By Calvin Zito 

Day 2 kicked off with a opening track sessions - the storage track was at 8 AM with several others at that time.  After the TweetUp on Monday night, I was wishing that it was a bit later in the morning.  But who I really felt sorry for was the band.  We had the same band playing in the storage track opening session that played at the keynotes on Monday night.  They are a good band but how many bands to you know that have gigs at 8 AM? 

The session kicked off with Chris Riley, VP of Americas sales giving an overview of the last year.  I was impressed to see that in the Americas, HP StorageWorks was the only vendor to grow faster than the market in Q4 and Q1.  The results since last year's Tech Forum for StorageWorks are solid.  Chris and the Americas team have a lot to be proud of.  

Chris then switched gears and talked about where StorageWorks is going.   He talked to a slide that a couple colleagues of mine had shared with a couple of weeks ago.  The theme you'll be hearing about from us is convergence.   Convergence of servers, storage, and the network(s) to collapse the physical environment, collapse the management (i.e simplify and lower cost of storage management), minimize the footprint, and minimize time to production.   Chris gave a few examples of how we're starting to do this today with the ExDS9100, the EVA family, HP LeftHand, and our BladeSystem Matrix.  (Note: the links point to blog posts on these topics). 

From their Chris brought out a panel that include our CTO of ProLiant Servers Greg Huff, CTO for the Americas StorageWorks Brian Ignomirello, the head of HP LeftHand Sales in the Americas, and Dave Roberson, the head of HP StorageWorks.  They discussed the future of storage tackling issues like storage for the cloud, convergence, and many others.  I'm actually met with Brian, our CTO of StorageWorks in the Americas, to get him to post on our blog in the near future so watch for that.  We'll also have a video summary of the panel discussion available soon.  Here's a picture I got of the panel:

The session concluded with Chet Jacobs doing a quick fly-by of our portfolio.  Chet is a funny guy and is aways one of the most popular speakers at StorageWorks events.  I was really glad to see Chet present because I know that he had fallen the day prior and was taken to the hospital.   He had an interesting factoid about the National Weather Service.  He said that they are sending 1 PB of data from satellites per month - and they save all of it.  That's a real data explosion.  Here's Chet all comfy in his chair:

I attended several sessions during the day including the XP update where many of the new software features were talked about.  I've asked the XP team to prepare a blog post talking about that and I'll share that as soon as we have it.  One of the new features they talked about  in the session is a recent blog post we did on HP System Copy Software for SAP. 

I also attended a very good HP LeftHand session.  We've had a few blog posts here on our HP LeftHand solutions in the past and we'll have more conversations in the future.

My evening ended by attending the Connect Luau.  I'll have much more to say about Connect in a future blog post.  Nina Buik who runs Connect (as a volunteer and also has a blog on hp.com) is about the most energetic person I've ever met.  It was good to see her again.  She presented Deb Nelson, Sr VP of TSG Marketing, with an award recognizing her support of Connect.  

Lastly, we also heard that our #HPTF hashtag for all of our Twitters cracked the top 100.  Thank you to everyone who was Tweeting and Retweeting on Monday night and Tuesday.   I was really shocked to learn that we were in the top 100.  You can see what has been talked about by going to this link: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23HPTF.  If you want to see what I've talked about (focused of course on StorageWorks), you can go to http://twitter.com/HPstorageGuy.

Since Day 3 at HP Tech Forum is nearly half over, I better get this posted and start working on the next post!

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