As some of you may have heard, I’m leaving Joyent.  I’ve learned a lot along the way and enjoyed the experience immensely.  Jason Hoffman and the team there have been incredible to work with.  We accomplished quite a bit while I was there including building a channel, starting an adoption program, deploying SmartDataCenter in major enterprises as both green field non-legacy clouds and internal IT clouds.  Telefonica just stood up their public cloud offering which is based on Joyent’s SmartDataCenter.  It’s been a great run.

So where am I off to now?  I’m headed to Inktank.  What does Inktank do?  Inktank delivers support and professional services for Ceph which is an opensource scale-out storage technology that provides object, file and block services.  Ceph is cloud platform agnostic as well.  Yes, I’m headed a bit back towards the storage world.  I’ll be working with customers and alliance partners to help them build and deploy solutions based around Ceph.  They’re based in LA and opening up an office in Sunnyvale so you’ll still see me around the Bay area a bit.

I’ve been working closely with a large telco to deploy SmartDataCenter from Joyent and it hasn’t been much different from other journeys to evolve development, operations and IT in general.  What I notice most is the agents of change versus the agents of same.

There’s a constant fixation on the things an individual feels they control in their environment.  If I’m the network admin, I control everything around network connectivity, security and operations.  If I’m the storage admin, I control everything around information storage space the organization can consume.  When elements of change come into a person’s world there tends to be an immediate dismissal of the force of change.

Here’s the thing.  I’ve noticed that there are a handful of people who want to be agents of change and a handful of those who don’t.  The agents of change aren’t asking you to throw away all you know and give up the responsibility you’ve always had.  They’re asking you to be a part of a movement.

Why do I waste my breath on this?  Because people still need periodic reminders that we’re in one of the most exciting times in technology.  It’s important because being an “Agent of Same” has the potential to screw not only your organization over but your brothers and sisters in technology as well.

I spent the a couple of days hanging out with Greg Knieriemen, Christina Weil and Gina Rosenthal at Dell Storage Forum 2011 last week.  The main driver was meeting people and doing Infosmack Live.

It was a lot of fun meeting many new faces and talking to Dell product and executive teams.  There were a number of things I was impressed with.  The first is that Dell is doing very well at is fostering a community.  The conference was small and Gina along with her team did awesome at pulling things together.  There was a lot of accessibility and comparatively more so than I had experienced with other vendors.

I got to do the Silicon Angle TV thing again and it was a blast.  John McArthur and Cali Lewis interviewed me about Cloud in general.  I spent a bit of time talking about Joyent and the things I’m seeing in both public and private cloud.  You can see the spot here.

Dell is doing well is not letting innovation with their acquisitions die.  That was evident in their FS7500 NAS release which integrates Exanet with their Equalogic arrays.  True to form, it’s easy to use just as Equalogic has been in the past.  I’m sure Dell will integrate this with their Compellent storage as well.  This will suit the markets Dell serves very well.  The other big theme was fluid data which continues the theme that data should be able to federate between storage platforms.  It will be interesting to see how this comes to market.

There are still some challenges in front of Dell though like selling all of their storage lines in a single sales motion instead of being fragmented.  They also need to ensure that Dell partners don’t cut out Compellent partners from their relationships with customers.

I spent 15 or so minutes talking to Michael Dell while we were at the Infosmack Live event.  The things that I tried to impress is that they need to keep innovating.  I also mentioned that they should offer a full stack play similar to Vblock, Flexpod or HP Matrix.  I know they’ve known about this for a long time but there still isn’t a Dell answer and there should be.

Overall it was great to be a part of the event and I felt like Dell wasn’t languishing even if you look at IDC numbers.  Now it’s up to them to execute.  Hats off to all the Dell people who pulled off a nice intimate conference!  It was wonderful to meet everyone.

I’ve been at Joyent for nearly four months now.  Time is flying.  It’s been busy.  What have I been doing?  I’ve been busy driving disruption and it’s a blast.  Everyone wants to talk to us.  Sometimes they understand immediately how we’re different and other times it takes time to sink in.

I’m meeting with a lot of the same customers I met with when I was at EMC.  Vblock’s and VMware solve challenges with existing legacy workloads and Joyent is there to help transition to the new way people are deploying applications.  The disruption in the enterprise has never been as evident as it has been now.  The innovation groups within enterprises want ITaaS and don’t care about the infrastructure sitting below because they’re designing high availability and scalability into their applications.  The IT groups struggle with this because they’ve spent years choosing standards, policies and procedures.  Joyent delivers a platform that delivers burstability, fast I/O and introspection.  That should be a requirement in any platform used to deliver applications, period.  Now add full-blown RESTful APIs that enable integration, orchestration and auto-scaling.  This means IT groups can integrate their processes while still giving true ITaaS.  It’s a powerful cocktail.

