#EMCWorld 2014 – What Happened in Vegas…

Earlier this month I attended EMC World in Las Vegas for the 4^th consecutive year. This year’s theme was Redefine—fitting for a conference filled with IT specialists coping with the changing technology landscape

It’s also a fitting theme for Las Vegas, where I lived for 8 years. It has changed so much since I made the cross-country move 13 years ago. Back in 2001 there was no Palms or Wynn Hotel. Only a handful of nightclubs, one high-rise condominium project, and the World Series of Poker was still played downtown at Binion’s Horseshoe.

During the first morning, I made my way through a crowded hallway to get into the opening keynote. Here’s a picture of the line to get in to the session—you can just barely see the entrance at the very end of the hall.

The room that hosted the keynote sessions was filled with an impressive light show complemented by movie-screen sized panels displaying a variety of images and text. Here are a couple photos to give you a feel for the massive room:

Some big announcements typically take place during the opening keynote, and this year was no exception. Here are some of the highlights:

• EMC’s acquisition of DSSD, developer of a new rack-scale flash storage tier. DSSD founder Andy Bechtolsheim even addressed the crowd. Fun fact about Andy: he co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982.
• Launch of the Elastic Cloud Storage appliance (ECS), formerly known as Project Nile. ECS is a scale-out solution developed to provide industry-leading density per rack unit. It can even be clustered to achieve Exabyte scale.
• The XtremIO million dollar guarantee, a promise from EMC leadership that XtremIO customers will never experience deduplication shutting off or any system level garbage collection. It’s been over 2 weeks since the announcement and no customers have stepped up to claim the cash. Click here to find out more about the guarantee and see a cool picture of David Goulden with the million dollars stuffed inside an XtremIO array.
• Launch of ViPR 2.0, EMC’s next generation software defined storage platform. This release includes new block data services, geographic replication and distribution, and additional support for non-EMC platforms.

We even got to see Joe Tucci celebrate Cinco De Mayo on stage with a fairly extensive mariachi performance.

My home base was the motorcycle-themed EMC Global Services booth (below), where my team focused on generating awareness of EMC services technology that improves the overall experience with EMC products and solutions. EMC runs its Customer Service organization as an investment center and not a profit & loss. To that end, many of our investment dollars are spent building out new capabilities that provide higher levels of automation and real-time intelligence about product performance and behavior.

Key features discussed in the booth include:

• Recent proactive enhancements to EMC Online Support, including the My Products feature which delivers customized alerts and notifications based on each customer’s unique mix of products.
• New capabilities built in to the management software for VMAX, VNX, Data Domain, and ViPR products, which provide new and interesting ways to manage and monitor performance, health, and functionality.
• Future improvements to proactive remote monitoring and repair solution EMC Secure Remote Support (ESRS), including a next-generation virtual edition of the ESRS Gateway that will go live this year.

During peak times, the booth was so full that you could hardly move! Here’s EMC Global Services SVP Kevin Roche addressing the packed house during one of his presentations.

During a brief moment of downtime, I got a chance to strike a pose with a Ducati in our booth. It was a good opportunity to take a picture, because this is the closest I will ever get to riding one of these things.

There has already been a flurry of blogs and articles on EMC World this year. Here are some highlights:

• An interesting recap from Forbes provides some perspective on the alignment between the EMC Federation strategy and the journey to the 3^rd platform of IT.
• Enterprise Strategy Group pulled together this great video recap providing a really nice overview of the look and feel of the conference.
• Barbara Robidoux, VP of EMC Global Services Marketing, published a crisp and concise InFocus blog: Top 5 Observations from EMC World
• To find out more about the journey that EMC Customer Service is taking as IT shifts to the 3^rd platform, check out this brief interview with Customer Service VP Mary Cay Kosten.
• Click here to search all things #EMCWorld on Twitter, just to see what happens when thousands of EMC customers, partners and employees come together for a 3-day conference.

If I didn’t get to meet you this time around, maybe our paths will cross at EMC World 2015. Until then, how will you REDEFINE?