Dell Storage at the Toronto VMUG user conference

Posted by Gina Rosenthal in VMUG | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Today I’m at the Toronto VMUG user conference along with some of the sales and partner folks from Dell Storage here in Canada. I’m taking an afternoon break to charge up devices and post on what I’ve seen so far.

First of all, there are a lot of people here – over 450 users! It’s the first time they have done a full day user conference in Toronto, and there is obviously a demand for this sort of event. Hopefully for the next one, they won’t put the vendors in the same room with the keynotes. OMG PAINFUL.

Angelo Luciani is the Toronto VMUG leader, and from what I can tell he is all about community. He came to find me when I tweeted that I didn’t know anyone at the conference, just so I would know a storage person in Canada. He’s pretty passionate about promoting Canadian virtualization bloggers, so if you fit that bill you should reach out to him. Two new blogs that I’ll be checking out thanks to Angelo are mwpreston.net and discoposse.com.

Stan Bobnic is an enterprise storage solutions specialist for Dell in the Toronto area. He  gave Dell’s presentation: Accelerate VDI success with Dell EqualLogic unified virtualized storage & vmware view 5. Very lofty title for a pretty in-depth presentation on VDI.  I tweeted quite a bit from Stan’s presentation. One thing I didn’t know is that EqualLogic was the 1st vendor to support vMotion. Pretty cool!

Mike Laverick was the guest keynote speaker. He runs an enterprise called RTFM education – loads of independent technical content over there, with an emphasis on virtualization (you really should check it out). He gave a no-nonsense cloud presentation, here are my notes from that:

  • Journey to cloud has to be strategic – not tactical like the journey to virtualization was
  • It doesnt matter if you have an awesome service catalog if you can’t make that service live for 7 days
  • Cloud can’t be delivered by software, must be done by looking at existing layers of process and approvals that are making it take a week to deliver simple services
  • The first time is fast, second time is tragedy. History will repeat – will we fall in traps we did w virtualization
  • cloud has to be biz driven
  • cloud – some people I say “I don’t care” but….
    • end users have NEVER cared about what it takes to provide it services. They have always expected it to work when they need it.
    • Mike’s definition of infrastructure: anything you absolutely rely on, but that everyone takes for granted
    • ppl (it) responsible has to care more. Esp if a service is moved out of our domain, we need to understand and be able to report/explain  reliablity, security, crazy SLA charges for services the business expects
  • “nothing new under the sun” is not always true. Exp: model t vs ferrari. Both cars, so that’s not new. But Ferrari has tons of new stuff the model t couldn’t even dream of
  • shifting from end-user to end-consumer (wrt BYOD)
    • end user is actually an insult from our industry (you know its true…..esp if you have done any level of support)
    • corp IT needs marketing – IT is paid to be invisible. We are good at just providing many, many services
    • what are the things we (IT) do as default? Make those as the big marketing plan – to external (cloud) providers,  services like backups are optional
    • promote and welcome end-consumer innovation – don’t discourage new devices on network, find ways to work w end consumer
  • cloud maturity – bumps in road
    • quality fo service catalog – your shopfront for IT
    • DR solutions, backup solutions
      • hard to be more than test dev if you put production based in cloud with no backup strategy
    • Security – this can kill and blackball innovation
  • Don’t base job security on protecting a fiefdom

Well break time is over, and I’m headed back to the event. Look for pictures on the Dell Storage Facebook page later.

The next VMUG we’ll be at is in Austin on March 15, hope to see y’all there!

 

 

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