1.007: the most amazing thing I saw at emc world 2008

As things wind down on the last day of EMC World 2008, I thought I'd take a break to reflect on what I thought was the highlight of the show.

For me, it wasn't any of the "scheduled" events.

Don't get me wrong, the Goo Goo Dolls were great - especially if you're a fan.

Billy Crystal? Hilarious - as long as you don't mind being called a nerd, or being told that your job of managing the world's most important information assets is "bleeping boring." (Most of us already knew that anyway.)

The technical sessions (close to 500 in total, counting those run twice) - well, judging by the packed rooms and the absolutely exhilarating buzz in the halls between sessions and in the Solutions Pavilion, I'd say that the overwhelming majority of attendees will agree that they got their money's worth - and then some.

For me, though, the most amazing thing I saw was a 3-foot high stack of pool balls, part of two-time U.S. Trick Shot Champion of Pool Chef Anton's show in the EMC Select booth. The OSG insists that nothing beats booth babes in bright-colored T-shirts - well, this guy did yoeman's duty pulling the customers into the booth every 1/2 hour for a 15-20 minute show of magic and trick pool shots wrapped around the requisite banter hawking the importance of buying partner products directly from EMC.

As you can see in the second photo, Chef Anton has stacked pool balls 14 "stories" high - including a second story sporting ball-stacked-on-ball. What he does next is nothing short of amazing, and I was able to capture it all on film...
 

the trick

Now, I don't know what Chef Anton calls this trick, but he did say he used it to win one of his two Trick Shot Championships.

After stacking the balls 14 stories high, with a short dissertation on several EMC Select partners between each layer, Anton grabs his trusty cue stick and lines up the shot...the object being to put the yellow one ball into the corner pocket, while leaving the cue ball in its place, WITHOUT DISTURBING THE STACK! (click on the picture for a larger view)

The next photo shows the shot itself - just before the white cue ball hits the yellow #1 ball.

Anton insisted that he was successful with this shot only about 50% of the time, but I actually think he made it far more times than he missed it while performing at EMC World. (That kind of little white lie is called "good marketing" in the entertainment world). 

By the way, capturing this shot on film was 100% luck - I just fired away at 6 frames a second, and hoped for the best.

The final photo shows the trick completed, as Anton pulls away from the shot just in case everything comes a-tumblin' down (it didn't).

I'm sure that many of my readers will be surprised, but I'm going to spare you all the cheap shots I could make here using the trick shot / pool-hall hustle metaphor. This trick was amazing to me, and being fortunate as I was to capture it on film, I just thought I'd share - with no hype.

other emc world coverage

Tomorrow I'm off to my daughters college graduation from Towson State, but I may find time over the weekend to recap other events from EMC World.

I've run across several other blogs and news stories covering EMC World that I've found interesting, and I've listed a few of my favorites here:

• Jon Brodkin (Network World) finds 10 things heard and seen at EMC World and covers EMC's forecast: cloud storage and flash drives.
• Beth Pariseau goes Back to the Future with EMC covering the Innovation Showcase
• Stephen Foskett (Pack Rat) learns that 3D storage isn't about holography in his (brief) Jargon Watch: EMC 3D = Data Deduplication, although his attribution to EMC's Blogging Corp is mistaken - "3D" comes straight from EMC's Marketing group, specifically to avoid the hyphen-wars around data de-dupli-(fi)-cation (plus, it's a lot  easier to say)!
• Scott Waterhouse sandwiched the event with his preview (This is the Day, This is the Hour, This is ...) and recap (The Fuses Have Been Lit) of the event, with a focus on backup and 3D.
• Chuck Hollis explores the 3D Redux from his lofty perspective, and brings it all back to earth.
• Robin Harris (StorageMojo) gets a new perspective on Flash Drives (EMC: flash replaces high-end disks in 2010) although I think he missed my session where he would have learned even more about what differentiates Enterprise Flash Drives from the run-of-the-mill devices he has been discussing of late. (I hope to recap my presentation in a future post, if I can get EMC's permission).
• And the prolific blogger / ambassador / entertainment critic Mark Twomey (aka StorageZilla) offers the most comprehensive blogger coverage, starting with My Road To EMC World (read forward from there for his complete coverage).
• And of course, the BEST of all - the EMC World 2008 YouTube video site, where literally hours of the show are archived in bite-sized packets. For an absotutely amazing "clip-shot" synopsis, check out this one, which ran just before Billy Crystal.

If you attended EMC World, I hope the event exceeded your expectations. Everyone associated with the event put in a ton of time and effort to make it happen, but the only metric of success is the feedback from the attendees. If you'd like to provide any feedback, they'd love to hear from you at emcworld@EMC.com.

Oh, and EMC World 2009 will be held in Orlando, May 18-22.

Thankfully, preparations for that won't start for about a month or so!

Be there. Or Be Square.

technorati tags: EMC World 2008, EMC World, 3D, data deplication, enterprise flash drives, storage innovation, enterprise storage, StorageZilla, Chef Anton, trick shots

Comments

[the storage anarchist]

Here's a shout out to Word of Pie's EMC World coverage post.

In it, he calls me THE storage blogger of the EMC world.

I am honored.

I hereby return the compliment: if you wanna know what's going on in the worlds of Documentum and/or CMA, you must follow the Word of Pie.