Today I registered “CharlesHood.Me” and “CharlesHood.Org” domain names, and redirected them here to my main site at CharlesHood.Net. Kudos to Hover, my registrar of choice, for their genius marketing campaign — they emailed me to let me know that the domains were available. Yes, they know all too well… I’m a domain junkie. But how important are domain names now in the age of social media? It seems most of my interactions these days are either on my Facebook page or on Twitter, not this blog. So tell me dear readers, did I just blow $25? Sound off in the comments!
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I’m working booth #710 at VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas this week! Here’s a map showing where we are located in relation to other vendors. I’ll be there at 5 PM tonight (August 29th) when the Expo Hall opens. See you there!
- I will be working the Brocade kiosk (booth #7) in the Microsoft Private Cloud Partner Pavilion:
Microsoft TechEd, May 16 - 19, 2011 - Private Cloud Partner Pavilion
I’ll be talking about Brocade solutions for Hyper-V, SharePoint, Exchange, SQL Server, Lync, and SCOM.
Don’t miss the Tweetup on Monday, May 16, in the Microsoft Server & Cloud Platform Booth at 12:30pm!
Hope to see you there!
VMworld 2011 Session Voting
May 15
It’s time for VMworld 2011 Session Voting, and the process couldn’t be easier. Just login to vmworld.com (or create an account) and click “Vote Now” on the right side of the page under Session Voting. Find the session name you want and click the Thumbs Up icon. (Click OK to confirm – the icon should turn green to indicate a successful vote!)
Here are the three Brocade sessions:
- 3182 – “Scaling Virtualized Data Centers with Cloud-Optimized Networks” –http://goo.gl/Yy5ja
- 3185 – “Virtual End User Computing with VMware View and Brocade’s VCS Technology” – http://goo.gl/a3aQQ
- 3200 – “Delivering Business Continuity Solution with VMware” –http://goo.gl/PlYzU
You only have until May 18th, so get clicking!
P.S. My friend Tommy Trogden (aka @vTexan) could use your votes as well! Details here.
EMC World 2011 Wrap-up
May 14
Congratulations to Rainer Domke who won Brocade’s big $16,000 give-away at EMC World this year! Brocade Vice President Charlie Leeming was on-hand to present the check.
The big news on Wednesday was the Arrow announcement of an integrated, cloud-optimized solution bundle called CloudTrack that features best-in-class products from EMC, VMware and Brocade. I can’t wait to start talking to EMC resellers about this solution!
I actually had to leave EMC World early this year, so in my stead, I’d like to point you to the following two blog posts for a wrap-up:
- The first one is from Ian Whiting (aka @IanTheBlog), SVP of Worldwide Sales at Brocade, in a blog post titled, “Speed Dating in Sin City.”
- The second is from Emory Epperson and Pavel Radda with their Ethernetfabric.com debut post titled, “Postcard from Vegas – EMC World & Interop 2011.”
See you next year!
EMC World 2011 Day 2 Photos
May 14
I finally got around to uploading my photos from Day 2 to Flickr, check ‘em out here.
The crowd was excellent on Tuesday, with no loss of enthusiasm whatsoever. Booth traffic was heavy. Our “game show” format was a big hit; Ken Newman really knows how to engage the audience. (Nice job as always Ken!)
On this day I was actually able to venture out a little bit and see some of the booths of our partners. It was nice to see Brocade gear in both the Greenplum and Isilon demo racks.
The highlight of the day, for me, was the opportunity to meet Brocade CEO Michael Klayko before his interview by SiliconANGLE on theCube. (You may think it’s funny that I haven’t met our CEO in person, but remember I’m a field guy in Atlanta, I’m never at HQ in San Jose.) Mike did a great job on the interview, he really knocked it out of the park. If you missed it live, the replay is available here. After the interview, I was able to snap this photo of Stuart Miniman, Dave Vellante, and John Furrier posing with Mr. Klayko.
Tuesday night finished up with the Brocade party at the Marquee. The Wes Quave Band provided the entertainment, and a good time was had by all.
EMC World 2011 Day 1 Photos
May 10
My photos from EMC World 2011 Day 1 are now posted on Flickr for your viewing enjoyment! This is just a photo dump, so some pictures are better than others. (Dammit Jim, I’m a blogger, not a photographer!)
Here’s some of the gear we have in our demo rack:
- Brocade 6510 – this is the new 48 port 16 Gb Fibre Channel switch that we just announced last week. (The very same one that our good partner EMC announced that they would be the first to deliver! Thank you EMC!)
- DCX 8510-4 – this is the 4 slot version of Brocade’s new 16Gb Fibre Channel Backbone Director chassis. This was a key element of our cloud-optimized SAN announcement last week.
- VDX 6720 – this is our Ethernet fabric switch featuring Brocade VCS technology. (Named the “Most Important Enterprise IT Product for 2010” by CTO Edge.)
- Brocade MLX – this is the 8 slot variant of our advanced Ethernet router with wire-speed 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE), 10 GbE, and 1 GbE capability.
We have lots of EMC gear in our booth as well, including a Greenplum DCA and the new VNX unified storage platform. We also have a flash based demo showing how Brocade networking works with VMware vMotion and EMC VPLEX to provide Business Continuity. Be sure to stop by and check it out!
Normally I would put up a pre-EMC World blog post, but this year I did that over on EthernetFabric.com, so go over there and check it out!
http://ethernetfabric.com/2011/05/vegas-baby/
Spring is in the air, and you know what that means… EMC World is right around the corner! EMC World will be held in Las Vegas this year on May 9-12 at The Venetian, and if you’re not yet onboard with social media, now is the time. Social media is huge at EMC World, and it’s a great way to keep your fingers on the pulse of what’s going on at the conference. Here are a few things that I recommend to get ready for EMC World:
- “Like” the EMC World page on Facebook, this is how I first found out that The Fray will be the band for the customer appreciation event on Wednesday night.
- “Follow” @EMCWorld on Twitter, another great source of information. Once the conference begins you will want to monitor the #EMCWorld hash tag to stay connected to what’s going on.
- If you are a blogger, be sure to sign up for the Blogger’s Lounge on Len Devanna’s blog.
- If your spouse is accompanying you to Las Vegas, make sure they know about Spousetivities.
- Start planning your sessions now, the Agenda Builder is your friend!
This is by no means an exhaustive list, so leave a comment and let me know what I’ve left out. Hope to see you at the conference!
Just a quick update from the floor at VMworld, the conference is in full swing and the attendance has been amazing. Over 17,000 registered according to the keynote yesterday.
The big news at the show for us is our announcement of the ServerIron ADX 4000 ASM-4 bundle. Think of it as a “stepping stone” between a fully-licensed ADX1000 (4 cores) and a significantly more expandable chassis-based system. It also gives customers with specific fiber connectivity needs more deployment flexibility, in case the 1000’s all-copper + two 10G ports won’t suffice.
We are demonstrating ADX in our booth, in conjunction with the Application Resource Broker, to show how we can provide automated, policy-based provisioning and de-provisioning of resources based on application performance metrics. Stop by and check it out, it’s very slick technology.
I’d also like to give a quick shout-out to Frank Iglesias of Radiant Systems, winner of the first drawing for Bose headphones from Brocade. We will be giving away a pair of headphones every day at the show, so be sure to enter! Hope to see you there.