I’m on my way back home as I’m writing this, and I must say that Dell pulled off a great event, and showed that Dell really cares about European market and people.
There were announcements across several storage product lines, one of the most prominent was surely Storage Center 6.0 that brings 64-bit goodness to the Compellent platform. A long due release that was slowed down by the Dell acquisition but that eventually turned up after a lengthy beta test period that involved many key customers. Besides boasting more cache and addressable space (crucial for scaling up) the new 6.0 code brings extended VAAI support as well, which is what separate the men from the boys when it comes to large VMware infrastructures.
Another great announcement involved one of the prominent acquisitions made by Dell during the last year: Ocarina. The new DR4000 is a disk-to-disk backup appliance, that aims to replace the now gone Data Domain boxes, sporting content-aware deduplication capabilities this little gem can match or outperform similar priced boxes from the competition, nice to see that Ocarina is slipping into the storage product line even if this was a low hanging fruit.
There were other interesting announcements revolving around Sharepoint and new switch / technologies validation, announcements that shows a deep move inside Dell as a whole towards more and more integration between the internal Storage, Servers and Networking teams, together with their long time software partners and innovative ISVs.
Now I’d like to spend a few words on the Social part of the event itself:
I knew from the start that this event would have been smaller than anything done in the US, this is usually synonymous with lower quality (see VMworld US vs. EU) but this definitely was not the case. The Social Media Team (Liem, Gina) managed to pull off an intimate event where people had the chance to approach a bunch of really down-to-earth execs that not only gave Dell a human face, but also gave them the “we care about you” warm fuzzy feeling, this is something that no marketing campaign can do, and these are the kind of things that make your customers stick around.
I gave this impression during the wrap up of the latest Nekkid Tech podcast recorded during a #Storagebeers held at the Old Cheshire Cheese, one of the oldest pubs in London, you can listen to the podcast here.
I also recorded some great video material during the event and even if I still have a huge backlog still to be published (suffered a hard drive crash right after Vienna last month) I hope to have it published in the next week or so, that means, stay tuned for more!.
DISCLAIMER: Dell invited me to the event and covered traveling and lodging expenses but I’m under no obligation to write, tweet or say anything about the event. Cinetica is a Dell Channel partner.
