May13

Remembering Interop 2012

by gminks on May 13th, 2012 at 12:57 pm
Posted In: conferences, interop

Last week I attended Interop in Las Vegas. Interop hass traditionally been a networking show. For Dell, our Networking group organized our participation at the show.

But this year, there was a definite storage presence (there was even a storage track). Some of the presentations were what you would expect from storage people….I was a little disappointed that the “What’s next in storage” seemed to focus on the speeds and feeds aspects of arrays. Why do we always go there as an industry? Yeah its cool that we have SSDs, cool we can make such big LUNs, but is that really our answer to what’s next in storage? And even if we are able to leap ahead and make the most amazing, fastest, most IOPS capable disk ever imagined, if we don’t have apps that can write the 1′s and 0′s to it efficiently who cares? Y’all (panel members) know I love you to death, but we have to start talking like storage is a part of the infrastructure ecosystem, not the center of the universe.

There were a couple of sessions on just that – converged infrastructure. Interestingly the best one I went to was in the networking track. The moderator asked the audience some great questions. He asked the audience what they thought the biggest impediment to getting to converged in their environments, the technology not being ready or organizational resistance. Pretty much every single hand went up for organizational resistance – another reason it is so important that we stop talking about speeds and feeds and start educating our stakeholders. The panel was also asked to talk to what sort of roles and skill sets are needed for a converged environment. The answers were interesting and all over the place. One panelist said people with virtualization experience are best suited, another said that we will still need specialists, and one finally talked about understanding applications. My guess is as technology keeps improving, we’ll continue to talk about convergence and its impact on IT environments and workers.

The other big thing at Interop was cloud. I was able to attend the Enterprise Cloud Summit. Day one was an overview of cloud platforms, hosted by Alistair Croll. Here are the presentations that I really liked:

  • James Duncan gave a great presentation about why Moore’s Law hasn’t helped datacenters shrink (increased efficiency = increased usage). He explained how programming languages like node.js are better for today’s developers since it helps them do more with less.
  • Daniel Retzer made me a little stabby with a presentation called “From devops to no-ops”. Even if every single company goes “to the cloud”, y’all better hope there are some kickass ops people running that equipment you are relying on.  Making hardware and software and bandwidth “just be there” whenever you ask for it takes lots of coordination and skill. Don’t hate on ops people!
  • Dave Roberts had a great presentation about making sure that people in your organization get to the right IT resources at the right time at the right cost. This access to info is a competitive advantage. Then he compared the way IT works now to bread lines in Soviet Russia. It was brilliant and I hope he shares the slides soon!
  • There was a real use case of cloud to mobilize first responders after the Joplin MO tornadoes. I don’t know about everyone else, but that’s why I got into IT, and definitely why I’ve slid into a social media role. Using IT to do good things for the world.

Day two of the Enterprise Cloud Summit was about big data, and it was hosted by Jeremy Edberg. My take-aways from day 2:

  • Every single presenter had a different definition of big data. Crazy sauce.
  • Dave Cahill had a great presentation on the technical and business disconnect with regards to big data. He said it doesn’t matter how fast it can go, performance without efficiency isn’t sustainable. He said the adoption barriers to big data solutions are performance, capacity/IOPS imbalance, noisy neighor problem, scalability, time to market, capex, and opex.
  • Margaret Dawson had a great presentation about  distributed & decentralized models. Basically she reminded everyone that there are still servers, networks, and storage behind this mystical thing we call “the cloud”. She reminded us that we are living in a world of chaotic IT. She also has a wrap-up of what happened at Interop.
  • Jeremy Edberg gave the most concise technical presentation about existing big data technologies that I have ever seen. And hopefully he is posting it on slideshare soon.
  • MGM Resort’s Becky Wanta presented on the importance of data discovery to the hospitality and gaming industry. It is amazing how much information the resorts pick up based on your digital breadcrumbs – she even said its like having a conversation with you (anticipating your needs, wants, etc). Cool but sorta creepy.
  • Dave McCrory presented on his data gravity theory. Basically his theory is that  data has mass. Density = how active the data is (r/w’s). Mass = volume of data. Very interesting stuff, check out his blog for the details.

