Things keep going well for DPM at IT Forum.
The booth stays swamped with interested folks – and we have a great team of up to 4 DPM experts at the booth at a time — and they are staying busy the whole time !
From my perspective, today was about the first technical sessions:
MGT-02-PD – Check out the new DPM 2007
This was a 45-minute product demo with one PPT slide in front. We covered server install and configuration, setting up protection, doing recovery and even a little reporting. Thankfully, no gremlins invaded my demo – so everything ran really well.
As of the the posting of this blog – it’s the #3 rated Product Demo (PD) at IT Forum – so people seem pleased with the product (and maybe the presenter too) 🙂
SRV11-IS – Interactive chalk-talk Q&A on Data Protection and Virtualization
My good friend, Edwin Yuen, and I talked about how some of the intersection points between two of the coolest technologies in IT – Virtualization and Storage. if you’re at Barcelona, we are doing a repeat of the session on Friday afternoon. If not, you might want to visit our recent TechNet webcast on a similar topic.
Edwin is truly a rockstar as a presenter, and has an awesome understanding in Virtualization. If you haven’t learned about System Center Virtual Machine Manager or any other Virtualization topic from Edwin, you definitely want to make the time.
Some of the intersection points that we discussed included:
- How DPM 2007 protects virtual machines hosted on Microsoft Virtual Server 2005
- Enabling partners to use virtualization with DPM 2007 to offer hosted backup services for their customers
- Staging your disaster recovery site using DPM 2007 for data and system state, with VMM’s P2V utility for the OS
Lots of lively questions – even a few tense moments from a storage guy and a virtualization guy from companies other than Microsoft (no names). But after some logical reasoning, I am pretty sure even they are going to run home and embrace DPM, VMM, Virtual Server, etc. (They just can’t tell their employers) <grin>
Final Score for Day 2
Woke up at 6:30 – DPM’ing from 11AM until 7P – had some dinner with my friend and co-worker Michael Kirby, the orchestrator of DPM’s launch and ongoing awareness activity – and then to bed at a surprisingly reasonable hour (midnight). If you have ever seen an advertisement for DPM or if you thought we seemed to be everywhere these days, it’s because of the team’s efforts that are helmed by Mike.
On a personal note
I also got to do my one "tourist activity" for the week – with pretty much every other waking hour already committed to DPM. But this morning, I didn’t have to be onsite until 10:30, so I made it over to one of the most amazing churches in Europe. The Sagrada Família Temple by Gaudi.
http://fodors.com/world/europe/spain/barcelona/entity_101306.html
Awesome for the architecture, but what really did it for me was the statues depicting several, several scriptural passages. To see those passages "come to life" (in stone) was beyond cool. It has 8 of 12 spires for each apostle (4 plus a larger one for Christ were never finished). So, now they are resuming construction. I’ll include a longer blog on that experience and some photo’s of the statues on my personal blog in the near future – http://jbuff.spaces.live.com
Today was a very, very good day.