| Exhibitor Booth Scans: | 43 |
|---|---|
| Sessions Attended: | 19 |
Exhibitor Booth Scans
Sessions/Activity Scans
|
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Final list of vendors and sessions attended at Interop
Here's the final list that was emailed to me of exhibitors who scanned my badge and sessions that I attended. I know I visited way more than 43 booths, so I'm not sure what happened. The session list seems fairly accurate. Feel free to ask me about anything you see that peeks your interest.
Netflix Passes Piracy in U.S. Net Traffic
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/05/netflix-traffic/
Monday, May 16, 2011
Both sides of a cloud
Sunday, May 15, 2011
iPad wrap-up
I thought I should do a wrap-up post on how the iPad worked for the trip. To be brief, I would say it worked very well. I would not hesitate in taking one again. The combination of the iPad and the Bluetooth keyboard worked very well, especially when there was a table.
The battery life of the iPad was great and I never had to change the batteries in the keyboard. The lightness of my bag was also wonderful, especially at the end of the day. In short, all of the advantages I hoped for before I left were borne out.
The iPad was wonderful on the plane flights, which is something I hadn't though of. It worked well for blogging. The slides posted to my blog were done by downloading the presentation slides on the iPad, taking a screen shot of the one I wanted and then posting the resulting jpeg by sending it to a secret email address. The photos, by the way, all came from my iPhone and were posted using the same secret email address.
I'm having a hard time thinking of any time I wished I had a laptop. I had to think about different ways to do some things and I did download a couple of apps to do some things that I hadn't thought about ahead of time. My typing skills with the virtual keyboard did improve as there were many times that the bluetooth keyboard was not convenient. This post is being done with just the virtual keyboard.
Having the 3G iPad was important. There were a number of times when I didn't have wi-fi and even more times when the wi-fi was either very slow or not working at all. When that happened, I simply turned off the wi-fi an kept going. That said, I will say that having a wireless access point in my hotel room worked out nicely.
All in all, it was a great experience!
The battery life of the iPad was great and I never had to change the batteries in the keyboard. The lightness of my bag was also wonderful, especially at the end of the day. In short, all of the advantages I hoped for before I left were borne out.
The iPad was wonderful on the plane flights, which is something I hadn't though of. It worked well for blogging. The slides posted to my blog were done by downloading the presentation slides on the iPad, taking a screen shot of the one I wanted and then posting the resulting jpeg by sending it to a secret email address. The photos, by the way, all came from my iPhone and were posted using the same secret email address.
I'm having a hard time thinking of any time I wished I had a laptop. I had to think about different ways to do some things and I did download a couple of apps to do some things that I hadn't thought about ahead of time. My typing skills with the virtual keyboard did improve as there were many times that the bluetooth keyboard was not convenient. This post is being done with just the virtual keyboard.
Having the 3G iPad was important. There were a number of times when I didn't have wi-fi and even more times when the wi-fi was either very slow or not working at all. When that happened, I simply turned off the wi-fi an kept going. That said, I will say that having a wireless access point in my hotel room worked out nicely.
All in all, it was a great experience!
The benefits of attending a conference
It would be easy to say that conferences are not as useful as they once were, given the huge amount of information that is available on the web. All the web sites, online documents, webinars, etc. do provide a lot of useful information.
There is a difference though. That has become painfully obvious to me in attending Interop this week. I have so much in this past week, and it's information I wish I had known before I made some of the decisions that I have made over the last year or so.
Why is going to a conference so different? Let me tell you.
Face-to-face interaction with other attendees can be priceless. Just talking with other people while sitting around the lunch table to find out what they have tried and whether it worked or not. Finding out what they thought about a presentation. It's instant feedback on the worth of the information that is being presented to me. I don't get that with a webpage or a webinar.
Having time with no distractions to let complex topics percolate in your head is important. The complexity of IT is increasing at an exponential rate, so this time become even more important. Sitting in on 3 sessions listening to 10 or more presenters talk about the same basic topic from different perspectives leads to the "ah ha" moments to get a more fundamental understanding of a topic.
The other side of the coin is hearing presentations on a bunch of different topics and seeing how they work together together to create a paradigm shift in the industry. The biggest example from this conference was cloud computing and mobile computing. The two together create a whole new world in which it is quite conceivable that neither the client or the server are on your network. So what good does a firewall do you in that case?
