Wrapping up my seven-city romp through Australia and New Zealand, the final city was Canberra, which is the capital of Australia. As with Wellington, this meant many of the clients in the audience work in government agencies.

I had not taken any photos of Anna Wells, IBM Storage Sales Leader for ANZ, but I was able to find this caricature of her on a poster from an award she won within IBM. I also did not have a picture of Robert, my videographer for this trip, who was always behind the camera himself.

The event went smoothly, just like the rest of them. Anna presented IBM's storage strategy and highlighted specific IBM storage solutions.

I had several emails asking if this event was called "Storage Optimisation Breakfast" because it was held in the mornings, or did we actually serve food at these events. The answer is we actually served food, a variation of the [Full English Breakfast], and most of the attendees gobbled it down while Anna spoke. The fare was quite similar across all seven locations: scrambled or poached eggs, on toast or english muffin, ham/bacon/sausages, potatoes or mushrooms, and half of a baked tomato with bits of something toasted on top. One morning, for a change, I decided instead to have a bowl of Weet-Bix cereal. Tasted like cardboard. I learned my lesson.

Next, we had Will Quodling, Manager of Infrastructure Operations, at Australia's Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research. The Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research consists of 3200 staff that strive to encourage the sustainable growth of Australian industries. The Department is committed to developing policies and delivering programs to provide lasting economic benefits ensuring Australia's competitive future, undertakes analysis, and provides services and advice to the business, science and research community.  American President, Barack Obama, visited Australia and was interested in adopting a similar concept for the United States.

The department was looking to replace their existing IBM System Storage DS4800 disk systems with something more energy efficient. They selected IBM XIV storage system, with an expected savings of 10kW per year. They are able to run 800 VMware images and 150 VDI workstations using storage on one XIV, replicate the data to a second XIV at a remote location, and have a third XIV for their Web serving environment. They tested out both single drive and full module failures, and experienced better-than-expected rebuild times, with no impact to users, and no impact to performance.

After 17 days without a functioning government, Australia finally selected a prime minister. Her name is Julia Gillard, shown here. She won in part by promising to build a National Broadband Network (NBN) for the entire country, including the rural areas.

[Canberra] is an interesting town, a fully planned community designed in 1913 by Chicago's husband-and-wife architect team of Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin. The location was selected as being half-way compromise between Australia's two largest cities, Sydney and Melbourne.

I would like to thank all the wonderful people in both Australia and New Zealand for making this a successful trip!

technorati tags: IBM, Canberra, Australia, Innovation, Government, XIV, DS4800, VMware, VDI

Tags:  innovation vdi xiv canberra australia ds4800 government vmware ibm

Continuing my romp through Australia and New Zealand, this is city 6 - Wellington, which is the capital of New Zealand. This meant many of the clients in the audience work in government agencies.

Here is my view of Wellington from my hotel room at the Duxton Hotel. I have been to Wellington before, it has that "small town" feel.

The event went smoothly, just like the rest of them. Anna Wells presented IBM's storage strategy and highlighted specific IBM storage solutions.

Replacing Natalie from GPJ Australia is Megan, who coordinated our events in both Auckland and Wellington, NZ.

Next, we had Glen Mitchell again from Telecom NZ, presenting his success story going from an EMC-only environment to a dual IBM-and-EMC mixed environment managed by IBM SAN Volume Controller.

Someone mentioned that my job as public speaker in different cities was akin to "busking". I had no idea what "busking" was, until I was shown two "in the act" in front of a bank. Americans call these "street performers", which shows we appreciate this art form perhaps more than the Kiwis.

Lastly, I covered future trends in storage. This is particularly interesting to government agencies that are particularly interested in reducing costs, managing risks, and improving service delivery.

Lastly, this is Aisel Giumali, IBM storage marketing manager for Australia and New Zealand. She managed my calendar, all of my events and one-on-one client briefings. I could not have handled these past two weeks without her.

Since the first big earthquake on Saturday, there were several smaller aftershocks, including one in Wellington itself. It is a good thing I head back for Australia for the rest of the trip.

technorati tags: IBM, Wellington, busking, Aisel Giumali

Tags:  aisel+giumali wellington busking ibm

While I was in Auckland, New Zealand, for the IBM Storage Optimisation Breakfast series of events, I agreed to also talk at the [Ingram Micro Showcase 2010] held there the same week. David Bird, who was scheduled to speak, was down in Christchurch taking care of his family after the big 7.1 magnitude earthquake.

The marketing team did a great job putting up a "Smarter Planet" ball up near the ceiling. It had to be "enhanced" with some extra black ink to include the outline of the islands of New Zealand.

Basically, I had 25 minutes to present "Future Storage Trends" to a packed room with standing room only. This was a shortened version of my 40-minute talk that I had been already giving at the Storage Optimisation Breakfast events. This presentation was based on three key trends:

1. There is a shift in the role each storage media type is going to be used for. Rising energy costs, performance and economics are causing the IT industry to re-evaluate their use of solid-state drives, spinning disk, tape cartridge, paper and analog film. IBM Easy Tier and blended disk-and-tape solutions are paving the way for these future trends.
2. Advancements in commuications technology and bandwidth are driving a convergence of SANs and LANs to a single Data Center Network (DCN) based on Convergence Enhanced Ethernet (CEE). IBM's top-of-rack switches and converged network adapaters (CNA) are the first step in this process.
3. Cloud Computing is driving new levels of standardization, automation and management that will impact the way internal IT departments will manage their own IT equipment as well. IBM's five different levels of cloud computing offerings, from private cloud to public cloud, provides every individual or company a level of service that is just right.

