On Thursday last week, I attended the Dell
Storage Vision Day press event. It was held at Chelsea Football Club, which
luckily didn’t seem to deter anyone from coming! Journalists attended from
across Europe, including the UK,
Netherlands, France, Germany,
Italy, and Russia.
We also had a fantastic line-up from the
spokesperson side – first up to present was Robin Kuepers, head of storage,
EMEA, and James Quarles, Director of Enterprise Solutions. They gave an
overview of the EMEA storage landscape including the latest trends, which was
brought to life by two customer presenters: Zafar Chaudry of Liverpool Women’s NHS Foundation Trust and
Marcel Dumont of Schoolbank.nl, the second
largest social networking site in the Netherlands.
Zafar’s presentation focused on how the
Trust is using a Dell/EMC storage solution to support server virtualization
from VMware. Marcel then discussed how he has implemented a Dell EqualLogic
storage infrastructure to support exponential data growth associated with the
social networking craze. Although Zafar and Marcel are using different storage
technologies, one thing was clear; they both turned to Dell to tackle two of the
hottest IT trends today – virtualization and social networking – and they have
already experienced significant benefits ranging from cost savings to a
reduction in management time related to storage-specific issues.
Next up was Tony Lock,
an industry analyst from Freeform
Dynamics. Tony discussed current issues in the storage market with some
strong survey data, giving the journalists a lot to think about before the
coffee break!
The second part of the day was led by
Praveen Asthana, Global Director of Storage and Networking, and John
Joseph, Vice President, Dell EqualLogic Solutions. Both Praveen and
John flew over from the US
to share with the journalists Dell’s current and future plans in storage. They both discussed Dell’s commitment to deliver on the promise to Simplify IT – from offering
a broad range of products for different types and sizes of customers and also including designed-to-order services for customers that need solutions for their unique requirements. The video below captures pieces of Praveen’s and John’s presentations.
Last but not least, we got to take a tour
of Chelsea Football Club at the end of the day – loved seeing the press room
where the managers hold press conferences at the end of each game, as well as
sitting in the manager’s chair right on the sideline!