by Compellent Technologies, — February 21, 2011
HIMSS 2011 kicked off with a keynote by Robert Reich, Economist and Former Secretary of Labor. Although the session focused more on the economy and its impact on healthcare rather than strictly IT, it was a session not to miss!
8:07 – A “sound technician” comes out on stage and is followed by the rest of the comedy a capella group, Return to Zero, to warm up the crowd. They sing, “It’s Alright,” “Drift Away,” and “Love Potion No. 9.”
8:17 – The crowd welcomes the host of HIMSS Channel, Robyn Leonard. “It’s about linking people, potential and progress.” Each day, keynotes will share stories of how individuals are helping people in hospitals and clinics. The HIMSS Channel can be found on Youtube.com.
8:20 – According to Robyn, this HIMSS is shaping up to be the largest healthcare IT show in the country.
8:24 – Robin connects via video feed to different correspondents stationed around the Orange County Convention Center, including an anchor in the Social Media Lounge.
8:28 – HIMSS Board Chair, Dr. C. Martin Harris takes the stage to welcome the attendees. He reports a record 31,000 HIMSS attendees. Dr. Martin had dinner with a longtime HIMSS member and 25 years ago, there were 3,000 attendees.
8:31 – On the first day of the event, Dr. Martin honors the HIMSS members from the 60’s and 70’s.
8:33 – Dr. Martin promises to deliver Steve Lieber in an egg to the HIMSS Awards Banquet, a la Lady Gaga at the Grammy Awards.
8:41 – Dr. Martin introduces the keynote speaker, one of the nation’s leading thinkers on the economy, Robert Reich.
8:44 – “The great recession wore me down. Three years ago, I was 5’11”!” Mr. Reich wants to discuss how the economy will impact healthcare costs.
8:46 – Mr. Reich says we have two economies. If you look at the DJIA, that economy is very strong. Corporations are sitting on $2 trillion in cash, but aren’t investing in new jobs and capacity. Maybe they’re holding back because they’re not sure if they have enough customers. The last recession was different from others before it – it started with the explosion of a big debt bubble. It’s not easy to come out of it. Federal Reserve Board has kept interest rates at near zero but it hasn’t helped.
8:48 – There is a deeper story to the recession. For thirty years, American consumers kept buying, not because wages went up, but because of adjustment of flat wages. More women entered the workplace. They went to work to prop up family incomes because male incomes were going down. When that no longer worked, everyone started working longer and harder.
8:50 – The third and final coping mechanism was going into debt. People were comfortable with it because their houses were going up in value, but when the housing bubble burst, it all came crashing down.
8:55 – Mr. Reich says that the latest news is that Republicans and Democrats can’t agree and there’s a 50 percent likelihood of a government shutdown by this summer. There was a government shutdown when Mr. Reich was the labor secretary. When media wages are flat, when people are worried about losing their jobs, when people are taking on debt, when nest eggs have gone down to robin’s eggs, and people’s houses are going down in value, the anger of people sneaks into politics.
9:00 – “The baby boomer generation is like a wave moving through the population. Like a pig moving through a python…no, let’s go back to the wave.”
9:04 – The real healthcare budget issue comes down to healthcare costs.
9:10 – “You are all on the frontilines…You dealing with healthcare information technology, have a big part of the solution. And for that reason, I salute you and I hope you do a great job.”
by Compellent Technologies, — September 06, 2010
With the flood of photos from VMworld 2010, we decided to capture the highlights. From the arrival, to the booth demos, press conference with Heineken Netherlands, roundtable discussion with customers and even photos of the Compellent CEO working the booth, you’ll find a nice variety of scenes from VMworld 2010.
Presenting the top 20 photos:
by Compellent Technologies, — September 01, 2010
A press conference was held today to announce Heineken Netherlands as a new customer of Compellent. Phil Soran, Compellent, Tod Nielsen, VMware, and Mike Robers and Lucien de Konink, Heineken were at VMware’s Blogger’s Lounge to share the news.
View VMworld 2010 Press Conference Video
View Q&A with Phil Soran Video
9:15: Tod Nielsen, COO of VMware kicks off the press conference with introductions and highlights the importance of partners like Compellent who provide efficient storage solutions to their customer base. Tod adds “My favorite twist of this press conference is the fact that Compellent is different than other vendors because of their Fluid Data architecture. Funny how last night was the VMworld Hall Crawl, and now we have Heineken a new customer of Compellent.”