Those are the technical highlights for me. Interop is always a great show for talking to the leaders in our industry, so there was much socialization and I probably need to chew on some of those conversations before I share them. Looking for the next time we all can get together!

 

 

 

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Apr29

What comic book movies can teach us about social media for B2B marketing

by gminks on April 29th, 2012 at 11:59 am
Posted In: community building

This post is part two of my post about being a schizophrenic engineer. :)

FYI this post MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS. I don’t think it does if you have seen the Avengers previews, but I’m letting you know just in case.

Like I mentioned in my last post, I had a conversation with Sarah Vela about the angst I was feeling over telling a story using social media. I tried to explain my idea of our audience as participants in the story. How we have to understand the nuances of the audience to be accepted as story tellers instead of …. marketers. I wasn’t making a lot of sense. Then I said – it’s like the difference between Marvel and how they’ve set up the Avengers movies, and how DC sucks at getting movies for their universe made. And for some reason that made sense.

Now, I’m a DC girl. I love Wonder Woman - what lady geek who grew up in the 70s doesn’t? I love her origin story, I love that you can be sexy and stand for justice and be vulnerable but still kick ass. I stopped reading the comic when they changed her outfit, and now I hear they are changing her origin (WTF!). That being said, DC is horrible at making movies for their universe. And Marvel is amazing at telling the story in a way that make sense to their fans.

I’m the Juggernaut bitch!!!

From what I can tell, the first time Marvel showed that they cared what the fans thought about the elements of the stories they were telling was X-Men: The Last Stand. Now imagine if you are telling a story about the X-Men for a big entertainment corporation. The corporation probably has huge expectations around revenue, so they want to tell this story to the broadest audience possible. However, X-Men as a story (comic) was created back in 1963. So you have people who were introduced to and told these stories by their parents at this point. There is an entire community that surrounds the story that can tell you exactly when, how, and why characters evolved by pointing to the exact issues the comics involved. They can tell you how other story lines have impacted their favorite character. If you don’t tell the story to satisfy the biggest fans, there is a huge chance you are going to catch hell for screwing up the story line. But how do you explain including nods to the superfans to the corporate people who are worried about numbers?

Well, someone at Marvel made it work with the Juggernaut. The X-Men Last Stand movie was released in 2006. In 2005, a parody video called “I’m the Juggernaut bitch!” was uploaded to YouTube. It’s a clip from the X-Men cartoon show with a very NSW (yet very hilarious) voice over (check out the whole story at Know Your Meme). The person doing the Juggernaut voiceover only says “Don’t you know who the f I am? I’m the Juggernaut bitch!” (again – super NSW). The Juggernaut was one of the bad guys in the X-Men Last Stand movie, and sure enough he said the line. I saw that movie opening weekend (maybe the 1st day) and the crowd in the theater went crazy.

So think about that. Fans of the X-Men made a seriously inappropriate parody of a children’s cartoon, that was in line with how the fans see the Juggernaut character. That parody became part of the collective story of the character. The writers of the X-Men movie found a way to incorporate the new part of the story into the story they were telling. So Marvel is telling the story, but appreciating that the audience are really actors in the story at the same time.

Avengers assemble!

Marvel has also done a really good job of telling a story with their Avengers franchise. The new Avengers movie comes out next weekend (cannot wait!). The Avengers is a team made up of (in this version of the story) IronMan, the Hulk, Thor, Captain America, Black Widow, and HawkEye. They are organized by Nick Fury. In the movie the villians are Loki (Thor’s brother) and the Chitauri.

IronMan, Hulk, Thor, and Captain America all have their own movies. Nick Fury first appeared in IronMan (2008), to talk to Tony Stark (who is Iron Man) about the Avenger initiative. Fury also appeared in IronMan2, The Incredible Hulk, and Captain America. Marvel did a great job teasing about the upcoming Avengers story by tying the main character’s stories to the main story.

