Category Archives: Conferences & Events

DELL Enterprise Forum EMEA 2014 in Frankfurt

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As you might have noticed on Twitter I was in Frankfurt last week to attend DELL Enterprise Forum EMEA 2014. It was a great conference and very worthwhile going to. It was a week of multi way communication between vendor, marketing, engineering, partners and customers. I learned a lot. And I gave a lot of feedback. As a Dell TechCenter Rockstar and a Microsoft MVP in Hyper-V I can build bridges to make sure both worlds understand each other better and we, the customers get their needs served better.

Dell Enterprise Forum EMEA 2014 - Frankfurt

I’m happy I managed to go and I have some people to thank for me being able to grab this opportunity:

  • I cleared the time with my employer. This is great, this is a win win situation and I invested weekend time & extra hours for both my employer and myself.
  • I got an invite for the customer storage council where we learned a lot and got ample of opportunity to give honest and constructive feedback directly to the people that need to hear it! Awesome.
  • The DELL TechCenter Rockstar program invited me very generously to come over at zero cost for the Enterprise Forum. Which is great and helped my employer  and myself out. So, thank you so much for helping me attend. Does this color my judgment? 100%  pure objectivity does not exist but the ones who know me also know I communicate openly and directly. Look, I’ve never written positive reviews for money or kickbacks. I do not have sponsoring on my blog, even if that could help pay for conferences, travel expenses or lab equipment. Some say I should but for now I don’t. I speak my mind and I have been a long term DELL customer for some very good reasons. They deliver the best value for money with great support in a better way and model than others out there. I was sharing this info way before I became a Rockstar and they know that I tell the good, the bad and the ugly. They can handle it and know how to leverage feedback better than many out there.
  • Stijn Depril ( @sdepril, http://www.stijnsthoughts.be/), Technical Datacenter Sales at RealDolmen gave me a ride to Frankfurt and back home. Very nice of him and a big thank you for doing so.  He didn’t have to and I’m not a customer of them. Thank buddy, I appreciate it and it was interesting ton learn the partners view on things during the drive there and back. Techies will always be checking out gear …

Dell Enterprise Forum EMEA 2014 - Frankfurt

What did all this result in? Loads of discussion, learning and sharing about storage, networking, compute, cloud, futures and community in IT. It was an 18 hour per day technology fest in a very nice and well arranged fashion.

I was able to meet up with community members, twitter buddies, DELL Employees and peers from all over EMEA and share experiences, learn together, talk shop, provide feedback and left with a better understanding of the complexities and realities they deal with on their side.

Dell Enterprise Forum EMEA 2014 - Frankfurt

It has been time very well spent. I applaud DELL to make their engineers and product managers available for this event. I thank them for allowing us this amount of access to their brains from breakfast till the moment we say goodnight after a night cap. Well done, thank you for listening and I hope to continue the discussion. It’s great to be a DELL TechCenter Rockstar and work in this industry during this interesting times. To all the people I met again or for the first time, it was a great week of many interesting conversations!

For some more pictures and movies visit the Dell Enterprise Forum EMEA 2014 from Germany photo album on Flickr

Conferences On My Roadmap For 2014

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Here’s a little roadmap of conferences on my radar screen for 2014. Some I can’t attend because of conflicts in my schedule and other priorities, but I list ‘m here for your consideration.

DELL Enterprise Forum

If you’re working with Dell technologies, either hardware or software this is for you. It very interactive and you get provide feedback to the product teams as well as briefings on what coming. Some are under NDA, some not.

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TechEd North America 2014

I’m attending, everything has been arranged. So if you’re a blog reader/twitter follower give us a ping.

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E2EVC 2014 Brussels

This is a non marketing event by experts in virtualization. So these people design, implement and support virtualization solutions for a living.  E2EVC Virtualization Conference is a non-commercial, it does not run a profit for the organizers or speakers. Everybody volunteers. The attendance fee covers the costs of the conference rooms, coffee breaks and such. The value is in the knowledge sharing and the networking.

