreadsheet, you can follow links by highlighting a cell and clicking the arrow that appears to the left of the cell.

I’m excited by what I’ve learned already — the conference has a good mix of academics, executives and entrepreneurs.  Twitter has grown a lot in the last year; not only is one of the founders, Biz Stone, a speaker, but seven other speakers have active Twitter accounts.  I found some good multimedia content including speeches from Pfizer CEO Jeff Kindler, podcasts from former Amazon Chief Scientist Andreas Weigend, and an episode of the Colbert Report with Teach for America’s Wendy Kopp.  Over half of the speakers are authors, and there is a mix of how much material can be found online for free. Michael Porter’s website on Harvard Business Review is fantastic, there is also a lot of content for the environmentally conscious on Joel Makower’s website and Jeffrey Hollender’s Seventh Generation company’s site.  Seth Godin is a prolific blogger and author; he also has two great TED videos (of course, it’s rare that I find a TED video that I don’t love).  I’m sure that I’ll be adding to my bookshelf after attending the conference.

Remote Participation

In addition to the free content delivered through Twitter and blogs, HSM is also offering a full live webcast [for a fee] of the conference.  As for what you can expect from Twitter and blogs, see my posts from last year’s World Innovation Forum and World Business Forum.  Make sure to check out all of the members of the Blogger’s Hub; I’m looking forward to catching up with friends from last year’s conferences and meeting some new bloggers.  The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #wif10 and you can follow me @stu.

Please post a comment with any additional resources, suggestions or questions that you have for the speakers and consider subscribing to this blog.

Stuart Miniman

https://blogstu.wordpress.com

Storagezilla on Blogging, iPad and Bias

Here is an interview with Mark Twomey aka Storagezilla which I filmed at the Blogger’s Lounge at EMC World 2010 in Boston.  The clip is 5 minutes long.

Mark discusses how he began blogging in 1999 thanks to some college connections (he was already an employee at EMC in Cork).  In 2006, Jeremiah Owyang (then working for Hitachi Data Systems) “unveiled” that Mark was the author of the Storagezilla blog.

The clip also gives Mark’s quick hits on Twitter, Apple’s iPad and how there really are no unbiased opinions in the blogosphere.

When Jamie Pappas and I put together a presentation about using Twitter for EMC business purposes, we put a disclaimer in the deck that reminded people that there is only one Storagezilla.

Stuart Miniman

https://blogstu.wordpress.com

Stu goes to Wikibon

My new position is as a Principal Research Contributor for Wikibon.  This means that I will be focused on the tech, doing research and being an analyst.  Louis Gray broke the news of my new position — listen to our 8 minute interview on the CinchCast site or by clicking play below.

https://blogstu.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/wikibon.mp3

I’ve been humbled by the outpouring of goodwill including a blog post from Storagezilla and so many notes on my blog post, Twitter and Facebook.

@stu has a new gig which sounds pretty cool for him. We’ll miss him at EMC, but he’ll still be in the clan!

Chuck Hollis

SOCIAL MEDIA + CAREERS: Another EMC ROCK STAR OFF TO GREAT THINGS … Very happy for @Stu. RT @stu: [Blog] http://bit.ly/bOe6N1 #notgoodbye

polly pearson

I’m not moving — Wikibon’s HQ is in Marlborough, MA.  I will continue to post on this blog site.  I’ll need to figure out the balance of what goes on this site and what goes on other sites — feedback is always welcome.  If you’d like to follow the journey, please consider subscribing (click this link or email notification available on the right bar)

Thank you,

Stuart Miniman

https://blogstu.wordpress.com

Thank You, EMC, for 10 Great Years

There’s no easy way to say this—I’m leaving EMC.

There will be plenty of time to talk later on about where my journey continues. For now, let me say that I’m staying in the industry; will continue to be involved with a mix of technology, innovation and social media; and that I am not going to a competitor of EMC.

