EMCworld 2011 has come and gone.  As I prepare to get back to work, I am trying to digest all of the information and apply it.  Someone last week said it is beyond the cliche of drinking from a fire hose to just trying to decide which hose to drink from.  From analyzing materials gathered, notes from sessions, and remembering conversations, I am getting my thoughts together on the conference this year.

Big Data is all the rage

My first thought is about “big data”.  Have we decided to throw information governance to the side and keep everything forever?  Do we put our efforts and resources into managing information instead of managing space?   If we have and have built our infrastructure to do this, then we discover other streams of data previously ignored or discarded.  How do we turn data into information?  While not perfect or probably EMC approved, this is my definition of big data; capturing, storing, managing, and mining streams of data to provide information for our companies to operate now and make decisions for the future.   Thus we turn data into information.

If Big Data provides the why to our them, then our friend, the cloud, provides how.  To me the move to cloud based services is more a result of our users not being tied to their desktop and local storage now.  In my business, consumers of information are not centrally located or do not necessarily work in offices.  This drives you to provide information stored in data centers and provided through different means.  Now we have people coming to us with their own devices and demanding access to information.  “Cloud” is how we meet this demand.

As I noted in a previous blog, I see a huge change in the technology landscape from EMCworld 2010 to 2011.  How we operate as information technology is evolving, how we view data is evolving, how users consume data is evolving.

I said during our NerdHerd that I couldn’t wait to see where we are when EMCworld 2012 rolls around.  I see we will be back in Las Vegas for the conference May 21-24, 2012 but I know we won’t be in the same place we are today!

If you’d like to see my photos from EMCworld 2011 you can find them here EMCworld2011

Tags: Big Data, Cloud, EMCWorld

Posted in Infrastructure Technology
No Comments Yet Posted by David Hurst