Today was my first day at Dell Storage Forum, today was focused at Dell Partners and not the general public unless you were lucky enough to be on one of the training courses that has been running over the last couple of days.
The Dell Storage Forum 2012 – London, is being held in the Grange St Paul’s Hotel, in the shadow of one of London’s the most magnificent monument St Paul’s Cathedral. The first thing that welcomes you when you enter the venue is the massive interactive display that is suspended from the ceiling, displaying the Dell Logo and Dell Storage Forum 2012 message in an animated fashion.
My day at the show started by talking to some of the UK channel press, they were keen to know my opinions of how Dell are doing with their channel model, as I work for a Dell partner. My experience has been a very positive one and particularly over the last 6 months we have started to see the whole of Dell embracing the channel and not only the dedicated channel teams we work with, lets hope this continues and progresses further as I think this is beneficial for Customers, Dell and their partners.
After the press interviews I was off to go and find the bloggers lounge and meet some of the bloggers. Dell have got together a good team of bloggers to cover the event and it was great to put some faces to names, there were a number of conversations throughout the day, some storage related and some not so storage related! it has been great to meet the other bloggers covering the event.
Gina from Dell has put together a list of the bloggers which can been seen below taken from here blog post here >> http://gminks.edublogs.org/2012/01/10/dell-storage-forum-2012-london-the-day-before/
Dell Blogger >> (Jason Boche, and Lance Boley), Community Bloggers Martin Glassborow, Chris Evans, Nigel Poulton, Bruno Sousa, Hans Deleenheer,Barry Coombs, Greg Knierieman, Ed Saipetch, and Stephen Foskett.
My day continued with a couple of partner sessions, the first session was regarding migrating to a Compellent SAN from another vendors solutions, it was good to hear about these inbuilt capabilities, at present they are only supported for FC to FC migrations but it is hoped iSCSI will be supported in the future. Unfortunately there were connectivity problems that meant the demo couldn’t take place, this was disappointing as it would have really added to the content of the session. Hopefully these will be rectified for tomorrow. My next session was regarding working will Dell for Cloud Solutions, this was more of an overview session covering how Dell’s range could be used to assist with all elements of your journey to the cloud. This session really was just an overview and I will look forward to chatting with the presenter Mark Maclean from Dell UK more in the future regarding the subject, I have known Mark for a short while and he is very passionate about his job and Dell hardware and is a great asset to Dell.
After the sessions had finished I was given the opportunity to meet with the other bloggers and some Dell execs, the content of the discussions is under embargo until tomorrow so keep an eye on the blogs tomorrow for more details. What I can say about this discussion was that it took place at the top of the venue overlooking directly St Paul’s Cathedral, not many conference venues have views as good as this.
The evening activities were kicked off by a short bus ride to The Anchor Bankside pub for the Dell Fluid Data Welcome Reception, there was live bands, food and even a Will and Kate look alike. For me the best part was meeting a number of Dell employees past and present that I have worked with over the years. After the welcome reception a number of people went onto the #storagebeers at the Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese Pub in fleet street, I opted for a walk back to the hotel to grab my camera to grab some photos of my favourite area of London. The photos below are from my phones as my SLR batteries are charging, I will try and upload some better ones tomorrow.
All in today has been a good day considering the conference hasn’t even really started yet, there does seem to be a distinct lack of Dell UK employees particularly the Dell UK SE’s who I feel could add a lot to the event, Dell have a number of very good storage assists in the UK that haven’t been asked to attend.
I’m looking forward to finding out more about Dell’s storage vision, attending the Compellent hands on labs is a key goal for me as well as understanding more about the DX range of storage. I will be blogging about the event over the next two days and also be sure to keep an eye on my twitter account @virtualisedreal and the Dell Storage Forum hash tag #dellsf12
Virtualised Reality 