All began a couple of months ago, with EMC Inform on the horizon, I had two sessions in front of me, one a pure technology play – ‘EMC/VMware Integration’, and second being significantly business oriented – ‘Hybrid Cloud & Workload Federation’.

Personally prefer to be sitting in the front row of any presentation, I seek validation of a technology, process or an idea, and for someone on stage to be able to explain it, and more importantly demonstrate it; as a colleague likes to say, the “proof is in the pudding”.

I put this out to the twitter follow-ship:

Working on a presentation for next week. As a PARTICIPANT, do you prefer live or recorded demos? Leaning towards the former.
– @romant – 24th May, 2011

… which after all the responses, was kind enough to offer absolutely no definitive answer.

Really wanted to show instead of just tell; after-all, if you are in the audience, as both Eric and Damian point out – how do you really know something works, and there isn’t some recorded-voodoo going on? Given Adam‘s feedback though, anything that takes considerable processing or wait time, would record, everything else – live.

The hardware off which I was to show off my touch-typing skills resided in Sydney. The conference spanned 3 cities, connectivity was provided in only a single location – Wellington. Un-surprisingly, it worked, even across the pond. Two remaining cities, had to be covered off with a bluetooth-tethered iPhone. In Melbourne’s convention centre, the connectivity was flawless, and the demo portion of the talk didn’t skip a single beat.. over 260 happy souls.. confidence for the largest venue, Sydney, was at an all-time high. What I didn’t realise, is that Sydney’s Exhibition Centre is built like a quasi-’Faraday Cage’; which really helps if you’re after reaching the world through 3G.

Unfortunately, after 20 minutes of pure slides, a realisation dawned, that the mobile provider wasn’t up to scratch to make everything look as seamless as was planned. I had to revert to some miming and a description of pixels that would be drawn on screen had things progressed as planned.

The inability to attain more than 2 bars of reception love on the iPhone, rendered the experience simply unbearable.. back to the slides.

some of the the team, after it all finished | click for largeness

Regardless, all up, it was a great event. was able to get through most of the message in Sydney, and for the rest had some canned videos ‘just in case’, which covered the necessary points.

After the presentation, I was asked whether a live demo would ever be attempted again, the answer is simple – yes. Obviously the problem will be differently approached next time, with significant pre-checks in all locations, specifically around connectivity, and having an alternate telephony provider if necessary.

Of the sessions I was able to attend, my favourite presentations were by far, David Lloyds on ‘UIM and what it can do around the managements of standardized infrastructure’ – namely Vblock, there was standing-only room left., and the Q&A from Michael Bookey‘s session on ‘VMware + Mission Critical Apps’. Not only was he able to bring some personality and zest to a typically mundane topic, but every question thrown to him, he answered with incredible depth.

At the end of it, enjoyable, and glad to have participated.

Vblock Training

The timing couldn’t have been better. My first three days on the job, I spent in Vblock training with personnel across the VCE alliance. My background not being in networking, and having heard great things about those with CCIE certs, it was a pleasure to witness these guys in action.

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Cisco UCS

The first time I saw one was at vForum 2009 in Sydney, an ugly piece of semi-gray/teal enclosure with several blades packed to the rafters full of RAM. Dismissed it immediately because it seemed like an immature solution for a company that didn’t have the pedigree of building servers.
On my second day of training we started an overview of the chassis, fabrics, blades themselves… something clicked (no, not just kool-aid). Problem is, when procuring hardware and you have a choice of vendor, you decide on the ‘immediate bang for buck’, hence inevitably look at Memory + CPU configuration before all else, without giving much consideration to something just as important if not more, ‘ease of management’ and deployment ‘at scale’. Thus is the racking + stacking of a single blade in a single chassis as simple as doing it across 40 chassis and 320 blades?

There are some stunning features within UCS Manager for scalability. Most notably service profiles, which capture things like SAN+LAN connectivity as well as BIOS+Firmware levels into a quasi-template. Simply put, you can define a policy filter for a certain workload that is to be performed by the blade, and UCS Manager will tell you which blades comply in Memory, Connectivity, CPU and IO-Cards and which can be easily configured to the profile with the push of a button. Some great videos which distill some of the configuration + management benefits are here.

