IBM VM Catch the Wave poster

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Last week, I got the following comment from Bob Swann:

I am looking for the IBM VM Poster or a picture of the IBM VM "Catch the Wave"

Do you know where I might find it?

Well, Bob, I made some phone calls. The company that published these posters no longer exists, butI found a coworker at the Poughkeepsie Briefing Center who still had the poster on his wall, and he was kind enough to take a picture of it for you.

VM: The Wave of the Future (click thumbnail at left to see larger image)

Some may recognize this as a [mash-up] using as a base the famous Japanese 10-inch by 15-inch block print[The Great Wave off Kanagawa] byartist [Katsushika Hokusai]. I had this as my laptop'swallpaper screen image until last year when I was presenting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I was told that it reminded people about the horrible tsunami caused by the [Indian Ocean earthquake] back in 2004.I was actually scheduled to fly the last week of December 2004 to Jakarta, Indonesia, but at the last minute ourclient team changed plans. I would have been on route over the Pacific ocean when the tsunami hit, and probably stranded over there for weeks or months until the airports re-opened.

The Wave theme was in part to honor the IBM users group called World Alliance VSE VM and Linux (WAVV) which is havingtheir next meeting [April 18-22, 2008] in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I presentedat this conference back in 1996 in Green Bay, Wisconsin, as part of the IBM Linux for S/390 team. It started onthe Sunday that Wisconsin switched their clocks for [DaylightSaving Time], and the few of us from Arizona or other places that don't both with this, all showed up forbreakfast an hour early.

When I was in Australia last year, I was told the wave that sports fans do, by raising their hands in coordinatedsequence, was called the [Mexican Wave]in most other countries. When I was there, Melbourne was trying to outlaw this practice at their cricket matches.

The "wave" represents a powerful metaphor, from z/VM operating system on System z mainframes to VMware and Xenon Intel-based processor machines, as the direction of virtualization that we are heading for future data centers.The Mexican wave represents a glimpse of what humans can accomplish with collaboration on a globalscale. It can also represent the tidal wave of data arising from nearly 60 percent annual growth instorage capacity. (I had to mention storage eventually, to avoid being completely off-topic on this post!)

I hope this is the graphic you were looking for Bob. If anyone else has wave-themed posters they would like to contribute, please post a comment below.

technorati tags: Bob Swann, IBM poster, z/VM, Japanese, Great Wave, Kanagawa, Katsushika Hokusai, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Indian Ocean, Jakarta, Indonesia, WAVV, Mexican Wave, storage, capacity, growth, Linux,Melbourne, Australia, VMware, Xen