So, Day 3 at DellWorld 2012…

The morning keynote included some interesting demos and announcements, first guest brought up on stage was Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park telling his story of being a life-long Mac user and suddenly switching to PCs because of the touch screen hardware and support available in Windows 8 and the Dell XPS All-in-one. He demoed some music production software called Stagelight. Slick, but not my market sector.
The other presenters were:

• the CTO from iLand.com showing off their use of the new Active System provisioning from Dell and announcing their “Replication as a Service” offering for EqualLogic customers.
• There was a slick demo of some PocketCloud products for BYOD, remote working and portability of files, but not something we’ll be using. (See box.net)
• The CIO of Quest Software (now part of Dell) showing the CIO dashboard product that isn’t here yet, but will be free at launch (she claims).

Next, I dropped into a hands on lab with the Dell Management Plugin for vCenter and it was pretty slick. I’m going to have to try the free download for 1 server. And see how much a license for all 6 of our nodes would be.

After that was a session on Systems Management, presented by the iDRAC Product Manager Doug Iler. He had some good things to say, including that OpenManage Essentials now includes a plugin for for SupportAssist, a proactive remote service option. Yet another reason for me to get off ITA. Another item was an announcement that an iDRAC7 firmware coming in December will be certified to work with certain versions of Safari, including remote console. I’m not a Mac user, but this appeared to be welcomed by multiple people in the room.

After that, I had a session I wanted to go to, but I got held up having a great conversation about blades, storage and other things with Alex and Roger.

The conference itself concluded with a keynote from the Freakanomics Guys that included several interesting stories but, as they prefaced the session with, not much in the way of applicable to the day job content. It was still entertaining, both Stevens are interesting and good presenters.

After that, we had a special DellTechCenter RockStars event at K1 Speed and it was a BLAST! Driving around in electric go carts trying to go as fast as possible, pass others and not crash. Later that night there was an After Dark party sponsored by Intel at Stubbs BBQ in downtown Austin, really good closing to the whole week.