The two points I emphasized during the keynote are:

1. The Cloud is an enabler.  It lowers the cost of entry for disruptive technology.  A use case example is using Elastic Map Reduce to solve huge problems we can’t easily or inexpensively solve today with traditional enterprise methods.
2. GIS and mapping are extremely relevant these days. As admins, directors and users, they should work with developers  to create innovative mashup-style apps.  This can help disseminate information to wide masses or create revenue streams from a constituent and commercial perspective.

You can find the keynote preso here.

Trisha borrowed a lot of the CloudCamp unconference format for the KAMP Summit which worked well.  I also found out that they had an App Contest (Desktop and Web) similar to a sprint during StartupWeekend.  I spent most of the day there and this is what I walked away with:

• Cloud in the public sector is still very new, yes it’s a journey
• Unconference (a la Barcamp) continues to work well as a format
• The midwest has a lot of innovation in it
• Can’t underestimate the value of leadership and community (Trisha did an amazing job)

I had to leave during the Unpanel but I was getting a lot of questions about Cloud in general (security, resiliency, etc) and I tried to answer as much as I could.  I also met Angie Jennings of Swova who specializes in ArcGIS implementations.  Her company is also one of the first to help customers take their GIS solutions into the cloud from an IaaS perspective.

If you’ve got questions about the preso or cloud in general, feel free to comment below.

EMC is sponsoring and I’ll be doing a lightning talk on private cloud.  If you haven’t been to a CloudCamp before, it follows the unconference format.  CloudCamps have been extremely successful because of the user participation.

Here are some of the topics that have been covered:

• Infrastructure as a service (Amazon EC2, GoGrid, Rackspace, Nirvanix, etc)
• Platform as a service (AppEngine, Azure, etc)
• Software as a service (salesforce.com, Yahoo! Mail, etc.)
• Application / Data / Storage (development in the cloud)

1. Ask yourself what you want out of it – Remember, some of your attendees have never heard of you but many know some of your pitch already. Figure out what you want to get out of the event ahead of time and ask yourself if attendees will walk away talking about your presentations the way you wanted them to.

2. Cover the basics and then get into the weeds – We love the weeds. Some of us do anyway. It shows us you know what you’re talking about. It separates you from your competition. Tell us your strengths and weaknesses. We are more effective when we are armed with more information.

3. Bring your best people - You want to bring your best and brightest because there will be people (like me) who will grind into the details. 3Par and Ocarina brought their rockstars and it was apparent to each and every attendee. They knew their stuff and didn’t push questions aside.

4. Think and re-think your demo or hands-on labs - Some of the ones we experienced were great but others weren’t effective. Demos and labs that cover the basics *aren’t* always the best. People who are following the event will say, “I could’ve done that. Show me something new and different.” Remember, some of us love the CLI and others could care less. Make sure your activity will keep people engaged. Data Robotics did this very well but a big reason is because their technology is *different*. They understood how to deliver an experience much like Steve Jobs and Apple does. Their CEO even did a whiteboard of their technology and he got into the weeds.

5. There is never enough time - Almost all the vendors were a bit over schedule. Don’t try to cram too much in if it won’t fit or get a bigger timeslot. Many vendors had this happen but kudos to them for rolling right through.

Remember that you will get both good and bad feedback but being in tune with your audience is what matters. The rules above are not a guaranteed recipe for successful but they’ll give you a good start. They are universal and apply whenever you are pitching anything, not just during a Tech Field Day event. Stephen will be posting the videos of the sessions, watch them and learn from what worked and what didn’t.

In case you don’t know what Azure is, here’s a description from Microsoft’s web site:

The Windows Azure platform offers an intuitive, reliable and powerful platform for the creation of web applications and services.

The Windows Azure platform is comprised of Windows Azure: an operating system as a service; SQL Azure: a fully relational database in the cloud; and .NET Services: consumable web-based services that provide both secure connectivity and federated access control for applications.

Currently in Community Technology Preview (CTP), the services are free to evaluate through January 2010. We will begin charging customers on February 1st, 2010.

I’m excited to be a part of such a big event for Microsoft. One thing that seems to be consistent is that this is not your dad’s Microsoft. Their cloud group started with twenty engineers and has ramped up over the last couple of years.

Like I’ve done in the past, here’s a “What I want out of PDC09″ list. If there’s something you would like out of PDC, feel free to leave a comment or e-mail me.

