I had a great time at Interop.  I loved being there as part of the Dell Storage team. I loved reconnecting with old friends. I attended many sessions on cloud and storage. I posted some of my (mostly) unedited session notes. There were a few sessions that really made me think about where the storage industry is going, and what role we will play in cloud computing.

Dell at Interop

Dell had quite a presence at Interop. We talked to lots of people about all things enterprise. The Dell Tech Center was there, and have posted the following blog posts:

• Dell At Interop Las Vegas 2011
• Dell At Interop Las Vegas 2011 – Day 1
• Dell At Interop Las Vegas – Day 2

Franklin from Dell OEM also had a post covering the conference. Here are some of my favorite pictures of the Dell booth – but every time I went to the conference expo floor the booth was swarming with people!

Enterprise Cloud Summit

I really loved the Enterprise Cloud Summit that took place on Sunday and Monday. I posted notes from the following sessions:

• 10 Cloud Computing Fundamentals
• Linking Private and Public Clouds
• Optimizing Hybrid Cloud Communication
• Understanding Big Data

It was obvious from listening to the sessions that most people are still transitioning their thought processes from the old ways of managing IT devices (servers, storage, switches) to designing systems that can actually manage information. It was great to be in sessions led by the people who are paving the path to this new way of doing IT.

Conference Sessions

The full conference started on Tuesday. There was a panel that discussed the future of Data Storage. The panel included Vanessa Alverez, Stephen Foskett, and Howard Marks. It was moderated by Mike Fratto of Network Computing.

The panel talked about primary deduplication, application performance and capacity constraints, auto-tiering, compression software, and thin provisioning. I was very disappointed that the panel didn’t mention Dell Storage very much in their examples. This article about Dell’s Fluid data storage strategy is a good place to start to find information on how Dell’s storage products and acquisition address many of the topics addressed by the panel. Or you could always ask. 😉

Vanessa Alverez also hosted a panel on object storage (my notes are here). The panelists included representatives from Cleversafe, Amplidata, Caringo, and Rackspace. One of the topics the panelists dived into was the role cloud plays in object storage. The nature of content that is best served by cloud is big blobs of unstructured data – digital music, video, cat scan, surveillance. The decision to move to cloud-based storage should be based on individual use cases. It’s really all about the data: massive unstructured data that is being produced by enterprises as well as consumers.

Another session I really enjoyed was led by Stephen Foskett, and was on FCoE vs iSCSI. It was a history lesson, and then a comparison of the new(ish) fibre channel protocols, with a nice call-out to a Dell Tech Center post on iSCSI performance.

This picture of Stephen is from his Interop flickr set, he took some amazing pictures of the social scene. More on the social part of Interop in my next post