Dell Storage Forum 2011 very late wrap-up

I was sitting on the patio today relaxing with a drink when I realized that I forgot to write a wrap-up post about Dell Storage Forum that took place last month at the Hilton adjacent to Disney Downtown in sunny Orlando, Florida.

That week saw a strange conjunction of events, in fact, three different events took place during the same timeframe: Dell Storage Forum, HP DISCOVER and Tech Field Day 6 and almost all the Twittersphere bloggers and influencers were spread all across these events, this really helped in making new friends and acquaintances.

As I already wrote in a previous article many of the announcements revolved around Equallogic and the Exanet IP which is now being included inside the Equallogic fabric as a group member but (even as of today) there's still no announcements regarding Exanet NAS on Compellent Storage Center that, by the way, now supports 2,5" 200GB SLC SSDs and 1TB 2,5" SAS 7.2k drives.

I had the chance to meet Michael Dell in person at the Infosmack Live! event where we chatted very briefly about the Compellent acquisition, he's probably one of the most laid back CEOs that I ever met (probably second to Jack Domme, CEO of HDS).

I also had the chance to be interviewed on the Cube by David Vellante of Wikibon fame together with Roger Lund where we talked about how VMware integration with storage can make the difference in both small and large environments.

I also had the chance to sit down with Andy Hardy and Brian Bell from Dell Compellent to briefly discuss the Compellent acquisition by Dell, hereby you'll find the video:

I would like to thank and congratulate with all the PR people at Dell and especially with: Liem, Gina and Marchelle. The event has been great and we had a really great time together.

DISCLAIMER: Dell covered my traveling and lodging expenses but I'm under no obligation to write, tweet or say anything about the event. Cinetica, my company, is a Dell premier partner.

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Fabio Rapposelli, Storage and Virtualization specialist with over 10 years of IT and consulting experience. He currently leads the technical team at Cinetica developing and deploying IT infrastructures on a global scale. Born as a UNIX man in the late 90's he started working with Virtualization technologies at their dawn until today where he evangelize the Cloud concept to C-level executives. In 2010 he attained the coveted VCDX (number #58) certification from VMware. Keen music lover and avid traveller.
You can find Fabio social profiles here: http://about.me/frapposelli