1. Get the latest updates on the Azure stack
2. Understand the limitations and where different services are best used
3. See how Azure addresses challenges like deployment, scaling, security and private cloud integration
4. Understand how Microsoft is making their software cloud-aware
5. Talk to more people using Azure and see examples of how they are using it

Much of it is cloud-focused because I spend a bit of my time running Indy Cloud Users and involved with CloudCamp. It has been awhile since I’ve spent time with developers so I’m sure I will be learning a lot. I’ve been impressed with the dynamic nature of the company and individuals like Brian who deliver the message about what Microsoft is doing.

The VMware datacenter probably got the most visual attention. A whole row of Cisco UCS nodes, Clariion, V-Max, HP blades, Netapp filers and other assorted infrastructure made it feel like you were walking into a blast furnace as you came down the escalators.

VMware formally announced their vCloud initiative with over 1000 service providers participating. vCloud Express was launched which provides an easily accessible platform for users to get started in the cloud and pay with a credit card. AT&T, Savvis, Verizon and Terremark spoke at the press and analyst event about their enterprise offerings and how things are taking shape. It was obvious that the service providers are still figuring things out. VMware also talked about their vCloud API which allows ISV’s to develop software that hooks into the clouds powered by VMware. That said, specifics on futures on vCloud were thin despite the fact that VMware is known for talking futures early.

SpringSource also demoed their software and platform. There was a lukewarm if not cold reception from many at VMworld but it’s because most of your VMware admins aren’t the right audience. The people who understood SpringSource were excited and thought it was a good acquisition for VMware.

The desktop was once again a very big focus. Dr. Stephen Herrod previewed virtual desktop mobility by moving a VDI session from one device to another. He also showed an android app running on a windows mobile phone. Wyse had a large presence on the show floor as did many other desktop virtualization solutions. It was clear that desktop virtualization is about more than shoving a desktop into a virtual machine and more about the operations aspect with things like profiles and persona awareness.

You can hear more commentary about VMworld 2009 on the Infosmack podcast led by Greg Knieriemen, Marc Farley of 3Par with myself and Devang Panchigar of CDS as guests.

Enhanced infrastructure awareness - VMware and its network and storage partners need to more visibility to each other.  Not only do people need to be able to see what is going on under the covers (storage and network) with things like AppSpeed but they also need to be able to make intelligent decisions on how to fix problems.  It should be easy for an admin to see what LUN on the storage side has too many VMs without having to interpret naa392dxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx numbers.  This is continuing to happen but still has a ways to go.

Desktop Virtualization – The improvements from VDI (2.0) to View (3.1) and continuing to View 4.0 have been good but there is so much work to do.  When I meet with customers, the challenges that they face aren’t just getting applications and desktops virtualized from a technical perspective.  We need more flexibility to determine not only what desktop a user receives but what kind of desktop a physical location receives.  We need application persistence with a physical endpoint.  This is counterintuitive to what virtualizing desktops is all about but this is all going to drive back to the persona of both the person and the endpoint.  Entrigue Systems, which is being acquired by Liquidware Labs,  and other ISV’s are doing this but it needs to be seamless and well supported.

If you have anything you want to know or news to share with me about some of these things, let me know.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time talking with my fellow GestaltIT.com bloggers (@storagenerve and @chrismevans) and others including the folks above and @basraayman, @storagezilla, @mike_fishman, @storageanarchy and many others.

Joe Tucci’s keynote was more or less the same as it has been in years past but he spent a lot of time talking about Cloud Computing.  Their cloud view was the same as what VMware is pitching.  Lots of talk about private and public cloud with federation between for traditional IT applications.

V-Max:

I attended a couple of V-Max sessions with @storagenerve on architecture and enginuity.  The architecture really is built to scale but a I’m not sure who will be scaling beyond 8 or 16 engines.  What will probably be more common is more V-Max engines able to federate data between systems instead of having one large global system.  Federation will probably be a big focus for EMC because most customers aren’t running the same modular but monolithic array for 5-10 years, they usually roll them after 3-4 because of technology and financial reasons.

We also saw a lot of numbers on IOPs and performance that I had never seen before for both DMX and V-Max.  I’ve always had the perception that EMC doesn’t publish much if any numbers but either that’s changing because of openness or the possibility that V-Max has good numbers and there isn’t much ambiguity on what is faster than what.  The numbers we saw were more about architectual limits and not benchmarking.

Powerpath/Powerpath VE:

Powerpath is getting some licensing changes where there will be an option of using a license server so licenses can be much more easily managed.  EMC did say that Powerpath VE for VMware will be released on May 21st.  As some admins may already know, multipathing for storage in VMware is manual and difficult today.  VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus will be required if you want to use Powerpath VE.  It will do multipathing across VMs, load balancing and EMC array optimization.

