Posts Tagged ‘EMC Select’

EMC World was a great event! Axxana’s Select Theatre presentation was delivered by our own Brendan Foye, Director of Sales, USA West. According to the EMC Select team on the floor, it was by far the most attended session at the Select Theatre. Some of them asked me “What did you do to get such a crowd?”

Axxana at EMC World Select Theatre

It’s no surprise to anyone who has heard Brendan present, but, the presentation went very well. And the buzz continued long after his presentation. People came to our booth saying they saw his presentation and wanted to hear more. At the V bar later that night, people were still talking to me about how cool the Axxana Phoenix is and how great the presentation went. They started asking me if we smashed and crashed the box and I right there on the spot went to YouTube with my iPhone and showed them the mechanical tests video that we have on our channel WEDR, complete with the fire, earthquake, explosion, penetration and water tests. It was, as Chad Sakac would say “AWESOME”!!!

Stage is one thing… but EMC TV??? My friend Lara El-Ghazal from Philly was the beautiful host this year and in between conversations about potential customers who will surely benefit from Axxana’s transformation of Async to Sync… we also… by chance… really… talked about sending a TV live crew to our booth… and sure enough, they came. Mr. Paul Jassies, Axxana’s Director of Sales, EMEA, did a remarkable job in his first TV appearance. Word on the floor was that he was the one who sent RPO-0 to do dance with the TV crew live. That was so much fun! RPO-0 was everywhere at the show. Our friends from Presidio, an EMC Channel Partner, took a picture of RPO-0 strapped to the rope of their climbing wall… again… AWESOME!!!

RPO-0 Ready to Climb The Wall

As for the trade show… it was great. We had many meetings which were pre-set with end users and that’s a lot of what it is about. We had many EMC’ers bring their customers to our booth and of course, random end users who visited us and went home with a phone call in their future. We now have many good friends at EMC, people from all ranks and all roles… and many of them came to our booth to say hello. Having all of us and all of them in the same place at the same time – that’s… you guessed it – AWESOME!

Especially noteworthy was Jerry Eudey who walked around wearing our special, limited edition, “Team Axxana” shirt, which no Axxana employee is allowed to wear, by the way. And if we are talking about friendship… Axxana and RecoverPoint were seen going strong and steady at the show this year, with RecoverPoint’s new booth and back and forth referencing of Zero Data Loss @ Distance (RP+Axxana) to create the world’s strongest, most cost effective, replication solution, with not even a hint of competition. VNX/CLARiiON today… VMAX and VPLEX – here we come!!! Now… isn’t that… AWESOME?!

RPO-0 Meets VNX and Promises Total Protection

Coming from Tel Aviv, I’m used to the heat, but Las Vegas was over 100 degrees yesterday at EMC World 2012.  I figured it wouldn’t matter, because I stayed inside, with our new mascot, RPO-0. Turns out, though, it was just as hot inside. RPO-0 got a lot of attention, and hundreds came over meet him. Of course, one of his favorite visitors was RPO-0′s BFF, VNX.

Don’t forget to stop Booth #728 to meet RPO-0 in person, and remember that Eli Efrat, our CEO, will be speaking today at the Select Theatre at 1:30PM. Ask him how to get your own RPO-0.

Finally, if, tragically, you weren’t able to attend EMC World, you can still watch interviews and keynote presentations streaming live from theCube and EMC TV. We’ve been on EMC TV twice this week. Hey, it’s hot under the camera lights, but nobody handles heat better than Axxana’s RPO-0.  We prove it with this video showing RPO-0 being tested to 2000 degrees Fahrenheit.

Here I am: Introducing EMCworld to RPO-0

We did set up on Sunday and had time for a quick talk with the EMCTV. Go to EMCTV to watch live streaming video of the keynotes, as well as replays of interviews.

Yesterday was our first full day at EMC World 2012, and we were busy, busy, busy. Eli Efrat, our CEO, took the front row VIP seat that I won (you’re welcome, Eli) and watched the opening talk by Joe Tucci and Pat Gelsinger. You can see some of the pictures Eli took at the keynote. I posted them to Axxana’s Facebook page.