Seeing and hearing someone speak provides a lot of subliminal information about a topic. Inflection and body language convey a lot of extra information that helps you understand how the person you are listening to feels about the information they are conveying to you. Do they really believe what they are saying, or is it just marketing? Does this person really know what they are talking about? Questions that are much easier to answer if you can see and hear them and interact with them.
As I said in the first paragraph, there is a lot of information available on the Internet. The problem is that it is too much information and there is very little filtering of the information that is out there. At a conference, there is a filtering process that provides sessions that someone who is expert in the area feel are worthwhile and are presented by experts in the field.
So here I am more than 3 days after the conference is over, and I'm still processing all the information that I was exposed to during the conference. It's information that will effect the planning and decisions I will make for years to come. Decisions that will involve spending hundreds of thousands of dollars and thousands of man-hours. Spending a few thousand going to a conference to help make sure that those decisions are good ones seems like a pretty good idea to me.
There is a difference though. That has become painfully obvious to me in attending Interop this week. I have so much in this past week, and it's information I wish I had known before I made some of the decisions that I have made over the last year or so.
Why is going to a conference so different? Let me tell you.
Face-to-face interaction with other attendees can be priceless. Just talking with other people while sitting around the lunch table to find out what they have tried and whether it worked or not. Finding out what they thought about a presentation. It's instant feedback on the worth of the information that is being presented to me. I don't get that with a webpage or a webinar.
Having time with no distractions to let complex topics percolate in your head is important. The complexity of IT is increasing at an exponential rate, so this time become even more important. Sitting in on 3 sessions listening to 10 or more presenters talk about the same basic topic from different perspectives leads to the "ah ha" moments to get a more fundamental understanding of a topic.
The other side of the coin is hearing presentations on a bunch of different topics and seeing how they work together together to create a paradigm shift in the industry. The biggest example from this conference was cloud computing and mobile computing. The two together create a whole new world in which it is quite conceivable that neither the client or the server are on your network. So what good does a firewall do you in that case?
Seeing and hearing someone speak provides a lot of subliminal information about a topic. Inflection and body language convey a lot of extra information that helps you understand how the person you are listening to feels about the information they are conveying to you. Do they really believe what they are saying, or is it just marketing? Does this person really know what they are talking about? Questions that are much easier to answer if you can see and hear them and interact with them.
As I said in the first paragraph, there is a lot of information available on the Internet. The problem is that it is too much information and there is very little filtering of the information that is out there. At a conference, there is a filtering process that provides sessions that someone who is expert in the area feel are worthwhile and are presented by experts in the field.
So here I am more than 3 days after the conference is over, and I'm still processing all the information that I was exposed to during the conference. It's information that will effect the planning and decisions I will make for years to come. Decisions that will involve spending hundreds of thousands of dollars and thousands of man-hours. Spending a few thousand going to a conference to help make sure that those decisions are good ones seems like a pretty good idea to me.
Getting our heads out of the sand and into the clouds
One of the underlying themes I've been sensing is that we have been spending way too much time on keeping existing systems going and not nearly enough time on looking to the future. It's the 80/20 rule that one of my blog posts talked about. I feel like, in some ways, we've had our heads in the sand for the last few years. We make changes to our infrastructure, but we don't spend a lot of time talking and planning for how the changes we make will effect our clients and what their needs are and will be.
At this conference, it's all about mobile devices and services in the cloud. We really need to take a hard look at our network design keeping in mind that both our clients and our services won't be on our physical network a lot of the time. I keep hearing terms like "fundamental shift in the industry" being thrown around. I know there is a lot of hype about this, but there are early adopters who are already there.
The cloud is more than just technology. It's about a change in the mindset for what we provide to our clients. It's about about providing services instead of hardware and software.
I see this in the frustration even other groups inside of IT express in trying to make their projects a reality. It's about being more agile. Several presenters talked about how corporate IT didn't even know how much other departments were just going out and using the software as a service offerings as islands, because they didn't want to wait for IT. Then IT is blind-sided when there is data stolen or something stops working and they didn't know anything about it. That's the challenge. How does IT provide solutions that are up to the standards needed by the corporation, but in a timely fashion.
We need to lead the charge, or we'll get run over by our clients.
