If you follow me on Twitter, you no doubt know I was in San Jose, CA attending the Dell Enterprise Forum ( formerly Dell Storage Forum ) last week.  I attended this event on an invite from Dell, and I am so glad I accepted. The event was full of great information and many other great “social media influencers” as we where called.  I have met many of my twitter peers before, but others I had not –  being at the forum allowed me to put faces and real names to twitter handles.  I think having the prior social interaction with them before made this event that much better.  It was great of Dell to bring us together to listen, learn, and share ideas.
So, the purpose of this post is to recap the week, point out some highlights, some low, and set the stage for another post or two.

The whole theme of the event seemed to be around Ordinary -> Optimized.  Dell would show and present Ordinary things, and then how they Optimized them.  It was a theme they kept moving in all that they did.  From the legos laying around in the lounge area, the old Atari 2600 systems, to a full wall sized modern Tetris game.  They showed Ordinary and then Optimized it! 

The opening keynote was titled Built for Where Business Is Going and showed us some of the new and updated things that Dell was offering.

 –  Pro Support (An assigned engineer to your account who knows your company data approach (Servers, Storage, Network) inside and out.)
–  Dell Secure Works (24x Security Monitoring)
–  Dell Active Infrastructure 1.1 (full orchestration for virtual server deployment)
–  PowerEdge VRTX (More on this in another post soon –  but WOW, I want one!!!)
–  Mark Hurd announcing Oracle and Dell partnership (Press Release)

 

The second day was around Taking Your Data Center from Ordinary to Optimized and included:

 –  Move from an Infrastructure Central Data Center to a IT Services Centric Data Center
 –  SLC/MLC Storage Options using Dell Express Flash
–  300,000 IOPS in the Compellent Flash Optimized Solution
–  Automatic Tiering in their Compellent ling of storage arrays (Article Link)
–  Dell Fluid File System (Link to where you can download the white paper)
–  Announcing that they are the #3 Switching provider in the market  ( #1 –  Cisco   #2 –  HP)

 
 The final day keynote was supposed to be on Architecting the Future of the Data Center, and to be honest it was the worst keynote I have ever seen. I do not think that they ever talked about the topic of the keynote.  But there where a few interesting things said in the first quarter of the talk:
–  We are in an era of persistent connectiviness
–  Move the transaction closer to the processor
–  and a cool Suitcase with 16tb(?!) and some RasberryPi installed with a Netgear switch

The final day of the Dell Enterprise Forum I was invited to a Think Tank event –  WOW, was that amazing!
You can see the video here:

 
Oh, and the most amazing part that I am not sure if was captured on the video –  Jeannel King’s whiteboarding skills!  OMG –  SHE IS AMAZING!
 
Check out these pics that @networkingnerd took!  Jeannel did this as wel talked, she just took our words and put them to images and ideas.
 

 

 
 
Disclaimer
Dell sponsored my trip to Dell Enterprise Forum and as such they were responsible for my travel expenses and hotel accommodations.  At no time did they ask for nor were they assured any kind of consideration in the writing of this review. The thoughts I have shared are given freely and without reservation whatsoever.