9:19: Phil Soran steps in- “We are thrilled to be participating in this conference, and happy to have Heineken as one of our new customers. We’re providing Fluid Data storage solutions to our customers and have been the primary innovator in the storage space, with thin provisioning, sub-LUN automated tiering and intelligent data management. Compellent is one of the fastest growing SAN vendors in the world.” We’re in 34 countries and have 2,100 end-users with about 1,900 of those customers running VMware.
9:21: “Fluid Data is so simple to use that you can even enjoy a Heineken while using our technology it’s that easy.” He adds. “We are expanding globally as a company, as you can see with customers like Heineken and we’re also announcing our Australian market opening this week.” But let’s hear from Mike and Lucien about Heineken
9:22: Lucien: A little about Heineken, we brew great beer and brands. We are the #1 Brewer in Europe. We have 200 regional beer and ciders. We have a brewery in almost every country. The 140 breweries in 70 countries, brewed 200 million hectoliters of beer in 2009. In Netherlands, we have 3 breweries that brewed 18 million hectoliters of beer, 5 million is for domestic and the rest for export.
9:23: “We started Heineken Light last year just for the USA market, because we don’t drink that stuff,” Mike adds, getting laughs from the crowd.
9:24: Mike: Why did we choose Compellent? We needed to look for other solutions. We had a serious problem with support costs from HP, along with capacity and performance issues, so we had to take action and fast. We were stuck on EVA 5000 which didn’t allow us to upgrade to a newer version of VMware. We chose Compellent because it operates with every system and enabled us to have business continuity.
9:27: Lucien: We also had major issues with reporting. Thus, the major pro of Compellent is the reporting, I’ve never seen better. Right now we are 61% virtualized as of last week. We plan to be 90% by 2012. On our old EVA, some business critical reports took 35 minutes to generate, with Compellent it’s done in 20 minutes, showing the obvious performance improvements we’re seen.
9:28: Lucien: The Fluid Data concept gave us high flexibility and reporting functionality. Plus, the 24x7 proactive support, which is critical for us and our business. In addition, with Compellent we were also able to automatically tier 5% SSD, 72% Fibre Channel and 23% to SATA. We lowered our disk count by 40% in Zoeterwoude and 60% in Den Bosch.
9:32: Dave Villante, from Wikibon Group comes to the table
9:33: When you migrate to new systems what do you expect? From my research, customers plan for migration to cost $50,000 and take 6 months, do you guys think that is reasonable? What have you found? He asks of Mike and Lucien. They reply with a couple of raised eyebrows at the cost and said, “We expect it to be very easy. We migrated in three weeks. Our business is a 24/7 operation, so we cannot have much downtime.”
9:36: Can you talk about being a 24/7 company? Dave asks. Mike: You can’t stop brewery systems. If you interrupt the process, the beer goes bad. If a line goes down, it costs 12,000 Euros an hour. Same with packaging and distribution, all of those systems need to stay up and running.
9:38: Dave to all: What do you see as a big disruptive technology in the future? Phil- On the connectivity side, we have 10G iSCSI, FCOE, Infiniband, etc. On the hardware side, smaller drives, SAS taking over and SSD/flash drives. The core of Compellent is the flexibility to incorporate new technologies into existing systems, so when Heineken is ready to adopt the next new technology, they can do that with Compellent.
9:39: On the software side, he adds, data will be managed differently. It will need to be flexible to fit into cloud. You will need automated tiered storage at the block level. When we’ve had customers migrate over to Compellent they reclaim 60-70% of their capacity that they didn’t have with other systems.
9:40: Dave asks Mike and Lucien: What’s the benefit of saving all that space? Mike replies with- Not only are we spending less money, but we’re looking at green IT. Less hardware also means less cooling and power that we need.
9:41: Dave also asked about chargebacks . Mike: We are a non-profit IT organization so, we do chargebacks on a yearly basis and only charge for normal maintenance and hardware. Dave replies asking if charge backs were difficult? Mike promptly answers- no, it was fluid. We’ve been doing it for the past five years.
9:43: Dave to Lucien and Mike: What would you say is on Compellent’s to do list? Lucien- things are very good, all of our previous problems have been solved by Compellent.
Read more about this press conference and the announcement on SiliconAngle.