We spent the afternoon at the Solutions Pavilion, where I introduced affordable RPO-0 to hundreds of people.

Don’t forget, Eli will be speaking at the EMC Select Theatre at 1:30PM on Wednesday. Meanwhile, stop by to see us at Booth 728 and meet RPO-0 in person.

I’ve got to run now!

See RPO-0 in Action at EMC World 2012

EMC World 2012 is next week in Las Vegas. The Axxana team will be there in force, including our CEO, Eli Efrat, and CTO, Dr. Alex Winokur. It’s a huge event with plenty of options as to how to spend your time, so careful planning helps you make the most of the days.

As a company that has done deep technology integration with EMC’s RecoverPoint, you will find us at many of the RecoverPoint sessions.  There are now twelve.  To find the sessions, just go to the EMC World Scheduler and search on RecoverPoint.

If you are a VNX or VNXe customer, I recommend you attend the session by Jonathan Meltzer, entitled “VNX and VNXe Data Protection: Recovering from Disasters – Large and Small.” He’ll be presenting on both Monday and Tuesday.

If you are responsible for disaster recovery or IT budgeting, you should try to connect with Lynn Osborn, Director of Engineering Services at The Pinnacle Group.  He’s the individual that helped Animal Health International achieve a zero-data-loss IT environment on a budget that any mid-sized company can afford. You can hear Lynn discuss his experience with Axxana in this short video on our YouTube channel. Stop by Booth 728, and we’ll help connect you with Lynn.

As an EMC Select Partner, we are very pleased to have a cameo presentation at the Select Theatre on Wednesday the 23rd, at 1:30pm. Don’t miss it. At the presentation you will learn how to transform asynchronous replication to synchronous replication.

Finally, if you can’t attend EMC World, consider watching the live streaming video that will be coming from theCube. As always, the folks at SiliconAngle and Wikibon will be providing great coverage and interviews with EMC executives, EMC customers, and EMC partners.

We hope to see you in Vegas!

If all of the leaks and rumors reported by industry press are to be believed, EMC will soon announce the company’s latest unified storage offering. In fact, by the time you read this, it will probably already have been announced.  Dave Raffo at SearchStorage says it will be named the VNX and will combine the CLARiiON CX4 and the Celerra NS into one unified storage platform. This isn’t EMC’s first  unified storage offering, and it’s not the only one on the market. NetApp has been offering a unified storage solution for a while, and claims over 150,000 installations. Oracle has been shipping unified storage, ever since they purchased Sun Microsystems, and, of course, there are several startups shipping solutions.

Unified storage has been loosely defined as a storage system that provides both block and file services. After that, arguments over what constitutes “true” unified storage devolve into a discussion of whether the so-called “unified storage” has common management, automated tiering, integrated de-duplication, thin-provisioning capabilities, common replication, and common snapshot features.  Regardless of the specific features, what is common to all unified storage is that they enable the consolidation of more data of different types (block and file) into one scalable storage system at one location. This helps customers drive greater efficiency in management, increased flexibility, and improved  storage utilization. However, what’s missing, or at least pushed to the back,  in the drive to unified storage, is an honest discussion over the need for superior data protection, truly superior data protection, when all data is stored in a single unified storage system.

I just had a call with John McArthur, who helped us out at an EMC Select Road Show last week.  John is President of Walden Technology Partners, Inc., and was the top storage analyst at IDC for many years.  He now works as an advisor to several technology companies, including Axxana.

John told me there were about 140 Commercial Account sales reps at the road show, and that they are “very PUMPED” about  Axxana.   EMC is, for sure, a storage company, but more than that, they’re a systems company. Like any good systems company, they want to sell solutions, and hopefully solutions to problems that are more challenging than “I need more storage, and I need it to be cheaper.”  So when John told them that they had an opportunity to solve problems for customers that no other systems company today could solve, they really listened, and they got excited.

Read the rest of this entry »