Well, that ever-present and unique smell of Vegas has finally worn off, as has my post-Interop exhaustion, so I’m ready to reflect on some of the highlights of the show. Specifically, I want to capture the sounds of Interop 2012, or at least the top five most interesting comments I heard while at the show.
In the spirit of David Letterman, I’ll work my way up to number one.
Number 5: Anybody in the room able to get Wifi?
- Sad but true. This was the question asked by Alistair Croll as the Enterprise Cloud Summit (ECS) kicked off EARLY Sunday morning in Vegas, the attendees were not the only ones lacking connections. It appeared the Interop wireless networks were not yet fully operational. Ironic? Yes, we all thought so, too. Except the guy next to me who had his AT&T mobile hotspot going. What happened to the good old days when someone sponsored the wireless at Interop? AT&T are you listening? To be fair, by Monday afternoon, the NOC boys seemed to have gotten the WiFi up and running.
Number 4: Can somebody please relate this cloud thing back to the network?
- Ah, network admins. Gotta love them. While cloud took Interop by storm this year, not everyone was swept away. In fact, I realized after my presentation that I really should have put up the OSI stack like I did last year. Maybe just flash it every few slides as a subliminal pacifier. Or perhaps we need to be better at showing how the cloud, at the end of the day, is the network, with all 7 layers represented J. It just might not be your network. There was one presentation, titled: “The Impact of Cloud Computing on the Network” by Jim Metzler. Good job!
Number 3: Developers are going rogue to build new applications
- Finally, it wasn’t just marketing’s fault for all these rogue cloud adventures. Yep, developers are turning to the cloud in record numbers to build new apps, test new environments and play with new PaaS tools. The answer for all this unruly behavior? Deal with it and embrace it. Chances are these guys are going to find creative ways to solve business challenges.
Number 2: Traditional storage vendors need to move to the future
- In the session on “What’s next in storage”, industry experts Howard Marks, Stephen Foskett, Stu Miniman, and Mike Fratto, were not shy in their advice. While much of this session sounded like a storage alphabet soup (iSCSI, SSD, DDS, FC, NAS, ODD, RAID, etc.), and focused on on-premise storage solutions, with flash being the darling of the session. The experts made a great point of how storage needs to move to more object-based protocols and that overall, we need to start letting go of legacy technologies.
And my number one favorite thing over heard at Interop. . .
Number 1: Oh my god, like, you know . . .right?
- Not just once, but twice did I overhear a diatribe that would cause Shakespeare to turn in his grave. I have teenagers, so I know how to translate this, but the last place I expected to hear this was on an Interop bus going to a private party. Oh, and yes, she was blond, thank you for asking. Perhaps the only thing better that this sentence was when she said, “oh my god, I think I’m going to be sick.”
Yep, it was a great show!
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