Blog Stu

First name Mr, middle name period, last name FCoE ;)

Courtesty of Global Knowledge at Cisco Live 2009

FCoE Network perspective

My final video from Cisco Live 2009 is the second of two discussions that I had with Kash Shaikh about FCoE.

If you have any suggestions for additional topics about FCoE that can be covered in a future video, blog post or updated whitepaper, please let me know.

Cisco Live 2009 Social Media Wrapup

Here is the third and final installment of the Cisco Live Daily Blogger Techminute

As you can probably tell from watching these, we had fun making them (and were usually working on a very tight schedule).

After this final video shoot, Cisco also had a blogger reception.  To my surprise, since the event was held in Silicon Valley’s back yard, there were a number of social media luminaries that attended.

Here is a group photo (the Cisco bloggers were in attendance, but were not in this shot).  The photo was taken by Andrew Mager of CBS (who wrote the only live blog of the night), if you click on the photo, I had Andrew tag everyone with their Twitter IDs like I did for EMC World and the World Innovation Forum.

I always find it interesting to see how the real life personnas compare to the online.  Everyone was friendly and I had some great conversations about private cloud, Telepresence to the future of social media.

UPDATE: Here’s a second photo from Brian Solis (he has the names tagged if you click through)

Cisco Live Day 2 & Social Media

I’ve been really impressed with Cisco Live - most of the people attending are very focused on training and certifications; most will take the free T-shirts, but that’s secondary to the knowledge.  Here is the second Techminute with the bloggers:

As you might be able to see in the video - all of the bloggers are pretty passionate about some of the technologies being discussed.  Another item from the keynote that we didn’t even get to cover was John Chambers’ vision of the future of videoconferencing [imagine real-time language translation and search of content]; Bell Labs (AT&T/Lucent) had a similar vision back in the 90s when I worked for them, but the better/faster/cheaper networks today give us an advantage.

The Twitter volume at the conference has been lower than I expected w/ 10k attendees, but I would guess that there isn’t a lot of overlap between the guy who wants to attend a 2 hours IP SLA class and has interest in being active on Twitter.

To round out my day, I had dinner with bloggers Len Devanna, Louis Gray and Hutch Carpenter.  We spent a few minutes discussing storage (poor Hutch got to hear the vision of virtualization in the datacenter), but mostly discussed the developing social media/Enterprise 2.0 industry.  As I’ve mentioned before, there are great voices online, but it’s the connection with the real people that is really priceless.

If I can help with information on storage networking or social media, please feel free to comment here or contact me through one of the various tools.

Cheers,

Stuart Miniman

http://nohype.tumblr.com

Twitter @stu

FriendFeed http://friendfeed.com/miniman

Cisco Live Day 1 videos

Over ten thousand people descended on the Moscone Center in San Francisco.  It’s fantastic weather here this week and since the Moscone Center spans a few buildings, people get a few glimpses of daylight in between classes, keynotes and pavilion hours.

I had the opportunity to shoot 2 videos with Cisco on the first day.

First I sat down with Kash Shaikh to discuss FCoE.  With the T11 standards now past committee, customers can now confidently start evaluating and deploying the technology.  We discussed things from the storage (FC) perspective.  We’re hoping to shoot a second video later this week where we will discuss FCoE from the networking (Ethernet) perspective.

As I mentioned in my previous post, Cisco is using the latest technologies to extend the conference experience to those who can’t attend in person.  One of the ways that they are doing this is by having a short video each day with bloggers, discussing what is happening at the show.  Since things were just kicking off on Monday, James Urquhart, Chris Hoff and I talked about what we’re going to be doing and what technologies we’re excited to see.

In the video, I mentioned a VMware demo of VMotion over distance.  The blog post discussing this is http://blogs.vmware.com/networking/2009/06/vmotion-between-data-centersa-vmware-and-cisco-proof-of-concept.html.

Go to http://www.cisco-live.com/attendees/virtual to watch John Chamber’s keynote today and Padmasree Warrior’s keynote tomorrow.

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Best Regards,

Stuart Miniman

http://nohype.tumblr.com

Twitter @stu

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 to 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

http://nohype.tumblr.com