Shock: Pete is dorkier than the walking robot guy
I mustered the best grimace I could and still I failed. You’d think I’ve never been to a conference before, what with my swag bag, backpack, shirt full of cards and pens…I’m missing only the pocket protector and a sign that proclaims I still live in my mother’s basement. For the record, I do not, but only because mom doesn’t have a basement and the kids like having their own bedrooms.
Aside from the self realization that I am an unrepentant nerd I did learn a few other things at EMC World this year.
First: Reporting in the cloud is a major concern for the attendees. It seems the proliferation of tools and technologies for interrogating IT infrastructure has not “unclouded” the picture much. Clients are still looking for the magic sauce. EMC announced a product for called DataBridge to meet this need. Other vendors were in attendance and had plenty of traffic to occupy the time.
Second: I revisited my storage roots and sat in on a number of engineering sessions. My favorite was the discussion from our folks on FAST Cache and Fast VP use cases. I followed that with lunch with engineers from vmware. I came away with the conclusion we are not taking near enough advantage of the capabilities of tools like FAST. In consulting we take the approach that FAST is an architecture tiering tool and insurance policy if configured correctly. We can do more with it; I need to get my hands on that presentation because I think it was the best one of the bunch. They actually used math and said “solve for X”. Sold. I enjoyed myself thoroughly.
The nerdiest presentation appealing to the dorkiest guy in the audience? Big shock.