Techno Tchotchke

Author: colingallagher

That Spam Sure Tastes Delicious!

I admit it, I am a spammer. Every two weeks I send out an email blast that hits a huge swath of the Dell EMC technical sellers. While I recognize that it is a necessary evil – we have tons of new sales enablement content that will help them sell VxRail and VxRack SDDC – I used to hate myself for doing it. Me and my team would spend a couple hours every fortnight slapping together a dry set of synopses and links and I’d send it out late on a Friday afternoon. That way, it would hit people’s mailboxes when they were worn down from the week and might not notice it.

Then came Halloween – my favorite holiday – and in sheer desperation to get it out by week’s end, we took some creative liberties with the mail and sent out an over the top themed email. (Note to self: Calliope is best worshiped with bourbon). I was blown away by the responses – the most common and most rewarding were variants of “I usually delete these emails, but this one made me read the whole thing, word for word.”

What’s New with VxRail (Halloween Edition)

That was the “eureka” moment – we had fun writing it, it didn’t seem like work and people enjoyed reading it. We had made spam people wanted to eat! And the data backs it up, I get consistent open rates over 40% and as high as 60%. I adjust days and times and themes trying to find the secret sauce, but to no avail yet. Since Halloween we have done several great themes. New Year’s resolutions, the Super Bowl and this week was Ground Hog Day. Next up is Valentines Day and I am particularly excited for International Haiku Day as well as Talk Like a Pirate Day later this year!

February 5, 2017
Become the New Hyper-Converged Hero in Town

Reposted from blogs.vce.com on January 19, 2017

Faster than a speeding data packet! More powerful than a 3.5 GHz processor! Able to conquer complex deployment challenges with a single family of appliances!

Look up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s–

Ok… so maybe she can’t fly. But she sure knows her way around a data center.

The Xpert and her crew have arrived, and with them is a VxRail Appliance to fit every use case. Their mission? Glad you asked. Simply put, they are here to empower IT staff everywhere, starting with this video. Empower them to do what, you say? Well that’s the best part…

The Xpert crew is moving fast, and transforming IT wherever they go. And they want you to be an Xpert too. If you want to spend less time building infrastructure, and more time building your business, join us. If you want to spend less time upgrading software, and more time upgrading revenue, join us. If you want to spend less time dealing with support, and more time supporting exciting new business initiatives, join us.

Your overwhelmingly strong demand for and interest in VxRail has exceeded all of our expectations. While we’ve been working hard to continually improve VxRail Appliances, we’ve also been looking for ways to continue to support deployments in the field. Which brings me back once again, to the Xpert and her crew.

Launching today. Right now. In this very blog, is the first installment of the Xpert Video Series. In it, we’ll be tackling important subjects on all things VxRail, the first of which is drive failure. What can I say? Sometimes good drives go bad. It’s not common, but it happens. And when it does, you need to know that your hyper-converged infrastructure is not going to miss a beat. Your data is protected, your VMs remain available, and your business keeps running.

Don’t worry. VxRail has got your back. Wanna know how? Well we’re happy to show you. We’ve brought in Shannon Champion, one of the founding members of the Xpert crew, to do just that. In Episode I of the Xpert video series, you’ll get an inside look at how your VxRail Appliance handles various drive failure situations without losing data access. What’s more, VxRail can even rebuild a failed drive non-disruptively. Click below to see how it all goes down:

Don’t worry–we’ve got plenty more where that came from. We’ll be rolling out fresh content nonstop. In fact, Episode II (do you see what I did there?) in the Xpert series is slated to drop next week, so stay frosty.

If IT Transformation is your game, we’ve got a spot on the Xpert crew with your name on it. All you have to do is show up.

Until next time…

January 20, 2017
What Election? We have a Forum to Rock!

I had the most interesting experience this past November 8th. I was asked to present at the Dell EMC Russia Forum in Moscow. When I checked the date, I realized it would be on election day. Being eager to get back to Moscow I voted absentee and went back to working on the two presentations I was to deliver in Russian.

Yet I neglected to take a few things into account. How close the election would be and the 7 hour time difference. I ended up staying up all night and morning to watch the election results, hoping for a miracle and practicing delivering my sessions. I finally crawled in to bed at 5 am local time, pulling the covers over me head wanting to shut out the world.

A few hours later I had to deliver my sessions – the first two of the day in my track. And then give an interview about the show. Despite being a tad tired, the sessions were well delivered and received. I didn’t look my best but certainly delivered it.

Check out a snippet of my interview!

November 21, 2016
Creating a Bot Army for Social Domination

How do you make a big impact with just a small presence at a trade show when you have little control or options? My answer is to own the social sphere around it. How do you do get people to tweet about your product? How do you get them to line up to do it? Find a super geeky way to give away tchotchkes and turn the crowd into your poor man’s botnet!

For VMworld this year my goal was to make sure that VxRail was featured continuously on social media when any one searched on the show hashtag AND when the social streams were displayed on the large monitors around the event. I was given two small spots on the floor – each 10×10 and was going to make the most of them. So, we built social media enabled lockers – imagine a standard cubbyhole locker that has been absorbed into the Borg collective. Our lockers had actuators that opened and closed all the doors controlled by a Raspberry Pie that was connected to the Internet.

When an attendee tweeted the correct hashtags – #VMworld and either #VxRailRocks or #VxRailDelivers (one per locker) the locker would randomly open one of the compartments and the attendee could take one of whatever prizes we had packed into it. We filled the lockers with a 6 different items of different values so people were encouraged to come back and try for a different item.

And it worked. Both VxRail hashtags were in the top 10 for the show – you couldn’t go to VMword on twitter or any of the other social feeds and not see VxRail.

Update: I neglected to keep any video of the locker in action at VMworld, but we reprogrammed them with new hashtags for Dell EMC World and I made sure I did:

September 5, 2016