Here is the IBM booth. As is often the case, we get a prestigious corner booth that maximizes foot traffic to see our solutions.

While walking around, the folks at the Samsung booth notices my Samsung Galaxy S smartphone. These are not yet available in the New Zealand market, so they thought I was a Samsung employee. I explained that I am an American, and that these have been available for weeks now in the states.

The Samsung team then showed me their latest 3D television. Basically, you wear special 3D glasses that sync-up electronically with the TV screen itself to give the appearance of 3D image on anything you play. I believe the TV comes with two pairs of glasses, and additional pairs can be purchased for substantial extra. It works with any movie or TV show, there is no requirement that it be filmed in 3D mode. The 3D-TV automatically analyzes that is moving on the screen, and then makes that item clearer and sharper, and things that are considered background are automatically made fuzzier, out of focus. The effect is really incredible.

One of the storage solutions on display was the entry-level IBM System Storage DS3524 disk system, which is a small 2U high cabinet that holds 24 drives. These are the small form factor 2.5 inch drives. It's amazing we can pack so many drives in such a compact rack-optimized enclosure!

Ingram Micro is one of IBM's technology distributors, and it was good to see it was a well-attended event.

technorati tags: IBM, Ingram Micro, Auckland, DS3500, DS3524, Samsung, Galaxy, smartphone, future, storage trends

Tags:  galaxy storage+trends ds3500 future ibm ingram+micro samsung ds3524 auckland smartphone

I am now fully a week behind in my coverage of my romp through Australia and New Zealand. Last week was "week 2" of the "Tony and Anna" show! This time we were in Auckland, New Zealand. Anna Wells is from New Zealand originally, so it was good for her to be back in her home country.

Sunday I was able to take the Ferry boat to Devonport, and climb to the top of Mt Victoria, which is only 283 feet above sea level, but still affords spectacular views of Auckland from across the harbour. My hotel, the Auckland Heritage, as well as the IBM building, is about a block or two away from the Sky Tower.

New Zealand shares a lot of traits with Australia, including low unemployment and a healthy economy. Employees feel secure enough in their jobs to invest in real estate, get married and start families. School teachers are well-regarded in society, earning six-figure incomes. Retail stores were filled with shoppers spending [disposable and discretionary income]. What a refreshing difference from the United States! The level of optimism made my skin tingle. I had to file a lot of paperwork for all the work permits and visas for this trip, so I hate to think what it would take to emigrate to either country.

(Of course, the grass always appears greener on the other side. Not everything is perfect in New Zealand. I saw warning signs for toxic sea slugs in their beaches, sales advertising for [Brolly Sheets], and the south island of New Zealand suffered a magnitute 7.1 earthquake near Christchurch on the day I arrived to Auckland on the north island. Over 100,000 homes were damaged, but nobody died, and the entire country rallied support to help out those affected.)

I took this photo of a seagull walking along Cheltenham Beach. I thought it might make for a nice wallpaper for my phone or laptop.

The Storage Optimisation Breakfast at this, the fifth of seven cities, went smoothly. The New Zealand client case study she had planned to show was in the middle of an [RFP], so instead she covered [Edith Cowan University] and [Bunnings Warehouse] from Australia as examples of success stories.

Our next speaker was Glen Mitchell, an IT architect in the Operational Integration, Technology & Shared Services of Telecom NZ. The Telecom NZ is New Zealand's phone company, recently split up into separate business units, similar to what the US government did to AT&T during the 1974 [Bell System Divestiture].

The change forced Telecom NZ to be more financially responsible. Before, they were using an all-EMC disk environment, managed by HP Enterprise Services (formerly known as EDS). The EMC gear worked as expected and Telecom NZ is happy with EMC as a vendor, but they were uncomfortable with vendor lock-in. Some firmware upgrades on their EMC boxes often forced them to take outages on hundreds of connected servers to install Powerpath updates. After an EMC disk array went off its four-year prepaid warranty, it took another FOUR YEARS to get all 180 servers migrated to another disk array. Keeping a disk array after warranty expires can cost as much as $450K NZD per year, per disk array, in maintenance fees! Ouch!  This served as a strong motivator to find a way to migrate data from one disk array to another in a more smooth and timely manner.

The new direction was a dual-vendor environment, keeping some of the midrange EMC gear, and getting new IBM high-end DS8700 gear, resulting in a drastically lower TCO. To make the transition as smooth as possible, Telecom NZ employed IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC) to virtualize their entire environment, both EMC and IBM happily being part of shared disk pools. They had originally planned to migrate their entire server environment over in 12 months, but in the first six weeks, they are already at 20 percent, ahead of schedule!

The SAN Volume Controllers will also allow Telecom NZ have Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery protection in a consistent manner across both EMC and IBM equipment between their two main data centers in Auckland and Hamilton.

Remember those trees shown in the movie trilogy "Lord of the Rings"? The trees here in New Zealand are amazing! I'm not an arborist, but I was told this one shown here is a [Morton Bay Fig Tree]. Some of the oldest trees in the world live in New Zealand.

By deploying IBM DS8700 and SAN Volume Controller, Telecom NZ was able to reduce costs, manage risk, and improve service delivery!

technorati tags: IBM, Auckland, Devonport, Telecom NZ, HPES, Hewlett-Packard, EDS, EMC, vendor lock-in, price-gouging

Tags:  telecom+nz devonport auckland hpes hewlett-packard eds emc price-gouging vendor+lock-in ibm