I want to thank EMC for all of the opportunities that I’ve had over the past ten years.  I’ve worked with and learned from thousands of passionate and intelligent people on countless projects.  The teams that I worked on made EMC more than just a job.  A few highlights as I look back:

• The EMC Support Matrix (and online version, E-Lab Navigator) was a project with a global team that touched almost every corner of the company
• EMC Select – working with numerous EMC groups, with partners and with customers, this very small team functioned like an internal start-up which yielded some fantastic financial results
• EMC Innovation Conference – the first one in 2007 opened my eyes to the world of social media thanks to Chuck Hollis‘ presentation; 2008 pulled me into the innovation world even more as part of the selection committee; and the 2009 conference is one of the high points of my career – another global, agile, passionate team doing anything it takes to put on an event that has turned me and many others into innovation ambassadors

When I started at EMC, there was no Facebook, no Twitter, not even LinkedIn (there was 1 blogger, but it was many years later before I was even reading blogs).  In my operational role in the company, I always tried to look at processes and tools that could help improve efficiencies. The two things which can not be replaced are relationships and organizational knowledge that are built up over time.  When I got involved in social media, I networked with many Connectors inside and outside EMC.  This exponentially amplified the number of relationships that I had and the knowledge that I could tap into from many sources.

While there are so many people at EMC that I’ll miss interacting with on a daily basis, I hope that I’ll keep in touch with many of them.  Making a change is hard, and I want to thank everyone for the encouragement and support that I’ve received over the years.  I hope that through my discussions on social media internally,  I’ve helped to replace myself on the EMC Blogging Corp. The wave is here and I’ve been humbled to be able to ride some of it with Len, Jamie, Polly, Chad, Chuck, Barry, Mark, Gina, Dave, Dave, Steve and the other bloggers (including the ever-growing vSpecialist guys who have an unbeatable mix of technology and communication skills).  Please stay in touch – you know where to find me.

Stuart Miniman

stuminiman@gmail.com (email, Google Chat, Buzz)

508-561-9626 (mobile)

Twitter @stu

LinkedIn

https://blogstu.wordpress.com

EMC World Cubed – Here’s all the Video

I’ve returned (but not recovered) from EMC World.  Did you watch the live video from SiliconANGLE? The over 5600 Tweets on #emcworld? Well, just in case you missed something, here are some videos and links.

First of all, on the blogger front – Len “the mayor” Devanna pulled off another fantastic blogger’s lounge – click on my “Blogger Photos” tab above for the group photo which links to Flickr where I have all of the names and Twitter handles listed.

Video

All of the videos from “The Cube” can be found at http://www.justin.tv/nicefishfilms/videos

The videos include Joe Tucci, Michael Capellas, Pat Gelsinger, Howard Elias, Jeremy Burton, Jeff Nick, Steve Herrod, Chad Sakac, Chuck Hollis, Frank Hauck w/ the cover story customer from ON Magazine, the Women’s Executive Power Lunch with Polly Pearson, Kathrin Winkler and Gina Minks, the social media rockstar panel with Len, John Troyer, Stephen Foskett and John Furrier, and so many more that you should just take off next week to watch them all.

I too stepped into the Cube for my first live video experience.  I had three segments discussing the Converged Network announcement that EMC made on Monday.  The first segment (hosted here) was with Greg Schulz and Scott Lowe.  All three of us cover networking in our blogs regularly, so it was an easy first assignment to cover with bright, articulate guys where I know their material.

The second segment (hosted here) was with Doug Ingraham and Charles Hood of Brocade.  A good mix of the long EMC partnership, dynamics in the marketplace and what we’re seeing in the field.

The third segment (hosted here) was with Rajeev Bhardwj of Cisco discussing from how using 10Gb Ethernet and Converged Networks ties into the Journey to the Private Cloud to how EMC offering the Nexus 2000, 5000, 7000 expands the partnership.  I shot another video with Cisco which should be showing up on their EMC World microsite soon.

EMC’s video team grabbed me to discuss a variety of topics and they’ve posted this one on social media at the conference.