They also did lots of little things to tease the fans about upcoming stories. In IronMan, there is a shot of Captain America’s shield (Howard Stark – Tony Stark’s father -created the shield). There is also a deleted scene in the 2008 Incredible Hulk movie of the shield covered with snow. The Captain America movie came out in 2011.  BlackWidow, HawkEye, and Loki all appeared in the Thor movie (which also came out in 2011).

Marvel has been setting the scene and telling the Avengers story with their movies since 2008. They have tied all the elements together that the fans expect. There are sure to be some things that don’t jive (like why doesn’t Black Widow have a Russian Accent?). But they have honored their story and seem to have taken the fans into consideration, perhaps seeing them as defenders of the stories. Marvel knows they have to get these stories right for the superfans. And I think this has helped them tell the stories in a way that make sense for all audiences.

Will we ever see a JLA movie?

Like I said earlier, I’m a huge DC fan. Now, there have been DC movies. You have Superman and Batman movies. And a Green Lantern movie. Now that is my first gripe against DC. The trinity of DC is Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. Those are the movies that need to be made to tell a story that gets us to a Justice League movie. There should have been a Wonder Woman movie before a Green Lantern movie! Get Gail Simone to write the Wonder Woman script, and for goodness sake do not rewrite Diana’s origin story!

Stop doing crazy things with our favorite heros like the nipple suit and rebooting Superman and whatever that Catwoman movie was supposed to be. Tell the story the fans know to be true, not the one that you think will do the best in the box office. If you tell the story with the superfans in mind, the revenue will come. Look at how well Marvel is doing!

So what does this have to do with social media and B2B marketing?

I “do” social media in the Enterprise space – for data storage. Storage people are weird – I was told paranoid this week. I think that’s a good description, we’re paranoid about losing data. That touches lots of things – discs, IOPs, applications,  OSs, connectivity. We blame things on the networking people all the time – and they are never paranoid enough about how data gets someplace. They just figure out a new route. This makes us crazy. And the sysadmins just roll their eyes and get it all done because in the end the customers yell at them.

The stories and memes and cultures are all interconnected. If we as vendors don’t understand this when we go out with our company’s story, we’re dead in the water. If we miss an important meme when we tell the story, we miss connecting with our audience, and that shapes our relationship with the audience from that point on (tip of the hat to Ed Saiptech for that insight ). Look at how DC is handling their movies, and Wonder Woman in general, as an example of that.

We should look at our audience as actors in our stories.  They are the ones using and building and interacting with our products. Their reshaping of the stories we tell are vital. If we go out with a story, it should incorporate the story elements that are important to our audiences. We should find ways to insert “I’m the juggernaut bitch!” into the way we tell our company’s story.

Then we should report back on the story that we set out to tell, how our audience interacted and changed the story, and where the story is now. Don’t get me wrong, the Radian6 numbers are part of what we want to report. But the story telling is way more important.

Y’all……..we gotta start telling the story.

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Apr29

The engineer in me is starting to feel schizophrenic as a marketer

by gminks on April 29th, 2012 at 7:56 am
Posted In: social media

If you follow me at all, you know I’m a technologist who practices social media full time as my job. But since social media is normally run by PR/Marketing departments, I now find myself now the lone engineer in the communications organization at one of America’s largest corporations. I like my job and the people I work with, but sometimes I find myself in situations that make me feel a little schizophrenic.

This is probably a good time to remind everyone that I speak for myself on this blog, I’m not speaking for Dell. I just work there.

I’ve been struggling with a few months on how to explain the storage/cloud community that exists on Twitter, why enterprise technologists use Twitter/Blogs/Podcasts to share ideas, why attending meetups with names like #storagebeers and vMUGs are part of communicating to people interested in our technologies, and why understanding the importance of things like bacon and banana bread are vital to our success in social media.

