Fourth (and BEST!) of series of Holiday Gifts–HUGE “Santa Chad” Giveaways!!!

I’ve got a series of blog posts lined up in the giving spirit of the holiday season (which commercially started the moment Halloween ends – in the US they start with Thanksgiving, rest of world starts ramping up the advertising for Christmas and the other many Nov/Dec holidays).

I’ll give away the punchline now – here are the four gift blog posts:

1. UBERAlign from Nick Weaver – a CRAZY awesome tool that everyone VMware Admin should have in the kitbag going fwd – regardless of whether you use EMC storage or not – the rest Nick – thank you!
2. Recordings of many VMworld sessions – and fixes to broken FTP links to the core FTP content – sorry this has taken so long, but have been a busy, busy little beaver on many things – mostly 2012 planning.
3. SRM Survey – have a chance to influence SRM roadmaps – how cool is that?
4. And this is the biggie… The “Santa Chad” 2011 giveaways – with something for everyone!!!

What are we giving away?  Literally tens of thousands of dollars worth of cool toys that everyone should have in their “holiday wish list”!   No kidding – many SSDs, many Iomega IX2 Cloud Edition units, many Iomega PX4s, iPads, and even a loaded VNX3300e!

 

Read on for details…  There’s a LOT – so read on and read for the details – there is no easier contest, I’m sure!

There’s something in here for everyone.  By “everyone” – I mean even customers not using VMware stuff – and for EMCers, for EMC partners, for EMC technology partners (SAP, Microsoft, VMware, Oracle, Cisco folks) – and of course for customers.

Quietly we've really been ramping up our “Everything ______ at EMC” communities.  These are designed to be open, transparent, and hopefully useful for everyone.  They are simple to subscribe so if it’s important to you – you can stay on top of things.

The goal is to make it easier for customers, partners, and EMCer to be able to get solutions tools, resources, help, and share.

It’s easy to remember: just google “Everything _____ at EMC” where the _____ can be “SAP”, “Oracle”, “Microsoft”, “Oracle”.   By making these literally wide open (you can be anonymous if you want even) – all the content is crawled by google, and very easy to find.

Why?   Well, while according to IDC, EMC is the #1 choice – not just for VMware, but for Oracle (by a LONGSHOT), SAP, and Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, Sharepoint….

…who cares what other people say?   All that matters is how we can help YOU.

I’m a big believer of openness, our partners, and community models – and am pushing this as hard as I can internally, everywhere I can – including pushing hard for more of our hardware/software being made open for people to play with, learn and more (stay tuned for more presents coming on that front!)

…Back to the communities (which I shorthand to EV@E, ES@E, EO@E, EM@E) :

• The Everything VMware at EMC community has been up for some time, and is very vibrant.   If you take a look, you can see people asking questions, celebrating, complaining (and hopefully getting helped), as well as posting tools galore (project Orion, vCenter Ops adapters, powershell and much, much more)
• The Everything SAP at EMC, Everything Oracle at EMC, and Everything Microsoft at EMC communities are for all those folks who may/may not be using VMware (though those apps are always better virtualized!), and are more focused on the applications themselves.

They are starting to take off – with about tens of thousands of unique visits on a month, and 1000s of documents and discussions.   Beyond community support - we have a team of people around the globe whose role is to make sure that if you ask (including requests for sizing) – you get a response – and pretty darn fast.

NOTE: While you can get some great help on the forums – if you have an EMC support issue – always use EMC support: http://support.emc.com and 1-800-svc-4-EMC.

The communities have been up for a little while in “build” mode – but I wanted to really help jumpstart them, so the teams behind them have started contests for the month of November:

• The Microsoft community is running two contests:  
  • The first is a raffle for customers who would like to share their Microsoft/EMC story – and closes on Nov 30st.  If you are an EMCer, an EMC partner, or an EMC customer with a customer story to share – there are 15 prizes (iPads, Iomega PX4s, Iomega IX2s, and Iomega SSDs)…  Check it out here.
  • The second is for the 3 best community contributions – based on the quality of the contribution – there will be 3 winners – with Iomega IX2s, and iPads as prizes.
• The SAP community will be announcing their contest soon (same rough amount of prizes) – stay tuned by subscribing to the feed at their community here.  The EMC SAP team is pretty “heads down” at SAPPHIRE which is happening in Madrid (BTW – will do a post on the VMware/EMC/SAP announcement which is cool – you can read more about that here if you want it right now).
• The Oracle community is running two contests:
  • The first is for the best community blog – and a shameless attempt to leverage SEO (I challenged to provide valuable content and move up the google rankings – and this is a tricky devious way).  It’s running on a monthly basis for Nov/Dec/Jan – and grand prize at the end.  The prizes (November is for an Iomega IX2) are awarded for best blog posts related to Oracle that link to the Everything Oracle at EMC community.   While I respect Jeff Browning’s (one of the guys working to support the community) transparency and desire to win – I DO NOT WANT HIM TO WIN :-)  The rules are clear, and transparent – someone please, please beat him!   You can see details here.
  • The second is for great discussions started on the community – similar model – it will run month from Nov/Dec/January – with an additional grand prize winner.   Perhaps the easiest way to get an SSD around :-)  Check out the details here.   