So much goes on behind the scenes to pull of an event, as a friend of mine has on his email “I only make this look easy!“. Feedback and comments are always welcome.

Stuart Miniman

https://blogstu.wordpress.com

Joe Tucci Joins the Blogging at EMC World 2010

Quick video that sums up the first day of EMC World.

The first bit is at the opening night reception where thanks to some coordination over Twitter, we got a large group of bloggers together to chat.  The next clip is in the Blogger’s Lounge – a very large gathering of press, analysts, customers, partners and EMC employees that blog along with some special guests.  He wasn’t on the official video schedule, but Joe Tucci – EMC’s CEO – made a special appearance at the live video session.  Joe brought along newly appointed CEO of Acadia, Michael Capellas.  Joe came off camera and said “I guess I’m a blogger now” – priceless!

All of the video from the live broadcast are available on http://www.justin.tv/nicefishfilms and also at http://siliconANGLE.com.  Below is a photo from the social media rockstar panel including John Troyer of VMware, Len Devanna of EMC (host of the Blogger’s Lounge), Stephen Foskett of Gestalt IT and John Furrier of SiliconANGLE (the guys behind these videos).

Check out some videos, let us know what you think.  Anyone want to name all of the people in the video? If you’re new to my site, please consider subscribing, and also find me on Twitter.  Also be sure to check out the official EMC World 2010 PR Newsroom.

Stuart Miniman

https://blogstu.wordpress.com

EMC is Your Sherpa on the Journey to Converged Networks

I’ve spoken often on this blog about Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) as a great option for Converged Network technology.  There have been a lot of discussions on the technical maturation of standards and products for FCoE, there has been less discussion of how the operational and organizational changes of deploying a converged network will be dealt with.  To help customers work through these changes, EMC will leverage over a decade of expertise in storage networking to deliver world-class services and products for Ethernet-based storage products.  The services and products cover multiple 10Gb Ethernet solutions including FCoE, Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE), iSCSI and NAS.

EMC has travelled this path before

Learning new technologies, interoperability, best practices, trouble shooting… EMC has walked these paths many times. They understand both the pitfalls and the shortcuts, and know how to guide you even in places where vision can be blurred by lack of oxygen.  The E-Lab organization even publishes free “maps” including interoperability guides and best practices (including a full Tech Book on Ethernet and FCoE).

Confidence in choosing the right path

Even with a good map and guide, the goals of your journey can change over time, so the services and products that EMC provides are designed to allow for flexibility and growth.  The services provide you all of the tools to deploy a reliable and secure data center.  EMC isn’t on this trip alone, there is a full stack of partners to travel with you including VMware, Microsoft, Cisco and Brocade.  Wherever you are along the spectrum of upgrading to 10Gb Ethernet, deploying FCoE or rolling out a full private cloud environment, EMC can help.

Photos: (top) Grand Canyon taken by me; (middle) actual cables from E-Lab

Below are the slides of my EMC World session.  In addition to presenting the session live twice at EMC World, there is a recording of the session that attendees can get from the EMC World website.  My EMC FCoE whitepaper has also been updated and can be found here.  You can watch live streaming internet TV from EMC World discussing Converged Networks with EMC, Brocade and Cisco at 3:30pm on Wednesday, May 12th.

Stuart Miniman

https://blogstu.wordpress.com

VPLEX: Redefining the Boundaries of the Data Center

In March, Pat Gelsinger introduced EMC’s vision for Virtual Storage (my blog post is here). Today, EMC announced the VPLEX family of products—the first new products that deliver on the vision.  VPLEX is a Distributed Federation solution, which means that we can enable a single copy of data to be shared, accessed and relocated over distance.  When new technologies are introduced into the marketplace, people are most comfortable in making comparisons to things that they already know.  In this post, I’ll compare traditional replication solutions with VPLEX Distributed Federation.

