The second day at SNWUSA kicked off with three keynotes. One from Randy Mott, CIO of HP, who had a very good session of how they changed their internal infrastructure and processes to increase efficiency and ability to innovate. Second one was from my boss, or actually my bosses, bosses boss so that gives some perspective where I fit in the organization :-), Jack Domme who entered the world of massive data storage, preservation, and ability to harvest and analyse on these enormous amounts of data.
After that I went to the expo to check on the guys in the HDS booth and the setup of the demo’s. Always very nice to see all the software features and functions we provide.
My first breakout session was from John Webster who was providing an overview on “Big Data”. Now what the heck is big data? John provided on overview of some definitions, products and some freaky stuff that’s on the horizon. Then we’ re talking about brain implants and some things you really don’t want to talk or think about since this might touch the real essence of life. Anyway, when we got our feet back on the ground again, I went over to Kevin Leahy who runs the Cloud strategy at IBM’s CTO office.I think this was the best visited break-out session and people actually had no seat. As Kevin pointed out there are a lot of points that needs to be looked at when either adopting or providing a cloud service. But on the other side it also gives you a lot of flexibility and options to provide IT services to your business and customers.
During lunch I recieved a message from Horst Truestedt who presented my FC-GS proposal on fibre-channel resiliency at the T11 committee meeting in Philadelphia. He mentioned it was extremely well received and by and got unanimously got accepted. This was the best news for today. I’ve been waiting a long time for this and it seems it’s coming now. Yeahh.
After lunch I had the opportunity to meet a lot of people who were here long before I got into this business and warped some pretty interesting discussions into the equation. Due to this I missed a session so I have to dig up the presso from the SNIA website.
The last two keynotes were from Krishna Nathan,who runs the development of IBM’s storage development and he had some interesting points but also some things that are already there in the market place and have been done and dusted by HDS for a long time. Wondering if IBM is trying to play catchup here.The last session was from Dave Smoley. Dave runs the internal IT stuff at Flextronics. His message was that even with a very tight budget and well defined standards innovation doesn’t have to suffer. Instead he encourages companies to push their employees to be creative and come up with ideas that might have high value to the business but not necessarily cost an arm and a leg.
During diner I met up with Robin Harris who runs the StorageMojo blog and a column on ZDNet , were we had some interesting discussions around SSD and life expectancy of disks. Not how long a single disk or SSD is running but we were questioning when disk would become obsolete. Robin thinks he’s going to be retired a long time before disks run out of existence whereas I have the view disks will cease to exist within 10 to 15 years. We’ll see, time will tell. 🙂
A lot of buzz has been going around regarding #storagebeers. It’s a social gathering of people of all shapes, size, background and mindsets all working in the storage industry. It’s a great event with a fantastic turnout. Word goes around this was the best #storagebeers ever. I can’t tell, haven’t been to one before but it indeed was a great evening.
THE Marc Farley aka StorageRap at #storagebeers.
The best part is there is absolutely no competitive mindset, everyone talks to everyone about everything but storage. (well a little bit but all geek stuff. :-))
As you can see on the right a great turnup.
That more-or-less sums up my day.
CU tomorrow.
Cheers, E
