Day 1 - The plan was for me to arrive for the Wednesday night reception. Each attendee was given a copy of my latest book[Inside System Storage: Volume I] and I was planning to sign them. I thought perhaps we should have a "book signing" table like all of the other published authors have.

Things didn't go according to plan. Thunderstorms at the Mexico City airport forced our pilot to find an alternate airport. Nearby Acapulco airport was the logical choice, but was full from all the other flights, so the plane ended up in a tiny town called McAllen, Texas. I did not arrive until the morning of Day 2,so ended up signing the books throughout Thursday and Friday, during breaks and meals, wherever they could find me!

Special thanks to fellow IBMer Ian Henderson who picked me up from the airport at such an awkward hour and drive me all the way to Cuernavaca!

Day 2 - The event venue is the beautiful Japanese-theme[Camino Real Sumiya Hotel] in Cuernavaca, Mexico.

All of us, IBMers, Business Partners and clients alike, all donned black tee-shirts with a white eightbar logo for a group photo with one of those "wide lens" cameras. While we were being assembled onto the bleachers, I took this quick snapshot of myself and some of the guys behind me.

I was original scheduled to be first to speak, but with my flight delays, was moved to a time slot after lunch.After a big Mexican lunch, the conference coordinators were afraid the attendees might fall asleep,a Mexican tradition called [siesta], so I was instructed to WAKE THEM UP! Fortunately, my topic was Information Lifecycle Management, a topicI am very passionate about, since my days working on DFSMS on the mainframe. With 30percent reduction in hardware capital expenditures, 30 percent reduction in operational costs, and typical payback periods between 15 to 24 months, the presentation got everyone's attention.

Of course, a lot happens outside of the formal meetings. We had a Japanese theme dinner, where we wore Japanese Hachimaki [headbands]with the eightbar logo. For those not familiar with Japanese culture, hachimaki are worn today not so much for the practical purpose to catch the perspiration but rather for mental stimulation to express one's determination. Some students wear hachimaki when they study to put themselves in the right spirit and frame of mind. Shown here are presenters Mike Griese (Infrastructure Management with IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center),Dave Larimer (Backup and Storage Management with IBM Tivoli Storage Manager), myself, and John Hamano(Unified Storage with IBM System Storage N series).

Day 3 - Wrapping up the week, I presented two more times.

First, I covered IBM Disk Virtualization with IBM SAN Volume Controller. One interesting question was if the SAN Volume Controller could be made to look like a Virtual Tape Library. I explained that this was never part of the original design, but that if you want to combine SVC with a VTL into a combined disk-and-tape blended solution, consider using theIBM product called Scale-Out File Services[SoFS] which I covered in my post[Moredetails about IBM clustered scalable NAS].

During one of the breaks, I took a picture of the behind-the-scenes staff that put this together. They had created these huge blocks representing puzzle pieces, emphasizing how IBM is one of the few ITvendors that can bring all the pieces together for a complete solution. Shown hereare Mike Griese (presenter), Cyntia Martinez, Claudia Aviles, Cesar Campos (IBM Business Unit Executive forSystem Storage in Mexico), and Claudia Lopez. Each day the staff wore matching shirts so that it was easyto find them.

Later, I covered Archive and Compliance Solutions to highlight our complete end-to-end set of solutions.When asked to compare and contrast the architectures of the IBM System Storage DR550 with EMC Centera, I explained that the DR550 optimizes the use of online disk access for the most recent data. For example, if you are going to keep data for 10 years, maybe you keep the most recent 12 months on disk, and the rest is moved,using policy-based automation, to a tape library for the remaining nine years. This means that the disk inside the DR550 is always being used to read and write the most recent data, the data you are most likely to retrieve from an archive system. Data older than a year is still accessible, but might take a minute or two for the tape library robot to fetch.The EMC Centera, on the other hand, is a disk-only solution. It offers no option to move older data to tape,nor the option to spin-down the drives to conserve power. It fills up after the same 12 months or so, and then you get to watch it the remaining nine years, consuming electricity and heating your data center.

I don't know about you, butI have never seen anyone purposely put in "space heaters" into their data center, but certainly a full EMC Centera does little else. Both devices use SATA drives and support disk mirroring between locations, but IBM DR550 offers dual-parity RAID-6, and supports encryption of the data on both the disk and the tape in the DR550. EMC Centera still uses only RAID-5, and has not yet, as far as I know, offered any level of encryption. IBM System StorageDR550 was clocked at about three times faster than Centera at ingesting new archive objects over a 1GbE Ethernet connection.

This last photo is me and fellow IBMer Adriana Mondragón. She was one of my students in the [System Storage Portfolio Top Gun class],last February in Guadalajara, Mexico.She graduated in the top 10 percent of her group, earning her the prestigious titleof "Top Gun" storage sales specialist.

The conference wrapped up with a Mexican lunch with a traditional Mariachi band. I took pictures, but figured you all already know what [Mariachi players] look like, and I didn't want to detract from the otherwise serious tone of this blog post! This was the first System Storage Symposium in Mexico, but based on its success, we might continue these annually.

technorati tags: IBM, Storage Symposium, Mexico, Cuernavaca, McAllen, Texas, Ian Henderson, Camino Real, Sumiya, Hachimaki, Mike Griese, Dave Larimer, John Hamano, SVC, VTL, SOFS, NAS, TSM, TotalStorage, Productivity Center, Cyntia Martinez, Claudia Aviles, Cesar Campos, Claudia Lopez, archive, compliance, DR550, NENR, EMC, Centera, SATA, RAID-5, RAID-6, encryption, Adriana Mondragon, Top Gun, Guadalajara,