Last month I was invited to attend my first HPE Tech Day held in Anaheim, California. Actually, it was held at the Grand Californian Disneyland Hotel … pretty cool for someone like me who had never been to Disneyland. Although the location was definitely head and shoulders above most events that I have gone to, I didn’t let that get in the way of when it came to assessing what I saw. ...
While at VMworld 2017, I received an invite to attend a HPE Blogger Briefing hosted by Calvin Zito. The idea was to layout some of the current, and upcoming, goings on that HPE has coming down the pipe. The areas that we covered were primarily storage-focused, which I’ll cover in more depth below. First, however, I wanted to give a quick shout out to the HPE team for not dancing around the question of how their relationship with VMware has changed since the Dell EMC acquisition. The short version is that Dell fully recognizes that competition is natural in the market; along with that, it is also clear that VMware has a neutrality that it needs to keep in regards to partners and solutions. My take away was that Dell EMC and HPE are competitors, whereas VMware and HPE are still partners. ...
With my second Tech Field Day event in the bag, I have come to start to notice patterns throughout the event. I wouldn’t say that I made any judgements or assumptions because of them, but rather I found that identifying them helped me take in more this time around. One non-technical attribute that I started picking up right away was product identity. I’m not referring to brand identity, which would be akin to something like immediately recognizing logos, tag lines, etc. Rather, I’m referring more so to “what problem are you going to solve for me?”. ...
Just a short (but exciting, for me anyways) post today. I’ve been having some pretty good Friday’s as of late - that being said, Monday couldn’t come fast enough for me this week. Why would I say something crazy? Let me paint picture: October 18th, 2016 - it was a simpler time: the Blue Jays were still a contender for the World Series, the third US Presidential debate still hadn’t taken place, and Anthony Spiteri was still a Veeam Vanguard (massive congrats to him!). Meanwhile, I happened to catch the latest Tech Field Day Extra, which was great because I didn’t even know that it was going on. The stars must have been aligned because Paessler (the makers of PRTG) were presenting. The timing couldn’t have been better as I am currently evaluating their solution (which I quite like so far). Something cool happened shortly after the event ended - I had a new Twitter follower: Stephen Foskett (cool!). ...
This morning I was humbled, honoured, and excited to find out that I made the grade to become a vExpert for 2016. I know there are a ton of posts out there with more or less the same first sentence, but I don’t think a lot of posts go much deeper than that. What does it mean to me? Sure, I look forward to some of the potential benefits (I currently personally pay for VMUG Advantage as well as Pluralsight - both because I believe they are quality products), but more than that there are two things that becoming a vExpert means to me: ...
With VMWorld 2015 in the books, I thought I would do a sort of round-up post to collect my thoughts and experiences as a whole. I wanted to wait a week or so to let everything soak in and give me time to reflect on the event. Keep in mind that this was my first VMWorld and I’m sure that there was tons that I missed. This is also based on what I was hoping to accomplish going into this, which won’t be the same for everyone. ...
This year I was lucky enough to get the go ahead for VMWorld 2015 and as this will be my first VMWorld, and I am quite excited about it. I have been reading a lot of blogs (old and new) with regards to what to expect while I am there. Something tells me that no matter how much prepping I do, it still won’t be enough. There are a few things that I do hope to get out of the visit though (aside from endless marketing emails from vendors): ...
I’ve recently been working with quite a few vendors as we are in the process of doing a decent size (for us) infrastructure upgrade. We finally have it narrowed down to two solutions, but we can’t decide which one is the better fit. A large part of the indecision comes from the fact that we don’t know how these things work in real-world conditions vs. what the marketing material claims. ...