Enough about the product for now.  So where have I been?  I’ve been traveling a lot aside from the last couple of weeks.  A lot of customer meetings and then Interop in May.  Where will I be over the coming months?

June 5th-9th: Dell Storage Forum w/ the Infosmack crew

June 22nd-23rd: GigaOM Structure

August: Defcon

September: Bitnorth (Awesome crowd)

One of my best friends, Erin Banks, and I always talk about how life is about crossing bridges.  I’ve just crossed another bridge.  With a lot of heartache and turmoil but much excitement, I’ve accepted the role of Senior Technical Director at Joyent.  I’ve always wanted to help guide cloud strategy and this puts me close to the driver’s seat.

The next chapter…

I can’t express how excited I am to join Joyent.  I’ve always been a geek at heart and have loved Solaris, Dtrace, ZFS and all of the insane innovation Sun Microsystems did back in the day.  Joyent built their platform on Opensolaris but have hired much of the innovators that were previously at Sun/Oracle on the core elements that matter. Years ago I started following the Joyent folks and I was always impressed at how they innovated and had a vision of what they saw cloud to be.  They have amassed an incredible amount of talent and I’ve always had a ton of respect for Jason Hoffman and David Paul Young for their vision.  Now I get to play a big big part in making that vision become pervasive.  There will be more coming as I get planted at Joyent.

I am so thankful for the opportunities that I was given at EMC beginning with Aaron Chaisson hiring me last year.  He’s a phenomenal individual who let me thrive in the beginning and helped me in any way he could.  I joined the vSpecialist team when it was roughly 24 people and it has grown to over 100 which is representative of the success the team has.  I learned a phenomenal amount from the likes of Chad Sakac, Erin Banks, Justin Lauer, Jonathan Donaldson, Tommy Trogden, Rick Scherer, Scott Lowe, Jim Ruddy, Nick Weaver, Sharon Isaacson, John Avery, Denis Guyadeen, Dennis Hoffman, Chris Birdwell, Kevin Zawodzynski, Ben Dunning, Wade O’Harrow and too many others to name.  I’ve mentioned this before and I’ll mention it again, you become part of a family and it’s an unbelievable feeling knowing that your brothers and sisters on the team will lay down on train tracks for you.  It’s been an amazing time and a pleasure working at EMC.  I’ll miss it but I’m looking forward to tackling some insane challenges ahead.

The vExpert 2010 announcements started coming out this past Friday and Today.  I received the award along with many of my peers.  I feel honored that John Troyer and crew selected me as one among a long list of very talented and giving individuals.

@maishsk has set up a twitter list of many of the 2010 vExperts here.

Unbelievable. The image below shows an EMC Symmetrix that is still running after it fell over during the earthquake in Chile.  We don’t have many details at the moment but our team got a pic of this DMX that fell over in the 8.8 earthquake that hit Chile.

On a serious note, our hearts go out to those in Chile who have lost their lives.  Please treat this post more as utter amazement at what can happen during an earthquake from a technology perspective and not a slight at the human lives that have been lost or the hardship endured.

 

Some of you may know already but for those who don’t, I decided a bit ago to pursue some new challenges. I’ve joined EMC and the VMware Alliance team. My role as a systems engineer and virtualization practice lead at Network Storage, Inc has been extremely rewarding over the last 3.5 years. I got to build something from the ground up and work with some amazing colleagues and customers. I’ll be exposed to more challenges and the neat thing is being right in the middle of sales, marketing and engineering. We get to tell customers what EMC is doing but more importantly take feedback from customers and deliver it to engineering. The feedback loop is short so I encourage you to use us if there are things you need with regards to storage and virtualization that you aren’t getting.

The team I join is growing fast. Scott Lowe, Rick Scherer and John Avery have just recently announced that they’re joining the team as well. I feel honored to join a team with so many talented folks coming on board. If you’re interested in joining, let myself or one of the others know.

As others have posted regarding their blogs, this blog should not change much except for the espousing of EMC futures. Before I didn’t know much and I worked closely with Devang Panchigar but now I do know a lot more and can hint at direction but limit the specifics. I’ll continue to blog at GestaltIT.com and work with my peers just as I have in the past. I feel that independent voices are critical in the technology world. Also, this blog nor the opinions and information are mine and not EMC’s.