#BRC2K11 – vBrainstorm.com

The past month has been one of the most fun and challenging things since I started blogging. I have been participating with Thomas Jones’ Bloggers Reality Contest. We posted our third and final posts of the contest last week and each of us has been patiently waiting for the final results this week at VMworld.

On Monday, we all took part in an interview on VMware Community TV, which you can watch on-demand at the bottom of this post. The interview was fun and included our sponsors, the contestants and our judges. From the sounds of the interview, we all grew and learned out of this experience.

Last night, we had a fantastic wrap dinner with everyone involved and our sponsors and our winners and prizes were awarded. Congrats to Luigi Danakos (@Nerdblurt), the winner of the Gold bracket, and to Michael Letschin (@mletschin), the winner of the Silver bracket. Both of these guys did a tremendous job during the contest and I think we have all learned from each other on how we approach our posts and tips and tricks we have learned along the way. You can see a full recap from Thomas on his site, NikeTown588.

And, as a recap, I wanted to provide some of the highlights I found in the competition:

1) Professional Judges Feedback – Quite possibly, this is the biggest, long-term benefit of the competition.

2) Discovery – I have ‘met’ a lot of people online thanks to this competition. A good thing about participating is what I’d call cross pollination between your own readers and the others in the competition. This years contestants did a good job of promoting each other to their Twitter followers, readers and the community. It is win-win for everyone.

3) Learning Opportunities – I personally enjoy learning and getting exposed to new tech ideas and products. Its what gets me up in the morning. So, getting to see new things is exciting to me. Knowledge is something no one else can take away… Even though it was a competition, the other contestant shared freely with the group.

I urge any bloggers to jump at the chance to participate in this contest in the future. It is great for personal growth and for learning. I can’t wait to see what Thomas and the sponsors have in store for 2012.

BRC2K11 Community TV Interviews

Watch live streaming video from vmwarecommunitytv at livestream.com

Simplify. Eliminate duplication of effort. Reduce costs. Play to your core competencies. Standardize. All of these are themes I have heard in my own company as we have looked at ways to improve our IT operations. Like many companies, we try to form a plan of where our IT operations should move, motivated by making IT highly available, redundant and cost efficient.

Converge. That theme is a tougher sell in my employer’s environment. There is resistance to converging, whether it’s IP telephony on our data network versus converging our fiber channel with fiber channel over Ethernet and putting it on our same core Ethernet network. Same would go for iSCSI, if we had it. We tend to separate for simplicity reasons, but there are certainly cost savings in convergence.

Why converge?

Convergence is a major trend in IT, today, although it goes by many names. But like most trends and buzzwords (think Cloud), your mileage will vary among vendors and interpretations of the buzz. HP’s approach to convergence is largely centered around standardized x86 hardware for both server and storage platforms. In addition, the converged storage platforms within HP are about scale out, with multiple controllers to handle unpredictable and unruly disk I/O with ease.