Body

Continuing my coverage of the 30th annual [Data Center Conference]. Here is a recap of the Monday afternoon sessions:

IBM Watson and your Data Center

Steve Sams, IBM VP of Site and Facilities Services, cleverly used IBM Watson as a way to explain how analytics can be used to help manage your data center. Sadly, most of the people at my table missed the connection between IBM Watson and Analytics. How does answering a single trivia question in under three seconds relate to the ongoing operations of a data center? If you were similarly confused, take a peak at my series of IBM Watson blog posts:

• [IBM Watson: What's in that one Terabyte?]
• [IBM Watson: Tucson Watch Event]
• [IBM Watson: Business Intelligence, Data Retrieval and Text Mining]
• [IBM Watson: How to build your own Watson Jr. in your Basement]

Devising a Cloud Computing Strategy

The analyst who presented this topic was probably the fastest-speaking Texan I have met. He covered various aspects of Cloud Computing that people need to consider. Why hasn't Cloud taken off sooner? The analyst feels that Cloud Computing wasn't ready for us, and we weren't ready for Cloud Computing. The fundamentals of Cloud Computing have not changed, but we as a society have. Now that many end users are comfortable consuming public cloud resources, from Facebook to Twitter to Gmail, they are beginning to ask for similar from their corporate IT.

• Legal issues - see this hour-long video, [Cloud Law & Order], which discusses legal issues related to Cloud Computing.
• Employee staffing - need to re-tool and re-train IT employees to start thinking of their IT as a service provider internally.
• Hybrid Cloud - rather than struggle choosing between private and public cloud methodologies, consider a combination of both.

University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) Cracks Code on Data Growth

Often times, the hour is split, 30 minutes of the sponsor talking about various products, followed by 30 minutes of the client giving a user experience. Instead, I decided to let the client speak for 45 minutes, and then I moderated the Q&A for the remaining 15 minutes. This revised format seemed to be well-received!

University of Rochester is in New York, about 60 miles east of Buffalo, and 90 miles from Toronto across Lake Ontario. Six years ago, Rick Haverty joined URMC as the Director of Infrastructure services, managing 130 of the 300 IT personnel at the Medical Center. I met Rick back in May, when he presented at the IBM [Storage Innovation Executive Summit] in New York City.

URMC has DS8000, DS5000, XIV, SONAS, Storwize V7000 and is in the process of deploying Storwize V7000 Unified. He presented how he has used these for continuous operations and high availability, while controlling storage growth and costs.

The Q&A was lively, focusing on how his team manages 1PB of disk storage with just four storage administrators, his choice of a "Vendor Neutral Archive" (VNA), and his experiences with integration.

This was a great afternoon, and I was glad to get all my speaking gigs done early in the week. I would like to thank Rick Haverty of URMC for doing a great job presenting this afternoon!

technorati tags: IBM, Steve Sams, Watson, Analytics, Cloud Computing, Hybrid Cloud, University of Rochester, Medical Center, URMC, Rick Haverty, SONAS, Storwize V7000, XIV, DS8000, DS5000