EMC World 2014 - Safe Water

“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson

Today marks the final day of EMC World 2014 here in Las Vegas, an annual get together of the most brilliant minds in the IT industry. And I am talking about you, the attendees that truly make the industry run and perform as well as it does.

In all of the hubbub of everyday work life, conferences such as ours, we spend an awful lot of time trying to solve business problems. That is a good thing because business drives the economic life of the world, your city and your household. Without it, we would be scrambling to find those basic needs in life such as food, clothing and shelter.

Without it, we would be searching for clean water.

Water, that is what I am here to talk about today. How much do we take it for granted that we can turn on a faucet and drink clean water. To step into the shower and have water to bathe in or to fill a pot for cooking.

An organization named Charity:Water thinks about that everyday. Everyday they know that 90% of the 30,000 deaths that occur every week from unsafe water and unhygienic living conditions are in children under five years old. That diseases from unsafe water and lack of basic sanitation kill more people every year than all forms of violence, including war. They also know that over 3.6% of the global disease burden could be prevented simply by improving water supply, sanitation, and hygiene.

So how can you REDEFINE your life?

You can take part of your time, your money and your talents to help organizations like Charity:Water help those in need. You can change your way of thinking by changing the way you think about others.

We get a limited lifetime and the greatest reward you will ever achieve is in helping others. Now that is life REDEFINED.

Stay inspired my friends!

EMC World 2014 - Forward Motion

"If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears." - Cesare Pavese

The product I support for our company is called VNX. It is a storage system that I have seen evolve from the early days of 1987 when old traditional storage was simply "too old" for what the industry needed. During those days, we developed a SCSI disk array that managed to take several disks and basically band them together to present one pool of storage to host computers.

Relative to the time, those disk arrays were pretty FAST given the technology. But then technology moves on and over the years faster and more intelligent disk arrays become even faster and more intelligent storage systems. The only way we can move forward is by taking the good and smart things we have learned, discarding what went wrong and moving the technology forward. One example is the our company partnered with the Lotus F1 team to change and accelerate their success.

This is how we advance our products and our lives.

The same can be said for our lives. We start out with what we know and generally do pretty well. As we move forward, we take what we've learned and apply it to better our lives. Yet sometimes we hold onto the past. We hold onto grudges, hurt, pain and pride which slows us from making our lives better.

If we are to truly have a great life, what some call your best life, is to lay down those things that are slowing you down. Pain of broken promises, or the hurt experienced by some event will only keep you planted in the past. If you are holding a grudge due to a real or perceived incident, let it go. Forgive yourself by forgiving the other person if only within yourself.

Move yourself forward to a better life and a better way of living.

As each of you in attendance at EMC World 2014 are learning about some very cool and FAST ways of deploying, managing and growing with your storage needs. Take some time to learn, to REDEFINE your own life. Grow out of the old way of doing things and accelerate your life to a great life.

And stay inspired my friends!

EMC World 2014 - The 3rd Platform

“Happiness is not so much in having or sharing. We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.” — Norman MacEwan

People ask me quite often these days, in the world of Information Technology, what exactly is the 3rd Platform. In our business, we like to show the above diagram and talk tracks describing it. Sometimes it comes off sounding like a lot of marketing and at other times it gets so deep into the technology that one can feel overwhelmed by all of it.

Relax, I'm not here to sell you a product or wow you with technical brilliance.

When you try to comprehend what the 3rd Platform means, bring your thoughts down to just you and your connections to other people. On average, most people indicate they have what they would call three close friends. If you add that to our Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the many other social networks we probably have more than 4003 friends.

The data generated just by your interactions with these friends is enormous. In 2012, it was estimated that every household alone generated 52GB of data. That is two years ago and this data growth has only accelerated. Think of everything you do, you location services on your smart phone, use of your ATM card, watching cable television or a doctor's visit; all of these things are amassing more and more data.

Without going into the reasons (good or bad) on why all of this data is being collected, what the 3rd Platform does is to help companies handle this huge amount of data. Given the amount of data and infrastructure needed to support all of this data, if we did nothing it would be similar to needing tens of thousands of people as were used to build the pyramids.

So the 3rd Platform creates a need for simpler, more versatile and more powerful options to store, manage and use the data. This includes newer, more cost and flexible storage systems. It includes software that provides an easy method to manage, move, and measure all of this data. And we are talking lots of data.

It is estimated that every minute...

- YouTube users upload 48 hours of new video
- Instagram users share 3,600 new photos
- Brands and organizations on Facebook receive 34,722 "likes"
- Over 100,000 tweets are sent

So what you are doing in your life is adding data to this 3rd Platform data surge. And I don't mean to scare you away from generating data. I believe every connection we can make with another person, every good thing we can do, in every method available to us is a good thing. The 3rd Platform is not a bad thing, it is just a thing. What matters is how we respond as humans within the crush of all that new data.

Connect to life using your tablet, smartphone, biometric watches, laptops, televisions, cars and everything else.

Just don't forget to look up from your device and connect with other people, eye-to-eye, handshake to handshake, and voice to ear.

And stay inspired my friends.

EMC World 2014 - The Day Begins

“No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride...and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well...maybe chalk it off to forced conscious expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten.” - Hunter S. Thompson

Here it is, Monday, May 5th in Las Vegas, Nevada; entertainment capital of the world. And it is the start to EMC World 2014, a much anticipated event each year by those in the IT industry. As data growth explodes, EMC creates the infrastructure that enables you to manage your business and your career. EMC World is where you get to mingle with the top engineers and thought leaders in the IT world.

You also get to meet, greet and spend time with your peers in the industry. A time to see how others are doing their job and life. Reconnecting with old friends and making new friends. In a crowd that can be nearly 15,000 in size, you are bound to run into something old and something new.

There are a lot of folks at EMC and within our sponsors who want to welcome you and make this a productive and fun time. As Hunter Thompson said, you "buy the ticket, take the ride..." which is our industry. It can get bumpy at times but we are here to help make that ride a little smoother.

Enjoy the ride and let me know how the experience was. You can comment on my blog post or tweet something out to @jprimm on Twitter. Enjoy the week everyone.

And stay inspired my friends!