I had lunch with Bill Petro, Joyce Tompsett, Jon Collins, David Spencer, and Jason Benway.  We discussed about the benefit of transparency and social media for companies.  A great book to read is the Cluetrain Manifesto which talks about how companies benefit from genuine conversation with their prospects and customers.  Jon made a great point that Cluetrain is not the solution but rather a feature or ingredient that corporate social media must have.  A lot of the points I made as an EMC outsider were that pointing my customers to genuine conversations within EMC be it technical or business-oriented are much easier than me saying, “Trust me, they are listeners and truly care.”  One of my biggest challenges aside from competition has been convincing skeptics that EMC is not The Big Evil Machine(tm).

Later on I met up with Mark Twomey and Scott W. and talked with them for almost two hours.  Mark and Scott have the inside track and do a great job of blogging about EMC’s technology and how it honestly stacks up against the competition.  They’re not a marketing machine but rather two passionate individuals who go to bat for what they believe but take critical feedback.  No kool-aid there folks.

Overall a great last couple of days.

I did meet with Ryan Johnson who is the product manager for EMC’s Lifeline software.  Lifeline is “Network storage OEM software for the SOHO and Prosumer market.”  In a nutshell, this is home centralized storage done right.  You can store your music, movies and even surveillance camera data all on one device that will support remote backup to EMC’s Mozy online backup service.  The software is at release 1 today but a ton more features will be coming in version 2.  The Intel demo was really slick with about 4-5 HD videos streaming simultaneously to a TV, an iMac and an xbox 360.  Currently Intel has a product that holds 4 drives and is starting to ship today.  Iomega will have a device with 2 drives shipping in August.  The biggest challenges for EMC have been making a easy to use interface but giving the device a lot of features.  I did mention silent data corruption and ZFS to Ryan and he said they were looking at innovating in the data integrity area.

I attended a lot of VMware-specific architectual and performance engineering sessions since that seems to be my focus with my customers right now.  Some of the information was new but a lot of it I have heard last year.  Interestingly enough, it seemed that there were some mixed messages emerging from VMware folks who work on the same team.

A lot of my customers are just getting into centralized storage for VMware and are having a hard time deciding if they should do fibre channel, iSCSI or even NFS.  There are no performance differences between storage protocols (iSCSI, fibre channel or NFS).  Now there is a throughput difference between 1 gigabit iSCSI and 4 gigabit fibre channel.  Most importantly, if you’re going to consolidate a lot of hosts and could push the 1 gigabit barrier, 4gb fibre channel makes things a little easier without having to aggregate lots of smaller links.

That’s all for now, on to day 3.

The theme this year was Red Shift/Green Shift. The basic premise of Red Shift is that computing and data storage growth is exploding and there are companies riding this wave that are growing much faster than normal economic and computing trends. The Green Shift has to do with the rise of eco-responsibility.

Sun is positioning themselves to take advantage of this growth with the new Niagara 2 CMT (chip multi-threading) processors they have out as well as the forthcoming Rock processor. We were treated to a pretty cool public launch of the T5120, T5220 and T6320 servers. On the software side, things are progressing along very nicely with Solaris 10. Best thing about it all is that almost all of their software is opensource so anyone can take advantage of the R&D they’re doing.

Now on to my experiences… I sat through a number of really interesting sessions. Most notable was called “Web 2.0 – The Nitty Gritty” by Tim Bray, “A reference architecture for Web 2.0″ by Shanti Subramanyam and “Concerning Capacity” by Bob Sneed. Unfortunately there were tons of other sessions I missed out on that did deep dives into DTrace which amazing for developers who need to look at what their code is doing.

Tim Bray was very engaging and it was good to hear him talk about the state of web development today and how Ruby on Rails makes sense for a lot of people. He also talked about how software development is changing because of the time to market with things like Rails. Enterprise software development will be headed this way too.

Shanti’s talk discussed the state of affairs with scalable database intensive apps like Webkinz, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and the list goes on. A lot of it comes down to understanding how applications interact with their infrastructure and building out accordingly. Things touched on were caching, proxying, webservers and differences between packages out there.

Bob Sneed had a couple of amazing sessions that all seemed to revolve around capacity and performance. He talked in depth about the right way and the wrong way to diagnose issues. One thing every manager, software developer and system admin should know is that cpu utilization and system load are not accurate indicators of performance. Always, always, always work off an SLA. People end up dumping money on hardware without realizing what they’re doing. This topic deserves another post later.

On the social side, I got to meet a lot of my Sun friends who I’ve known for a little while on Twitter and meet tons of new people. It was a great time and the party at the Palms wasn’t too bad. If you ever get an opportunity to go and you’re interested in Sun technology, go.  If you want to read more about this year’s CEC then hop over to blogs.sun.com and search for CEC.

Update: Pictures taken by Shawn Ferry here.