Hey, me to, fancy that. My first actually. Until now, I have dedicated my once-a-year conf stint to a little get together called VMworld. This year, however, I will break the mold and focus more on what made me whole, EMC product centricity. What possibly could EMC announce this year, is my question? Here’s what I speculate..

• Cisco buys EMC, monopoly would you say? Highly unlikely, purely from a regulatory stance with the new administration in office and all. Can you say unstoppable force of nature if it comes to fruition?
• More acquisition news? more partnerships formed? etc, etc..Anyone’s guess. Who is the next Kashya?
• Tucci and Maritz shake every conference goer’s hand presents them a voucher for a free NS-120 and a copy of ESX 4. Just their way of giving back to us customers/partners.

Anyways all kidding aside, I hope to see there. I will be the guy with kaki pants, a golf shirt, a book bag and a thingy around my neck…

Schedule as follows:

Monday

8:30 AM-9:30 AM
Symmetrix V-Max Series with Enginuity Overview

3:00 PM-4:00 PM
Test Drive EMC Avamar – Hands-on Workshop

4:30 PM-5:30 PM
Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), iSCSI, and the Converged Data Center

Tuesday

8:00 AM-9:00 AM
Virtual Datacenter OS Simplifies Computing

9:30 AM-10:30 AM
EMC PowerPath and PowerPath/VE: What's New in 2009

11:00 AM-12:00 PM
Celerra Performance Analysis and Troubleshooting - Hands-on Workshop

1:30 PM-2:30 PM
Managing the Virtualized Data Center

2:45 PM-3:45 PM
FCoE - Considerations for Deploying Fibre Channel Over Ethernet

4:15 PM-5:15 PM
New Storage Features in VMware Infrastructure

Wednesday (Daughters B-Day! Morning Sessions only for me)

9:30 AM-10:30 AM
CLARiiON: Using Navipshere Analyzer to Optimize Performance for Serial ATA, Fibre Channel and Enterprise Flash Drives

11:00 AM-12:00 PM
CLARiiON: Performance and Design Implications of Mixed Workloads