Hyperconverge or Dive
One of the first dive sites on our trip to the North Red Sea was a place called The Barge. Not too deep, full of life with a bit of wreck and a lagoon. I think we did three dives here in our 6 days on the live-aboard Whirlwind. I am hoping to return soon to do more underwater photography in blue waters.
Even though hyper-converged solutions have been one of the hottest trends in the Datacenter since virtualization, you will still meet traditional 
architects that are seeing this technology for the first time. Many times the customer will come to the conversation with just the virtualization lead, sometimes they will bring the Storage or Compute team, but often they will forget to tell the Networking team any of their plans (no wonder the network engineer can be so grumpy). This can prove problematic for a networking team that is not familiar with a few of the basic HCI requirements. Continue reading “Is HCI networking easy?”
Delighted to be selected in the top ten for the second year in a row for An Taisce Clean Coasts – Love Your Coast photography competition. Headed up to
Dublin to meet my friends that were all selected as finalists and got to cheer on the winners. I didnt win (again) but it was really great to see my image hanging from the wall and to see the excellent standard required! Hoping to give it another try next year for sure. The winners are here.
Here were my other submissions that didn’t make the grade. Next year I will be back and I hope to submit more pictures to the Love Your Coast 2019 competition.
One of the biggest pain points customers have when managing their current traditional architectures is patching and upgrades. They want a so
lution that helps them to keep updated but does not introduce risk or take a lot of work to validate and test. Pressures on headcount reductions don’t balance with demands from the business to do more at lower costs. Often preventative maintenance is the first to suffer, and that means existing infrastructure is left to fall further and further behind patching schedules. Continue reading “Hardware is not invisible – VxRail HCI appliance”
If twitter is where the conversation is then you might be followi
ng the debate about what exactly is HCI? and does it matter? Does it matter if the H in HCI is for Hypervisor or Hybrid if the outcome is the same? If the H is still really all about the hypervisor, then does it matter which one is used? What about the infrastructure, is it important or invisible in a software defined world? Continue reading “Does the H in HCI matter?”
Someone once told me, the best job that they ever had in their career was in pre-sales. I have thought about that a few times in the past, now I thin
k I know why. At the Dell Technologies Customer Solution Center I get to present to an audience several times a week on technology that interests me, and i have my own lab with real hardware for getting stick time building out solutions! In pre-sales your job is to help customers and sales people to solve problems and close sales. You get the chance to meet customers, discuss solutions to real problems, and to present on the latest technology trends.
Every day you are like a teacher, but the students are always fresh and new. The subjects only stay the same for a while until something new comes out, so you have to stay current on the latest technology. You participate in the sales process, without the burden of a sales quota. This means you can also look at the problem without bias and solve it in different ways. Unlike teaching, it is you that is graded by the audience through a customer’s NPS score, a Partners trust and a sales persons handshake – this leads to a promise of further visits with more customers.
When I decided to start this blog, I figured the first post should be about me and where I work. This would be easy, since I have been giving an elevator pitch on what I do almost daily for the last few years in front of customers that visit us in the Limerick Dell Technologies Customer Solution Center.
Every customer engagement at a Solution Center begins the same way. A customer or partner has a problem (an opportunity) and the sales team needs our help to solve it. The first step is to ask for help, and then we shape an engagement that meets everyone’s needs. There are three main offerings as part of a Solution Center visit.
Customers and Partners may be new to the Dell Technologies portfolio or existing customers may want a closer look at the many solutions we offer. This is above and beyond the typical 101 presentation and could include a Demo or hands-on. These sessions are custom designed to meet the customers expectations rather than a blanket, this is whats on the truck style sales pitch.
These are best for customers that are already keenly aware of our portfolio, and have identified a solution that might address their needs. Here we can help a customer match a solution with their existing environment, or visualize a green field solution based on their requirements.
At this point a customer needs to prove that our solution will achieve the goal they set out to accomplish. They want to set the testing criteria and perform performance testing or functionality testing in our Data Centers and provide proof that their investment will not fall short of their requirements.
So that’s the story. If you think you have an opportunity and would like to engage the help of a CSC (there are 20 around the globe) then feel free to reach out. You can also find out more here: https://delltechnologies.com/csc
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