The Summer of FCoE
Now that the FCoE standard has hit the next milestone by being approved by T11, there has been an increase in requests for information on FCoE. Next week, I will be attending the Cisco Live! conference in San Francisco.
At the conference, I will be giving mini-presentations at the EMC booth (Booth #436) on the Evolution of the SAN which in 5 minutes gives a taste of how FCoE allows for a converged network and is an important building block for the Virtual Data Center and the Private Cloud. I’ll be looking to have some further discussions since 5 minutes really doesn’t do the topic justice (no time to even touch on the cabling which has been a major discussion point with most customers). It also looks like I will have the opportunity to participate in Cisco’s Techminute, which will be a panel discussion with bloggers (hoping to grab Chad Sakac to join me from EMC and from Cisco Omar Sultan, Doug Gourlay, James Urquhart and Chris Hoff) which will be videotaped and posted to the Cisco Live social media microsite and YouTube.
Cisco really does an amazing job using many technologies t
o allow participation in the conference. For those that can’t be there in person, there is a Virtual Conference - you can watch the keynotes (including Cisco’s CEO John Chambers and CTO Padmasree Warrior) for free or pay for access to the technical sessions. Cisco is also utilizing Twitter; there is a CiscoLive account in addition to the CiscoDC (which Omar runs) and the hashtag for the conference is #clsf. There are lots of ways to watch the Twitter stream remotely - check out this TwiTip article from Jeff Hurt (it’s talking about Twitter chats, but the same tools are very good for watching and/or participating in a conference that uses a hashtag).
From my Twitter experience at the World Innovation Forum and EMC World, the keynotes are where you get the best Twitter experience. Not only do you have everyone focused on the same subject, but there should be time to read the incoming thread, which I doubt that I will be able to do while taking a 2 hour class on DNS or while talking with other participants during the pavilion hours.
Beyond next week’s conference, there is a Cisco Data Center of the Future conference on July 15th. EMC will have a keynote and you can get whitepapers and videos from the virtual booth. There are subject matter experts online to chat.
I will also be participating in the EMC Innovation Lecture Series on September 2nd - watch for details on the EMC Community Network (ECN) site. I will be discussing FCoE and the innovation journey of many decades in search of a converged network. The Innovation Lecture series is open for all to attend, it is a webcast with live Q&A and the sessions are all posted on the ECN site listed above. BTW, for those that wonder, FCoE makes up about 1/3 of my work, but is the only technology that I can publicly talk about at this time, which is why this blog covers FCoE related material and social media which I explore in my spare time.
Hope you’ll be able to join one of the events. Please post any questions that you have and enjoy the summer - it will be a busy one.
Stuart Miniman