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See https://blog.workinghardinit.work/2014/02/03/e2evc-2014-brussels/

OSCON 2014

I love watching the OSCON presentations on line and it’s one of my never attended that on my must attend list. Whether that will happen this year remains to be seen.image

TechEd Europe 2014

It runs from October 27th to October 31st 2014 in Barcelona. I hope to meet you there and I hope they are ready at that time to talk about vNext Winking smile. It’s a great opportunity to network and talk shop with so many of my peers I’ll most definitely try to be there. Any vNext information would most certainly make it a not to miss event. They announced it a bit late and they already have lost some of the potential attendees to TechEd North America. Not their best move ever I must say.

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E2EVC 2014 Barcelona

Details have yet to be announced. But if my schedule allows I will attend and present!

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Dell World 2014

No details as of yet but for partners & customers this is a valuable opportunity to talk to the product teams, directors, marketing mangers and engage in some serious conversation about technology and where DELL fits in your road map.

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Microsoft MVP Summit 2014

I will NOT miss the MVP Summit Smile. No details as it’s all NDA.

E2EVC 2014 Brussels

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Ladies & gentleman, on May 30-June 1, 2014 the E2EVC 2014 Brussels Virtualization Conference is taking place. This is a non marketing event by experts in virtualization. So these people design, implement and support virtualization solutions for a living.  E2EVC Virtualization Conference is a non-commercial, it does not run a profit for the organizers or speakers. Everybody volunteers. The attendance fee covers the costs of the conference rooms, coffee breaks and such. The value is in the knowledge sharing and the networking.

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This community event strives to bring the best virtualisation experts together to exchange knowledge and to establish new connections. It’s a weekend event (so people can attend without interrupting their work or customer services. Filled with presentations, Master Classes and discussions you can have 3 days to network and learn from your peers.

So the next event will take place in Brussels, Belgium May 30 – June 1, 2014 in Hotel Novotel Brussels Centre Tour Noire. So my Belgian colleagues, this is your change to be al little Dutch as they have a SPECIAL PRICE FOR BELGIAN RESIDENTS – 199 EUR!

If you’re not Belgian you are also very welcome. So do register for E2EVC 2014 Brussels. If you have knowledge to share, please volunteer to speak. This community event has as a goal to share knowledge and stimulates professionals to present on their subject matters.

A big thank you for Alex Juschin & team for his never ending efforts to help organize this conference!

DELL World 2013 – Tour Of the Acoustic & Storage Testing Labs & Presenting at the Dell TechCenter User Group

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While at Dell World 2013, a group of us had the opportunity to visit the Dell offices as part of the Trends in Data Center Technology Think Tank. We saw advancements in fresh air cooling, a hot house,

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the storage lab and, new to me, the acoustic labs. Below is a picture of Chris Peterson, the acoustic Architect (he was involved in the design of the DELL VRTX, which is a unique solution and achievement in the industry). Like wise the also have thermal engineers and both of these expertises are closely related.

I will never look at acoustic / thermal engineering for servers & storage in the same way I used to and I have way more respect for the effort and a better understanding of what efforts go in to this research and why.

For some more information on the acoustic lab read this white paper Dell Enterprise Acoustics and watch these videos:

Dell thermal & acoustic engineers discussing the VRTX
Chris Peterson on Dell PowerEdge Generation 12 Server acoustics

Next to all that I attended briefings, had one to one conversations with network, storage & server managers & engineers. I had a lot of information, questions & request to share from our Microsoft MVP Community in regards to our needs & wishes for the best possible support for Windows Server 2012 R2, Hyper-V, ODX, UNMAP, SMB Direct, SOFS, Management & cloud. I even jumped into an open source breakfast discussion on * cloud computing. Last but not least we joined fellow Rock Stars Jonathan Copeland (@VirtSecurity), Rasmus Haslund (@haslund) & Dell Tech Center’s community manager Jeff Sullivan (@JeffSullivan) to discuss what community & social media means to us.

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I also shared our experiences with Windows Server 2012 R2, Hyper-V, DVMQ, vRSS & ODX at the Dell Tech Center User Group during Dell World 2013.

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Want to talk and demo DVMQ & vRSS? Start with the basics: RSS Smile 

To all my community buddies a very festive end of the year and a great 2014! If you want to know even more about how rewarding being part of a community can be, check out this blog Mindset of the community by Marc van Eijk (@_marcvaneijk)