We sponsored part of Storage Tech Field Day last week, and it was just a great event. We set up the normal things you would expect from social media professionals to report on our activities: we set up a Radian6 listening post, we captured the conversations, we will share the videos Stephen Foskett has posted of our presentations, I will write a wrap-up blog post.

But…… it’s not enough. It’s not going to capture the amazing conversations we had with folks at the dinner we went to Thursday night. It won’t explain the camaraderie between the delegates and the rest of the storage community who followed as the event was live broadcast. It won’t make people who aren’t techies, who aren’t part of the storage community, feel what we felt.

It won’t tell the story. 

And that story, and the relationship between us as story tellers and our audience as actors, is important to the business. That’s where the promise of social media lies. Not in our reach, not our post views. The promise is in storytelling with the input and participation of our audiences.

Thanks to a great conversation over nommy Thai food and adult beverages with Sarah Vela I think I at least have a way to explain what I think the problem is. But this introduction is already too long, so I think I’ll start another post….stay tuned.

Update: post is here.

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Apr17

It’s that time again – Dell Storage Trivia Tuesday

by gminks on April 17th, 2012 at 12:02 pm
Posted In: conferences, conferences, dellsf12

It’s that time of year again! Last year we had a trivia contest that we ran on Twitter for your chance at a fabulous Dell Storage Forum t-shirt.

Well the contest is returning for #DellSF12 Boston! Here’s how to play:
1. Follow @dellsf on Twitter
2. Every Tuesday, starting 4/19, the @dellsf account will tweet a trivia question that has something to do with Dell Storage. We’ll tweet this at 12:00 CT.
3. You must reply on Twitter with the correct answer to the @dellsf account, and use the #triviatues hashtag.
4. The contest is open for an hour. At the end of the hour, we’ll draw a random winner from the correct responses

 

Its that simple! The contest is open to US residents, for all of the rules and conditions please visit here.

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. Legal residents of the 50 United States (D.C.) 18 years or older. Ends 6/1/2011. To enter and for Official Rules, including odds, and prize descriptions visit here. Void where prohibited.

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Apr15

What is “the cloud”?

by gminks on April 15th, 2012 at 2:45 pm
Posted In: cloud

I’ve been meaning to get around to writing this blog post for about a month. Other work has just been getting in the way. I’m still coughing, so I’m going to blame it on the pneumonia. :)

So what is the cloud? “Cloud computing” made most of the big lists of 2012 technology terms. But what is encompassed by that term? If you google “What is cloud computing” the top results are from Wikipedia, a two year-old article from PC Magazine, and a TechTarget definition.

If you read vendor blogs, many times they start like they are educating about what the cloud is, but the post ends up as an plug for the company’s solution. We all throw that term is about pretty carelessly. And even though everyone is told that cloud is a big trend in technology in 2012, but no one can really tell you succinctly what cloud is.

It’s like the continuum transfunctioner -  a very mysterious and powerful device…its mystery is exceeded only by its power…

You may have thought I was going to define the cloud in this post. That wasn’t what I had in mind, so sorry if you feel mislead. My goal was to point out that if you are looking for a cloud solution because you have been told you must have one, or if you are marketing or selling a cloud solution, let’s start being a little more careful with our words. Don’t turn “the cloud” into a mysterious and powerful thing like the continuum transfunctioner.

Think about the compute problems organizations have, then talk (or ask questions) about the different stacks or technologies that can solve the problems not only right now, but also in 5, 10, 15 years. Rob Hirschfeld (also from Dell) wrote a great blog post on this topic - Seven Cloud Success Criteria to consider before you pick a platform. I’ve heard that concept driven even deeper by Ed Saipetch of Joyent. He talks passionately about what organizations need to consider if when evaluating open source vs vendor-created software for a project. Now if only he would map those thoughts out on his blog (yes, this is a hint!).

Let’s move away from vendor-speak and cloud stack wars, and lets get back to figuring out how to use our amazing industry to solve real world problems. That would be truly powerful….what do you think?

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