Federation Instead of Separation

In a traditional replication solution, there is a primary site and a secondary site for failover or recovery of data.  In contrast, with VPLEX, the data is active at both sites at the same time.  Rather than putting together complex failover scenarios, having the flexibility to have active data between sites will allow for maintenance without downtime and workload balancing across multiple data sites.  Instead of thinking of “site A” and “site B” separated by policies and distance, we can start to think of our pool of federated resources that spans multiple physical data centers.  VPLEX can change how you think about deploying data centers; rather than a disaster recovery site, deploy data centers to achieve additional efficiencies (such as taking advantage of low cost energy) and performance (optimizing locations to be close to clients).

Near Today, Far Tomorrow

The network between the locations is critical for any solution to work.  Similar to replication solutions, we can consider whether a solution is synchronous or asynchronous and how the network fits into a customer’s existing environment.  Enterprise customers will typically have network connectivity between locations that are close to each other.  When these existing links have the appropriate bandwidth and other network characteristics–such as those required for replication solutions–the same links can also be used for VPLEX.  Synchronous solutions of 100km are available with VPLEX Metro today.  Longer distance (asynchronous) solutions require special links. Asynchronous solutions will be available with VPLEX Geo in 2011.

As I hinted at in my previous post, the VPLEX solution ties into other development work from partners.  VPLEX will expand the solutions of VMware VMotion (see this great VPLEX/VMotion whitepaper) and Microsoft Live Migration, plus work with the latest networking technologies from Cisco (including leveraging OTV) and Brocade.  Virtualization of your servers, network and storage redefines the boundaries of the Data Center by creating a single pool or resources separated by distance.

_________________________________________________________

Click on the graphic above to go to the VPLEX launch site which includes customer videos and whitepapers.  You can also hear more about VPLEX live on May 10th with streaming internet TV from EMC World: Pat Gelsinger at will be on at 3pm Eastern and Brian Gallagher at 4pm Eastern.

Stuart Miniman

https://blogstu.wordpress.com

Federation meets The Cube: LIVE broadcasting from EMC World

I’m really more of a Star Wars fanboy, but while the official theme is “Journey to the Private Cloud”, I’ve seen a couple of Star Trek references:  Federation (not the guys in the red shirts, but Storage Federation) has been a buzzword around the industry.   This year, if you’re not attending, you have a chance to get a taste of the content and excitement of the event.  EMC is working with SiliconANGLE who will be bringing “The Cube” (photo above is the Federation Star Ship Enterprise meeting the Borg Cube) to EMC World – see their post, Cloud & Storage Blowout – Chowda, SiliconANGLE, The Cube, and EMC World – Shipping Up To Boston (note that due to BCEC regulations, we’ll be serving “virtual chowder” – gift cards – instead of the real thing).

As Stu Miniman says, EMC World is the Superbowl of Storage.  It’s the main industry event where the action is not just the show but the partying and side events of which we’ll be covering like a blanket.

What content are you getting?  THREE keynote speakers (2 of which will be coming directly from the stage straight to the live video), top industry bloggers & analysts, partners (VMware, Cisco, Brocade and others) and more special guests to be announced later.  Topics will span everything from Federation, Cloud and Virtualization to Social Media, Security and Sustainability.

The broadcast will be LIVE from 2:30pm-5:30pm Eastern time on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday (May 10-12) and can be seen on http://siliconANGLE.com/emcworld2010.  Here is a sneak peek at the schedule (click on the graphic below to enlarge).  Note that all items subject to change, but the people named are currently scheduled. Last Update 5/6/10, 4pm.

I’ll be participating in the Networking discussion on Wednesday.

In a recent Seth Godin webinar that I attended, Seth stated that there is something about live video that excites the caveman in people’s brains.  Giving away some free content from a show can pull people into the event, increase buzz and get people more interested in attending live the next time (see my blog post from last year discussing this).  If you won’t be at EMC World in person, I hope you’ll tune in and let us know what you think.  If you’re new to this site, please consider subscribing to this blog for my ongoing mission to cover EMC World and beyond.

Stuart Miniman

https://blogstu.wordpress.com