Off to the Bio-IT World 2016 Expo

Posted on 4 April 2016 by GeekFluent

Bio-IT WorldI’ll be spending Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday this week at the Bio-IT World 2016 Conference and Expo at the Seaport World Trade Center in Boston.

Mostly, I’ll be spending my time on the “Expo” side of things. I’ll be doing booth duty for Accunet Solutions, talking about the solutions we can offer Life Sciences customers.

If you’ll be at the conference, stop by the Accunet booth (#327) and say “Hi!” If you hadn’t planned on attending, but will be in the area, reach out — I can get you an Exhibit Hall pass.

The Exhibit Hall will be open:

  • Tuesday 5 April – 17:00 to 19:00
  • Wednesday 6 April – 9:45 to 18:30
  • Thursday 7 April – 10:00 to 14:00

Naturally, I’ll have GeekFluent stickers to give to anyone who asks.

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Storage Field Day 9 – The High-Level #SFD9 Experience

Posted on 30 March 2016 by GeekFluent

Storage Field DayNow that I’ve been back for a while and have had some time to reflect on it, I thought I’d pull together an overall impression of my experience at the recent Storage Field Day Event. I’ll be following up over the next few weeks with posts focusing on the individual vendors and their presentations. This is intended as more of a high-level “what it was like” post.

[DISCLOSURE: The vendor sponsors involved in the event covered my expenses for the event. This included airfare, hotel, and meals. There was no expectation that I post anything in return, nor have I been asked to. No one other than me has previewed my content.]

OK, with that out of the way, let me dive in to: Continue reading →

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How I Accidentally Became a Conference Keynote Guest Speaker

Posted on 18 March 2016 by GeekFluent

Over the years, I’ve attended many industry technical conferences. I’ve been an attendee. I held a whiteboard session that was livestreamed over the Internet. I’ve done video interviews. I’ve been booth staff. I’ve given presentations in booths. I’ve been responsible for the entire booth.

With all that, there are still a few things I haven’t ever done at a technical conference. I’ve never given a keynote speech (yet), and I’ve never been a guest speaker in a conference keynote.

Pure Storage logoEarlier this week, that changed when I accidentally ended up with a (very brief) speaking role in the keynote on Day 2 of the Pure//Accelerate event.

If you were there, you may have witnessed it, or if you were following the event on Twitter, you may have read about it more-or-less as it happened, but I’ve been encouraged to share the story of how it came about. Continue reading →

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Pure Storage Announces New Solutions and New Architecture

Posted on 14 March 2016 by GeekFluent

Pure Storage logoToday, Pure Storage made several announcements: new product, new bundled solutions, and a brand-new scale-out architecture. These announcements were timed to coincide with Day One of their first-ever conference event, Pure//Accelerate, which I am attending.

[DISCLAIMER: In the interest of full disclosure, Pure Storage provided me with a complimentary pass to their conference and also covered my plane fare and hotel costs to attend. That said, there was no requirement that I post anything, nor has Pure reviewed anything I’ve written in this post. The only input they’ve had on this content is being very available to answer any questions I’ve asked.]

The announcements that interested me the most are:

  • A new addition to the FlashArray//m Series line of products
  • New bundled FlashStack solutions
  • A from-the-ground-up new scalable storage architecture

I’ll walk through these in order below. Continue reading →

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Storage Field Day 9 (#SFD9) Preview and How to Follow Along From Home

Posted on 10 March 2016 by GeekFluent

Storage Field DayIf you weren’t able to guess from my previous post about this, I’m very excited to be returning to Storage Field Day as a delegate for SFD9.

If you won’t be there at the event, I figured you might like more info on the presenters and on how you can follow along — in real time.
Continue reading →

Posted in Storage | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

For Vendors: Handling Negative Social Media Feedback — Three Case Studies and Some Tips

Posted on 8 March 2016 by GeekFluent

Thumbs DownIf you’re a right-thinking individual, you’ll find it hard to believe that sometimes not everyone agrees with everything I write. In fact, sometimes people have taken exception to things I write. On the rare event when it has happened, it’s usually the vendors I write about who disagree with me.

In this post, I’ll present the stories of three different times this has happened to me in the past year or so. I’ll cover what happened, what the vendor didn’t appreciate about what I said, how they decided to handle that, and the end results of their actions. Continue reading →

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Cisco Enters Hyperconverged Market with HyperFlex

Posted on 1 March 2016 by GeekFluent

HyperFlex HX240cToday Cisco announced their entry in the Hyperconverged Infrastructure marketplace, a solution called HyperFlex.

Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) can be thought of as “Virutalization in a Box”. An HCI solution is one that offers everything needed for server virtualization: compute, memory, network, storage, hypervisor, and management/orchestration for all of these.

Cisco’s HyperFlex solution uses:

  • Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) to provide the compute, memory, and storage hardware
  • Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnects to provide the network hardware
  • Cisco UCS Manager for compute, memory, and network management
  • VMware ESXi for the hypervisor
  • SpringPath software, re-branded as the Cisco HX Data Platform, to provide the data services, and storage optimization and orchestration

The HyperFlex solution will initially be offered in three different ways: small footprint, capacity-heavy, and compute-heavy.

I’ll walk through the various components and the complete solution below. Continue reading →

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What’s New in Isilon OneFS 8.0

Posted on 25 February 2016 by GeekFluent

Isilon OneFSYou may remember that back in November EMC announced new features coming to Isilon. Most of the message focused on the IsilonSD Edge virtual appliance, but a lot of the rest had to do with “OneFS.NEXT” (which we all expected to be numbered 8.0).

About 3 weeks ago, OneFS 8.0 became GA. The availability of the new software happened with very little announcement and absolutely no fanfare. I found this somewhat surprising given how much EMC had hyped up the pre-announcement so far in advance.

With the availability of 8.0, two other new things become available: the new CloudPools software and IsilonSD Edge. This post covers everything that’s new. Continue reading →

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Mixed Message Monday: Little Caesar’s Thinks You’re an Idiot

Posted on 8 February 2016 by GeekFluent

Pizza(Think of “Mixed Message Monday” as “GeekFluent Hits Back at Marketing Gone Wrong”. I feature advertisements or marketing campaigns where the message that’s actually delivered is (hopefully) not the one the folks who paid for the ad intended.)

Since my last Mixed Message Monday focused on Domino’s, I thought I’d take a look at another pizza vendor, Little Caesar’s.

Lately, Little Caesar’s has been running a series of commercials about their “Hot and Ready” pizzas. These commercial annoy me immensely. Continue reading →

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VMware Announces vExperts for 2016

Posted on 5 February 2016 by GeekFluent

VMW-LOGO-vEXPERT-2016-kToday, VMware announced the list of vExpert recipients for 2016.

The VMware vExpert program recognizes those who have gone above and beyond their normal job description in sharing the messaging, knowledge, and “how to” of virtualization in general and VMware in particular.

The vExpert program is open to VMware employees, partner, customers, and others.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t really excited to have been named a VMware vExpert for my fifth year in a row. I’m also honored and thankful, but, yeah, excited too.

You can see the full list of 2016 VMware vExperts here.

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