After those initial three days in training on EMC Storage such as CLARiiON + Symmetrix families, UCS and VMware to see how it all fits within the Vblock offering, I only had two days in the office. In that time I attempted to digest the email firehose of Vblock configurations, customer requests and explanations. My manager promptly and kindly offered my services to help break down some vSphere 4.1 features around core-mapping. As any new starter, then had to spend time on setting up phones, VPNs, cards and travel – have you heard about this VMworld thing? *fingers crossed*

• adapted from flickr user striatic

The past few weeks I’ve had one of the most fantastic professional experiences. Having toiled away at firstly virtualizing and then cloudifying all internal systems. I’ve been asked to join IBM’s tour of Cloud duty, and go around Australia and New Zealand preaching.

Most enjoyable part of the trip was the king-sized bed at the Hilton speaking with customers and business partners, and seeing how they:

• Deploy and manage their internal QA environments
• View the future of virtualization and cloud affecting their Application and inherently their delivery (a limited few have given this some thought)
• Dealt with concerns they have about cloud (security, privacy, legalities even)

None were technical issues. No one cares about hypervisors.

It was valuable to learn that in some instances customers are behind several years in absolute basics of automation for test, development and my favourite environment-generation. This is unfortunate from the obvious benefits they stand to gain, but a lot of the problems seem to stem from a lack of complete understanding about “what is cloud/virtualization and what can it do for me”

In my talk, I didn’t go through ROI, CIO vs CFO debates – but more about real evidence and clear-cut results from virtualizing with a sprinking of Cloud services atop. Without further ado, my talk as recorded during the Sydney-leg.

Going green? Or going neat? Get rid of that paper!

Think of all the bills, invoices, warranty cards, tax refunds and bank statements that you file away, day after day. The problem here is that paper is bulky, and takes up a lot of physical space, especially if you’re an owner of a filing cabinet.

My hope for this task was to achieve a state where I can be light on my feet, Read more »

Reading a blog I follow: David J. Anderson [Where's the Lemon ?], got me thinking more about businesses choosing the right candidate for a particular role, and an experience I had with a Japanese gentleman once on a plane.

Within the Western society, it is the norm to go through the sifting process and hopefully end up still floating when HR finishes washing their lists, to make sure that the ‘key words’ that they were after, are actually on your resume.

Now that you’re up to stage two, you tend to go through several more:

1. Meet HR
   Have them toy with you and get a feel for you.
2. Technical Test
   If you’re going for a programming role, you’ll once again be sifted until they make sure you know what OO is, and where you put a tilde to form your destructor.
3. Group Excercise
   Now that you’ve passed the previous stage with flying colours, you’re invited back into a group formation where you can be studied like a primate “assessed on your thinking ability, general knowledge, communication,argument structuring, confidence, presentation skills as well as creativity” (Lifted from Accenture Recruitment Guide)
4. Meet the manager
   At this point, as far as HR is concerned, you’re as good as hired, since not many people make it to this stage – and the only reason you wouldn’t pass is primarily due to your lack of personality . Here you are evaluated on your ability to actually ‘fit in’, be one of the boys (sorry girls).

With this “fool-proof” system, every company still ends up with a multitude of useless workers that merely are able to meet the basic requirements, pass the aptitude test and now be a leech on the system. Chances are – it will cost the company more to support this worker that it would have been to spend more time to find the right candidate in the first place, especially considering the inflexibility of labour evidenced by the plethora of unfair dismissal lawsuits.

So back to the Japanese gentleman I sat next to on my flight to Frankfurt a few years ago. He informed me that the company he worked for, had an unwritten policy that if they’re going to be spending over ¥10 million JPY – then the hiring manage must conduct a careful analysis of the person, which in this case meant – take them to a golf course for the day!
Wow, a whole day of playing golf and relaxing… Well, not exactly. As through the day the manager is able to see your traits that you would normally leave out of an interview, such as how competitive you are, and how you actually deal with stress and your diplomatic ability.

These subtle hints which will provide the employer with a clearer image of the real person, is far more useful than a two hour psychometric test, that after 30 minutes you are just clicking on anything just to finish!

A day long interview – does it cost too much? Well if you want to employ someone for a few years at the least, and they are not there to clean the toilet or make a cup of crap coffee, then you simply can’t afford not to spend the time.