The Dell Enterprise Forum EMEA parties have traditionally been something a bit special with previous years taking the delegates to the Tower of London and on a Trip down the River Seine in Paris. This year maybe didn’t have quite the same wow factor but it is appreciated with the show growing putting on intimate parties like that would be increasingly difficult. The party this year was a German focused event that took place in The Squire near the event and the airport >> http://www.thesquaire.com/en/the_squaire/the_project

There was food, drink, live entertainment as well as a fantastic opportunity to socialise and meet new individuals. This is the important aspect for me and it was a pleasure to meet some fantastic people from Dell, discussing many aspects of Dell and anything and everything else.

Below are a selection of photos I took at the event.

Yesterday was day 2 of the Dell Enterprise Forum EMEA in Frankfurt Germany, due to attending a number of NDA sessions there wasn’t so much tweeting and blogging from me but it was a very productive and insightful day. 

Every year what stands out to me at these events is not just the content and labs, but the access to the execs and great technical people at Dell, speaking as a Dell Partner and a previous Customer the opportunity you get at these events is really unrivalled. It really does show you the levels of effort and skill that are behind the scenes, which by the time it reaches the partners and customers I feel is some times masked. 

My day started off with a session discussing storage in a VDI world and in particular Compellent configuration options, this was really insightful and whilst the subject matter is something I feel very comfortable with the insight into the Compellent specifics was of a great help. This session also led to me speaking to some great technical people at Dell that are actually specialising in VDI in terms of storage and configuration options. I am hoping to be able to do some follow up with these guys in the future and will blog what I can. 

As mentioned all my other sessions during the day were NDA and whilst I can’t blog about these, once again I want to highlight how beneficial it is to have access to these sessions and the subsiquent access to the execs afterwards. 

Outside of the sessions I did sit the Compellent vSphere integration lab which was good to see how the integrations between the two works, particularly with the web client integration. I also had some further time speaking to vendors and looking around the show floor. 

Random shot of hardware but I liked it! 🙂

All of my photos can be found on my flickr page for the conference here >> https://flic.kr/s/aHsjX7xaQX. A few of my favourite are below

This morning was the first customer facing keynote and we saw a number of announcements.

Darren Thomas VP and GM for Dell Storage presented on talking about Dell’s journey, key business values, goals and new product announcements. 

For Dell Compellent we saw the announcement of Storage Center 6.3 offering boosts in performance up to 100% just through a software update! They also announced they would be the first array with 16Gb FC end to end support. These features come with a number of improvements and enhancements that have came since the first 64bit version of Storage Center 6.0 that was announced during the Storage Forum in London earlier in the year.

Bob Fine expanded on the announcement during the press and bloggers session going on to explain how the updates would be available for free to customers with existing support, without having downtime or rip and replace. How many other vendors are able to offer these kind of enhancements within the same units with just a software update? 

The Compellent solution is expanding and growing into Dells greater fluid vision with the FS8600 NAS. One of my key goals for the next 12 months is to come a lot more familiar with Compellent. To be it sounds a really exciting technology and I look forward to learning more about 6.3. 

For the MD and Data Protection lines we saw version 3 of the firmware introduced offering iSCSI based replication, thin provisioning, VMware VAAI support and SSD based caching. With all these features within the MD range it is making it much more than a my first SAN solution offering many of the key features and more of its competing products and even able to start punching against its weight at a cheaper price point. 

We also saw a wealth of releases from the data proaction product line with the AppAssure DL4000 backup appliance, the CommVault DL2300 and Quest NetVault Backup 9.0. I am a little confused as it stands where the place is within Dell for so many backup products. We will see how that matures and the different divisions start working together. Certainly from what I have seen from the user interface of the Quest NetVault Backup 9.0 product looks very nice and easy to use but I am looking forward to seeing what the future brings. 

There weren’t any announcements regarding the EqualLogic range but Pete Korce talked about the intention of looking at how EqualLogic could be utilised within the host with JBODs. For me this is really excited particularly for VDI workloads utilising SSDs or for branch offices. I look forward to learning more about this throughout the conference and as it is further developed. 

I am looking forward to attending the rest of the conference now, sitting some hands on labs and learning about some of the new technologies and announcements. 

Today I have taken part in the Dell Storage Fluid Forward Think Tank, quite a mouth full! This gave me and a number of others (Partners, Customers and Dell Employees) to a chance to discuss the storage and IT industry in detail and understand the challenges we are facing and help define where we think it is going. 

I was joined by (from the Dell site – http://en.community.dell.com/dell-blogs/direct2dell/b/direct2dell/archive/2012/11/01/fluid-forward-think-tank-let-s-talk-storage.aspx)

• Fabio Rapposelli, @fabiorapposelli
• Andrew Mauro, @andrea_mauro
• Barry Coombs, @virtualisedreal
• Didier Van Hoye, @WorkingHardInIT
• Bruno Sousa, @bsousapt
• Rasmus Haslund, @haslund
• Charles Gillanders, @cgillanders
• Andreas Erson, @ersontech
• Tom Heskestad, @hypervfan

and the session was moderated and kept moving by Simon Robinson – Research Vice President at 451 Research. I

It was a really interesting session for me to hear everyones opinions, problems they are facing be it technical or political within their organisations. We covered everything from SSD, hybrid storage, tiering, local storage, de-duplication, protocols, Dell strategy and more. 

We also had an artist on hand graphically illustrating our conversation!

The discussion was fed live online and is also available for you too watch or at least flick through here >> new.livestream.com/accounts/201054/storage

I also took a number of photos which can be found on my Flickr page here >> http://www.flickr.com/photos/74107311@N05/

But here are a few from the day. 

This evening is a partner reception and #storagebeers, I will be attending a partner meal but may make it to #storagebeers a bit later. 

Today I traveled to Paris for the Dell Storage Forum, after a very early flight I had a chance to wander around Paris before the Partner reception. I headed towards Notre Dame then to be honest I don’t know where I ended up so if you recognise a location in one of my photos please comment and help me fill in where I have been :D.

All my photos throughout the event can be found here >> http://flic.kr/s/aHsjCPTHfu

This evening was spent at the partners reception chatting to the other bloggers and the Dell Social Media team, tomorrow we will be taking part in the Fluid Forward Think Tank for more information or to find out how to join in check out this article >> http://en.community.dell.com/dell-blogs/direct2dell/b/direct2dell/archive/2012/11/01/fluid-forward-think-tank-let-s-talk-storage.aspx

Keep checking back I will be blogging all week from the event regarding whats going on and any announcements.