At this conference, it's all about mobile devices and services in the cloud. We really need to take a hard look at our network design keeping in mind that both our clients and our services won't be on our physical network a lot of the time. I keep hearing terms like "fundamental shift in the industry" being thrown around. I know there is a lot of hype about this, but there are early adopters who are already there.
The cloud is more than just technology. It's about a change in the mindset for what we provide to our clients. It's about about providing services instead of hardware and software.
I see this in the frustration even other groups inside of IT express in trying to make their projects a reality. It's about being more agile. Several presenters talked about how corporate IT didn't even know how much other departments were just going out and using the software as a service offerings as islands, because they didn't want to wait for IT. Then IT is blind-sided when there is data stolen or something stops working and they didn't know anything about it. That's the challenge. How does IT provide solutions that are up to the standards needed by the corporation, but in a timely fashion.
We need to lead the charge, or we'll get run over by our clients.
Thursday notes
Sorry the last few notes have been so dry. I wanted to get the notes out there as quickly as possible. Thursday morning I went to 3 sessions in a row on moving from virtualization to private clouds. The afternoon was spent in the exhibit hall.
The sessions I went to helped me finally really understand the difference between virtualization and a private cloud. A private cloud is virtualization with good management tools sitting on top of it. In a lot of ways it's more a change in business practices than in a difference in technology. The provide cloud provides a catalog of standardized VMs and storage options that can be deployed very quickly. The business side of this comes in the standardization of the images and the life cycle management of those images. It's the automatic updating of those images and the agility this provides to the company. You want a LAMP server, boom, here you go.
Here is the progression from virtualization to private clouds:
The sessions I went to helped me finally really understand the difference between virtualization and a private cloud. A private cloud is virtualization with good management tools sitting on top of it. In a lot of ways it's more a change in business practices than in a difference in technology. The provide cloud provides a catalog of standardized VMs and storage options that can be deployed very quickly. The business side of this comes in the standardization of the images and the life cycle management of those images. It's the automatic updating of those images and the agility this provides to the company. You want a LAMP server, boom, here you go.
Here is the progression from virtualization to private clouds:
- Server virtualization and consolidation
- Infrastructure optimization -- both storage and network
- Management and automation
- IT as a service ==> private cloud
There are a lot of tools out there from many different vendors. They are getting better over time. The tools are also becoming cross-platform, meaning that one tool can be used to manage private clouds and public clouds from multiple vendors. Many of these tools deal with the concept of a Service Catalog. This is basically a menu of VMs, storage and networking choices. They are standardized for fast deployment and easier management. As part of the life-cycle management a good CMDB tool is needed. This will help reduce VM sprawl.
There was some discussion of the latest version of VMware and some of the tools that are available with it. This version has some significant improvements in iSCSI performance. It was also stated that moving to using the VMware backup client instead of individual backup clients on each VM can make a huge difference in backups. If you are backing up the entire VMFS volume at once, the backup software can do a lot more de-duping.
Applications need to become cloud aware. How many apps have IP address built into them or their configuration files. What does F&M need to do to make this happen. Zimbra is a terrible example of this.
It was suggested that we should put a price tag on the services we provide, even if we don't actually collect money. It will help our clients realize the cost of what they are asking for.
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and BYO3
I went to a few sessions in a row that all dealt with VDI and the influx of multiple devices per person. There are lots of things to think about if you are looking at moving to VDI. In a nutshell, VDI is creating a VM for employees to use as their desktop system or for them to use to get to company applications. We've been doing the latter for years and have been experimenting with virtual desktops recently. Most companies can categorize the employees in to several groups based on their computing needs, what resources they need to get to, and whether they are always in the office or not.
There is no longer a 1 to 1 relationship between clients and machines. Clients want to access their apps from multiple devices and multiple locations. Virtualizing apps makes the data more secure, because it is not stored on the mobile devices. This is a fundamental shift. The combination of the cloud and mobile means that everything is migrating away from your corporate network. The network needs to be re-designed to deal with this fact.
One speaker said that he foresees a time when IT wil be getting out the business of providing client machines. Employees are starting to bring their own machines into work. Think of the iPhone and any other mobile device. Think of the personally owned laptop or desktop at home. With budget crunches, some companies are expecting their employees to provide their own laptop. This is BYOC or Bring Your Own Computer. BYO3 is everyone bringing 3 or more devices to work.
