Archives November 2009

I couldn’t think of a better way to publish my schedule… so I’ve instead opted for this blog post!

I think I’m gonna be hardpressed to find time to step out of everything going on, but I’ll see what kind of flexibility exists!

The official “Agenda” which was delivered to me stated this:

Times: M & W 8-5pm; Tu 8am-9pm; Th 8-6pm; F 8-2pm

Considering I’ll be shuttled to the Airport at noon on Friday, not much chance to do things then.   And as far as the other days.. here is my “unofficial” agenda I came across… :)

Sunday, Nov 8th – 6-7 Dinner, 7-930 “Storage Basics” class – So unless we’re doing something on a Sunday evening after 10!? Though if you want, I can bail on the Storage basics class and be available after 7PM on Sunday!

Monday, Nov 9th – 8-5 Training, 530 Bus to Boston, 6-7 Dinner (And I imagine a bus back? so this evening looks kind of set in stone a bit, not sure how flexible!)

Tuesday, Nov 10th -  8-4 Training, 4-??? Other Training (By the looks of above, it claims I’m busy until 9PM!? So that may be true…)

Wednesday, Nov 11th – 8-5 Training, 6-7 Dinner, and Evening is more training, so again, not sure if this is a possible day – but one thing to note: Franklin Facility Tour in the morning, and EBC tour as well!

Thursday, Nov 12th – 8-6 Training, 6-7 Dinner, and then it talks of “Evening” for some more training, so another unknown

Friday, Nov 13th – 8-2 Solid, and then off to airport – Again, too many unknowns..

If you have any suggestions or experience in the areas of the training I’ll be attending as to knowing when things will normally run to, and the liklihood of dinner or otherwise, I’m open to finding that out, else I may be out there – in the area, but no chance to actually meet/see any of you!@?

Either way, here is my schedule, published and available! :)

Yea, that’s right! Facebook was all “Hey, I know you like to share your tweets with the Facebook Community, well NO MORE!…” Well, kind of no more.

If you are like me, you may have noticed that ever since Tuesday November 3rd after 8PM Central – Your tweets have shown up on Facebook as Private “Only Me”

However, after I took steps to figure out WTF happened, I solved it, and I’ll show you how too!

Out of nowhere, Facebook decided to setup some function called “Publisher Control Default” which if yours looks like mine, it’d look like this:

Effectively making it so all content generated (such as Tweets) or other “Publisher Controls” were showing up as Only Me – seen above

This can be easily fixed by doing the following

So, what this means for you is – You no longer have to worry about the loss of your visible tweets and the pure WTF-ness this was provided by Facebook (WTF Seriously!)

Also, if you’d like to follow me on Twitter or Facebook, feel free to send an invite :), and respectively, if you want to join my Mafia or other stuff, I love new friends!

I remember in the early days of UCS, the competitive question on the table was “I don’t see why I’d want to do this, noone is using it” and I also imagine to hear that echoed here today.

So, who DOES think that this whole VCE coalition is a good idea? Is anyone willing to put their name against it? (Other than the CEO’s of 3 of the largest and best of breed innovative companies on the planet?)

Certainly, Steven Tally – CTO of Purdue University wouldn’t go on record saying:

“Purdue is a research university and the majority of our IT needs are spent on high-performance computing, which requires strong computing, massive amounts of storage, and high-speed networking fabric,” said Steven Tally, CTO of Purdue University.  “The Vblock solution offers these elements in a single pre-tested, pre-integrated solution which will be easier to deploy.  VMware, Cisco, and EMC are ideal partners to respond to this problem because they offer complementary tool sets and have a history of delivering good products in the market space.  When these solutions are tied together in a coherent and systematic way, it is very good news for an environment like Purdue.”

I mean, frankly that’d be ridiculous! That’s  because no one is obviously using this ‘untested’ ‘untrained’ and certainly ‘unplanned’ initiative of aligning three worldclass businesses together around efforts to improve the experience in data centers and making the private cloud a reality?   I frankly know of many other businesses leveraging VCE, as well as many getting ready to sign off on it, and thus I will not share that information until I have something external to reference on it (I do like keeping my job, kthx! ;))

Today was the big day! The launch of the Virtual Computing Environment coalition, also known as the VCE Initiative!

CNN Broke the news as far as the link to the Webinar would go, with announcements being made by:
John Chambers, chairman and CEO for Cisco
Joe Tucci, chairman and CEO for EMC Corp
Paul Maritz, president and CEO for VMware

There has been a lot of chatter about this, over the weekend and even moreso leading into this announcement, with some highlights:

The launch of Privatecloud.com is only the beginning in the mass of places to find out information and content on this amazing initative.

VCE Beats out IBM with Melbourne IT

Cisco and EMC, Together with VMware, Form Coalition to Accelerate Pervasive Virtualization and Private Cloud Infrastructures

In unveiling the Virtual Computing Environment coalition, Cisco and EMC also introduced Acadia, a joint venture focused on accelerating customer build-outs of private cloud infrastructures through an end-to-end enablement of service providers and large enterprise customers. Acadia’s unique “build, operate, transfer” model for delivering the Vblock architecture, addressing people, process and technology, will offer customers further choice, flexibility and cost advantages as they seek to virtualize their IT infrastructures and evolve to private cloud environments. In addition to Cisco and EMC as the lead investors, the build-out of Acadia’s expanded capabilities in 2010 has also been capitalized by investments from VMware and Intel. Because the Vblock architecture relies heavily on Intel Xeon® processors and other Intel data center technology, Intel will join the Acadia effort as a minority investor to facilitate and accelerate customer adoption of the latest Intel technology for servers, storage, and networking.

Cisco, EMC, and VMware join hands and plunge into cloud: Acadia, the power of three

In fact, many partners – both systems integrators, and service providers have all started lining up behind Vblocks.    Here are just a few examples:

Most of the vCloud Express launch partners are using the VCE coalition, and want to move forward with a formal Vblock model.   Examples are Terremark, Alphawest, Savvis, Orange and SunGard. (Thanks for this Chad!)

Virtual Compute Environment – an insider’s take.

Virtual Compute Environment – Vblock Partner Ecosystem

Virtual Compute Announcement – Integrated Sales/Service/Support

Virtual Compute Environment – Solutions Venture and Investment

Virtual Compute Environment – Technology Innovations

Also, looks like there is some Twitter presence too! So, represent! @privatecloudcom

Today, is quite an exciting day, and while all of this is high level, I’d be glad to go into much more depth about this – something I’m sure many of those linked and referenced here can say and do the same.   This is not intended to be a tutorial, but an advisory of what’s new, where to go, and I’ll have separate blog posts to go into the details :) It’s an exciting day! :)