EMC World 2016: My Newbie Take - Day 1

First Day in EMC World Paradise

I started out the day with every intention to hit as many breakout sessions as I possibly could, but slowly realized how much was available. I quickly got overwhelmed with the sheer number of possibilities available throughout the day and surprising found myself more focused on the vLabs (Both Self Paced & Instructor Led) instead of the breakout sessions.

A majority of my day was spent learning more about the new storage product line, Unity Family, that was introduced during the general session that morning. I had a good experience running through one of EMC's first renditions of the Instructor led Unity: Admin and Config class, where we only had a few small snags which is pretty common in a setting like they had.

I then decided it would be a good idea to hit up some of the self paced labs right next door, where I quickly found out that they were having some major hardware issues on the testing equipment behind the scenes. I tried pushing through these technical difficulties but failed miserably.

I decided it was time to go take one of my FREE attempts at a Proven EMC Prof. I headed down and registered for a VNX Cert Exam and spent about an hour drudging through that attempt.

At this point my brain was turning to mush with all the info that was being thrown my way, so I decided it was time to go hit up the Lounge area and try out the amazing cushy bean bags and watch a little bit of EMC TV before I head to the last breakout session of the day.

I headed towards my first/final breakout session of the day, Unity Multi-Dimensional Flash Flexibility, to get a little deeper look at the hardware behind the new Unity product line. The session had some pretty good information and it also had some data that made my head spin, but at this point it wouldn't have taken much to do so because my brain was just about to give up after the long day I had.

Stay Tuned for more of my Tales from the Depths of EMC World!

Sessions

• General Session: Modernizing The Industry
• DellEMC started the week with a pretty big bang! I was pretty impressed with what Michael Dell had to say about the future of the Dell/EMC Merger
• Plus they were giving away laptops! I didn't win, but still
• Unity: Multi-Dimensional Flash Flexibility
• This was pretty informational. There was a ton of pretty deep info that made my head spin just a little bit, but overall was a decent breakout