But – while I’m helping these guys get started, I’m always going to save a pile of stuff for my beloved VMware community :-)

Lets see.. the VMware community is already cooking, and we have so many customer references of customers using vSphere and EMC for all sorts of stuff, I literally have saturated the PR calendar, and they have told me to back off :-)… So… What do do?

• Well – I would like to hear from more customers/service providers who would like to share their stories of how they use vCloud Director and EMC – so the first 3 who contact me (comment on this post, I won’t post your comment – but will reply in email) who would like to share their story publicly will win an Iomega PX4.
• …And, hey – it’s always great to have a more stories of customers using VMware View and XenDesktop (Citrix shares their own story here on how they use EMC) production environments on EMC – so the first ones who contact me (comment on this post, I won’t post your comment – but will reply in email) will win their own Iomega PX4.   First customer with a great VMware View story they want to share takes the first PX4.   First customer with a great Xen Desktop on vSphere story they want to share takes the second PX4.

… But – that leaves me with a LOT of toys in my Santa Chad Q4 2011 bag of fun...

… And I like the idea of a completely low-barrier of entry…

… hmmm …

How about a multi-faceted community give-fest?   A lot of people dug the VMware/Storage survey I ran in 2010, so how about a 2011 refresh?

Ok… Here’s the scoop.  At random to people who complete this survey, we will provide one of the following:

• 10 Iomega SSD
• 10 Iomega IX2 Cloud Edition
• 2 iPad gen 1
• 5 iPad gen 2
• 1 VNXe 3300

I’ll leave the survey open until Dec 9th, and report the winners on Dec 16th.

That’s right.  For the simple 5 minute task of the survey (and I will share the results publicly – while maintaining anonymity), you could win even a VNXe 3300. This is no toy.  It’s the 2 storage processor (highly available) unit, and is configured with 15 600GB 15K RPM SAS disks (9TB raw), and with 8 1GbE interfaces, as well as 10GbE interfaces.  WOW.  Here’s what it looks like…

Just go here to complete the “Official Unofficial” VMware/Storage Virtual Geek survey 2011 edition!

Thank you all for being EMCers, EMC partners, and most importantly of all – EMC customers.   THANK YOU.   Happy holidays!

Comments

[Timgleed]

Wow! Awesome as ever Chad! :-)

[Scorpinus]

Hey Santa Chad,

I really need that PX4 for my homelab to get started on vSphere 5. But we don't use any EMC storage devices. So to bad I can't share anything. Great giveaway btw! Keep them coming :D

Regards,

Arjen

[Duco]

Great chad

[Adam Van Haren]

Hi Chad,

We an EMC customer CX3-20 and NX4 (where a pretty small shop)
But we recently deployed a View 4.6 with 45 desktops on our NX4 using Wyse P20 zero clients and the feedback from the staff has been amazing!

We had been looking at desktop management software along the lines of dell kace solution with the added cost of purchasing new computers just made vdi sounds more attractive all the time.

We weren't sure if the baby NX4 was going to be up to the task but after running some vdi assesments it looked promising and to date it's been handling the io quite well.

We debated how to provision the desktops over nfs or fc and ended up going with fc, composer and linked clones do a really good job on saving space and fibre was what we where comfortable with.

to sum it up it's been a great success and i wish we had the budget for a shiny new vnx but it just wasn't to be but the end result was good and that's a succesful project!

Peace out!
Adam

[Robert Pfannkuche]

Just checking if the px4 for the Xen Desktop on vSphere story is gone. We have xendesktop 4 on esx 5 with the desktops running on hyper-v. It's a goofy setup :)

[Chris McNally]

Dude, you rock! What great geek gifts.

[Virtual Server Hosting]

Hey Santa Chad, they should wish me luck to get that PX4 to start my VMware Sphere 5. Great giveaways Santa.