InfoSmack from Barcelona
Last week we had an ESSN (Enterprise Storage, Server, and Networking) press and blogger event in Barcelona. I talked a bit about it in my previous article.
Last night, the InfoSmack podcast team published their weekly podcast, this week from Barcelona. The podcast is co-hosted by Greg Knieriemen (@knieriemen) and Marc Farley (@3parfarley). They recorded the podcast from Marc's hotel room, just down the hall from my room at the Hotel Rey Juan Carlos. Guests on the podcast were HP Storage VP of Marketing, Strategy and Operations Tom Joyce (@Tom_Joyce), Chris Mellor from the Register (@chris_mellor), Chris Evans (@chrismevans), and Ilja Coolen (@iCoolen).
Here's the podcast. (Yes, big text is intentional as this is a must-listen).
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At the event in Barcelona, I was able to spend a lot of time with everyone on the podcast. I wanted to make a few observations based on the discussion in the podcast and my interaction with these guys:
- On a personal note, I really enjoyed just hanging out with Greg, Marc, and Tom from Ivy Worldwide on Monday before the event started. Alessandro Perilli also met up with us as we played tourists at the Sagrada Família (the most visited tourist site in Barcelona). If you have used the word "gaudy" before, the roots of it are in Barcelona and Antonio Gaudí, the designer of the Sagrada Família and other interesting buildings around Barcelona. Marc found a short line to go up an elevator to the top - the views of Barcelona were stunning! (I've included one below).
- During the podcast, Ilja talks about his impressions of HP storage before the event - HP not being a a visible storage player in the Netherlands. Ilja and I were tweeting late last night and something he said was significant, "I had no reason 2 (sic) take HPSW (HP StorageWorks) serious before BCN (Barcelona). Now, even without taking 3PAR into account, I do." It's amazing to me that every time we do a blogger event, we get this kind of response - I do think that HP Storage is the most misunderstood storage vendor in the market and if you aren't talking to HP now about storage, you should be.
- We did a technical briefing with the bloggers on Tuesday afternoon on our Mission-Critical announcement that included the P9500. I have several articles on the blog about this new generation of the XP Disk Array. It was the focus of the bloggers on Tuesday morning prior to the press conference and they got a close look with Tillman Walker, an storage architect on the team for a long time. Later that afternoon, Ilja and Paul Miller (@PaulMiller) came back for a deeper dive, especially interested in Application Performance Extender and I showed them the HP/Hitachi Collaboration video. The video is worth watching to I'll include it here:
I'm having issues with the embedded video so here's a link to the video while I work on fixing it.
- I mentioned that Chris Mellor is a reporter for the Register. He's probably the most read storage reporter in the world. On Tuesday night, there was a dinner for the press and HP executives but Chris was talking to the bloggers (that he knows from Twitter) and wanted to come out to dinner with us instead. I had a great time hanging out with Chris. A couple of times during the evening he said to me, "Calvin, you aren't the typical HP employee". I told him I didn't understand what that meant - I've been at HP since 1983 and I think I'm as HP as HP gets. I say what I'm thinking and don't hold much back - this might be what Chris meant but I had a great time with him and the others at our tapas dinner on Tuesday night. I think Chris came away with a bit different perspective of HP and you can hear that in the InfoSmack podcast. Chris also wrote a story after the event that's worth a read.
I've said this before but I really love these kind of events and engaging with the storage community from Twitter. If you're focused on data storage, I encourage you to get on Twitter and join the community.
Here's the picture I promised of Barcelona from the top of Sagrada Família.