There is no longer a 1 to 1 relationship between clients and machines. Clients want to access their apps from multiple devices and multiple locations. Virtualizing apps makes the data more secure, because it is not stored on the mobile devices. This is a fundamental shift. The combination of the cloud and mobile means that everything is migrating away from your corporate network. The network needs to be re-designed to deal with this fact.
One speaker said that he foresees a time when IT wil be getting out the business of providing client machines. Employees are starting to bring their own machines into work. Think of the iPhone and any other mobile device. Think of the personally owned laptop or desktop at home. With budget crunches, some companies are expecting their employees to provide their own laptop. This is BYOC or Bring Your Own Computer. BYO3 is everyone bringing 3 or more devices to work.
Using the cloud for backup and DR
There are several companies that do hybrid cloud storage. By this I mean they have a device that is onsite at the customer's data center which contains some storage and caches the storage that is out in the cloud. Most of these vendors support the use of many different cloud storage vendors like Amazon. The theory is that a lot of your data is not access on a regular basis, so it doesn't need to reside locally. The local box looks like an iSCSI or FibreChannel drive to your systems.
The cloud is just a tool. You still need to use best practices to keep your data safe. You can use multiple clouds to replicate your data or use the cloud to keep a copy of the data you have in your data center. Using the cloud can be more expensive, but it can be more available to you in a disaster. Using one of these devices for backup can also free up time since you don't need to manage a tape library.
Data should be encrypted and the key should be stored on a local system and not leave the client site. This is requirement for regulatory compliance.
I've said this before, but it was mentioned many, many times. It's important to design your apps assuming there will be failures, because there will be. Distributing and replicating data and services makes an app more reliable.
The cloud is just a tool. You still need to use best practices to keep your data safe. You can use multiple clouds to replicate your data or use the cloud to keep a copy of the data you have in your data center. Using the cloud can be more expensive, but it can be more available to you in a disaster. Using one of these devices for backup can also free up time since you don't need to manage a tape library.
Data should be encrypted and the key should be stored on a local system and not leave the client site. This is requirement for regulatory compliance.
I've said this before, but it was mentioned many, many times. It's important to design your apps assuming there will be failures, because there will be. Distributing and replicating data and services makes an app more reliable.
Catching up - Wednesday Keynotes
It's Sunday night, and I am finally getting around to catching up on what I saw at the conference.
The keynotes on Wednesday morning were good. As a group, they were the best set of the three keynote sessions.
It started off with a nice panel discussion on public cloud issues. The panelists were all from companies that provide public cloud services. They talked about how the industry is still in it's infancy. The likened public clouds to other new IT ideas. At first there are not a lot standards on how things are done, but over time the industry settles down and it is lot easier to move from one vendor to another. There was some discussion of the Amazon outage. Those who wrote their apps with the cloud in mind did much better than those that didn't.
Intel did a presentation that emphasized how quickly they are pushing the processing power of cpu chips which is allowing things to be done with computers that could not be done before. They also talked a lot about what they are doing to save energy. 85% of the power they use in their own facilities comes from wind or solar power! Pretty impressive. Here's a couple of facts they threw out:
The keynotes on Wednesday morning were good. As a group, they were the best set of the three keynote sessions.
It started off with a nice panel discussion on public cloud issues. The panelists were all from companies that provide public cloud services. They talked about how the industry is still in it's infancy. The likened public clouds to other new IT ideas. At first there are not a lot standards on how things are done, but over time the industry settles down and it is lot easier to move from one vendor to another. There was some discussion of the Amazon outage. Those who wrote their apps with the cloud in mind did much better than those that didn't.
Intel did a presentation that emphasized how quickly they are pushing the processing power of cpu chips which is allowing things to be done with computers that could not be done before. They also talked a lot about what they are doing to save energy. 85% of the power they use in their own facilities comes from wind or solar power! Pretty impressive. Here's a couple of facts they threw out:
- 150 Exabytes of data were sent through the Internet from it's beginnings in the 1970s through the end of 2009. In 2010 alone, 245 Exabytes of data was sent! Exponential growth.
- Data Centers in the United States consume 2% of the total electricity used.
Avaya did a nice presentation on what can be done with unified communications. It sort of reminded me of the Apple Knowledge Navigator piece from years ago, but they were demoing stuff that is available from them today. Pretty impressive. They even have an iPad client for their unified communications system.
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