What is that sin? Ideally a blog post (at least in my experience) is focused on a single topic, and (again, in my opinion) stays within “idea boundaries”. If you have something that is really best represented as separate ideas, post separate blog posts.
Well – rules are made for breaking, so what the heck….
Also – I’m at EMC’s leadership meetings (Mon-Tues) and then the Sales Kickoff (Wed-Thursday) and have my hands full, but loads of cool stuff, so if it’s not in this quick “burst format”, then it’s just not going to get out. It’s also why I’ve been a bit “blog silent” – as I’ve been prepping for the week.
If interested, read on for: EMC leadership meeting, sales kickoff, VSA instructions, mind-bending iSCSI performance, my 2 cents on the HP/MSFT announcement, customer feedback on a customer council….
- Leadership meeting was awesome. Great to have the teams together, talk tactics, talk strategy. Exec team rocks. Joe awesome as always, Paul M and Pat G were standouts for me, but so was Frank Hauck with a great leadership message. Frank, I love working for you, and for EMC – you are a great leader. The things coming in 2010 will blow people’s minds. I CAN’T WAIT.
- Sales kickoff – loads of fun. Bill Scannell runs an amazing sales operation in the Americas, consistently impressed with everyone. Raftery is a gas, and those of you there know what I’m talking about. Patricia Florissi was inspirational as the new Americas CTO. For those that are curious about Raftery’s joke, I really DID say “dude” in the boardroom to Joe. The funny thing was that for the rest of the meeting, the full exec team only referred to each other as “dude” which was a sight to see :-) Glad to have my own leadership team here with me – am very proud of them all and the team we are creating. Looking forward to the divisional breakouts tomorrow.
- For those using the new Celerra VSA – updated docs and videos are going up, but it works easily – you just don’t need eth2 anymore. eth0 and eth1 are all that is needed. the “control station” access comes from those interfaces, no need for eth2. The new Celerra VSA is faster, works in less memory, and everything is working great… one exception – rarely SRM issues – we think this may need an SRA fix – working on it.
- Ianhf – as a customer (and a large one at that of both EMC and others – a rate perspective) thank you VERY much for the feedback here. We do take those customer council sessions very, VERY seriously. I try to do them every chance I get. The customer feedback (good/bad/ugly) goes RIGHT back into the company and the products.
- Do you think IP storage is not ready for prime time? Debating iSCSI performance with software based initiators/HW based approaches? Wondering about 10GbE? Thinking about Hyper-V? You WANT to attend this webcast tomorrow, trust me. I’ve seen the test results from compatriots, and they are indeed impressive.
- What do I think of the HP/Microsoft announcement? It’s definitely material - $250M of joint investment over 3 years is absolutely material in anyone’s books (though much smaller than EMC’s R&D and Go-To-Market focus on VMware, for relative comparison). Didn’t see anything in it that represented the key ideas in the VCE announcement (existing tech integration, joint sales, joint support, joint venture), but I absolutely don’t underestimate my competitor HP and my coopetitor Microsoft. I would expect some engineering developments to come over time. Wonder if they are working on something UIM like, or like the sets of technologies we discussed at VMworld in SS5240. Recently VMware has done joint announcements with HP – so I wouldn’t read TOO much into it – people are too quick to jump to “all out conflict”, where the reality is that coopetition and customer choice rules the day. BUT – all that said, we do see an emerging “choice” – one of a more integrated “infrastructure as a service” enabled stack from a technology/sales/support standpoint. Don’t think MS and HP are there yet (though I’m sure I’m biased) – will see if they are getting there.
On topics 5 and 6 – one interesting development…. EMC has a slew of Hyper-V solutions – see below. This covers our three platforms, production and backup use cases, FC and iSCSI, Replication Manager for array-integrated snapshots, Networker support and more.
http://www.emc.com/collateral/hardware/white-papers/h6643-symmetrix-microsoft-hyper-v-wp.pdf
Further, expect even MORE from EMC on Hyper-V, but not from me :-) My “Hyper-V doppleganger” has been named – which is Adrian Simays. I can’t be happier about that – I want to have someone at EMC driving EMC integration with Hyper-V as hard as I drive EMC integration with VMware – leaving me with no conflict of interest. Adrian was one of the first people I hired at EMC, and I was fortunate. He joined from NetApp, and he’s been incredibly successful, incredibly influential at EMC. I’m always happy to have an “enemy” who I respect, and Adrian isn’t an “enemy” in any real sense of the word. A trusted colleague, a great friend – was great to sit down for dinner and a drink, and will be great to “compete” with him (in the end the customer wins!)
But – ok, now oooff. Off back to bed – have a busy day tomorrow! Can’t wait for the divisional sessions!
Does Adrian have a blog and is it as cool as yours? :)
Posted by: Shawn E | January 14, 2010 at 04:50 PM