Category: Travel

IBM Cloud for VMware at Think 2019

IBM Cloud for VMware at Think 2019

IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions had a strong presence at the IBM Think 2019 conference in San Francisco last week, with many main stage announcements, think tank discussions, and breakout sessions.

See the IBM Cloud blog for the full list of our announcements: VMware on IBM Cloud at Think 2019.

There was particularly strong interest in our forthcoming offering of Caveonix RiskForesight on IBM Cloud. RiskForesight provides a set of powerful compliance monitoring, remediation, and reporting capabilities for both your cloud and on-premises workloads. We are very excited to be working with Caveonix!

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PureApplication in Thailand and the Philippines

PureApplication in Thailand and the Philippines

Last week I spent time in Bangkok and Manila with the IBM PureApplication local teams and with IBM’s customers and business partners. It’s exciting to see continued growth in production workloads running on PureApplication System in ASEAN.

There were two repeated themes to many of our conversations. First was the importance of PureApplication’s pattern technology for building a DevOps pipeline that allows application and infrastructure teams to build greater confidence in the handoff from team to team between QA and production. Second was the strong interest in building high availability or disaster recovery solutions using PureApplication System. PureApplication provides many building blocks, such as GPFS and disk replication, that can serve as foundations for building HA and DR solutions.

See also: PureApplication High Availability and Disaster Recovery

Over rock and under tree

Well, that was fast. In a matter of a few weeks, I made the jump from Knight Wazer to Royalty Wazer, after having driven a total of 4,665 miles. It is interesting to me that, during this period of two and a half weeks, the point value required to reach royalty did not change. It makes sense to me that this value may be recalculated less frequently, perhaps on a weekly or monthly basis, but I crossed both week and month boundaries without the point value being updated.

This indicates to me that the activity at the 1% mark for Waze members—at least in North Carolina—is stagnant, as the 1% bar is not moving. Thus, in North Carolina less than 1% of the total Waze membership is highly active.

Roads go ever ever on

Last November I joined the Waze traffic and navigation community. I’ve been using Waze since then for my daily commute and also used it for our family’s Thanksgiving trip. My commute time is 35 minutes in one direction compared to the national average of 25 minutes.

It is now mid-February, three months later, and I’m a little surprised at how rapidly I’ve been able to progress in ranking. Just today I received the Waze Knight status, which means that I am in the top 4% of users in my state, North Carolina.

Thus far I have driven only 3,472 miles with Waze. The majority of my Waze points come from driving miles, although I have achieved a fairly normal set of bonus points (for example, using Waze four days out of one week). That is not a lot of activity to reach the top 4%!

If I’d had to guess, I would have expected that somewhere in the neighborhood of 20% of Waze’s user base was fairly active. But from my experience, at least in North Carolina I would say that number must be less than 5% and could be much less than that. Now I’m very curious to see whether and how quickly I’m able to reach the top 1%.

PureApplication in Malaysia

Last week I helped to facilitate an IBM PureApplication pattern camp in Kuala Lumpur, where we helped PureApplication customers and business partners from Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam to build their own patterns. While there was snow and ice back home in Raleigh, it was very bright and warm in Kuala Lumpur!

kualalumpur

Along the way we had a chance to discuss best practices for script packages and scripting, high availability and disaster recovery, multi-system deployment, IBM Bluemix running directly on PureApplication System, and best practices for backup. It’s exciting to see PureApplication growing in Southeast Asia!

Business cards

Business cards

In the age of LinkedIn and mobile apps like Bump (now defunct), it may seem like business cards are becoming obsolete. Up to this point in time I’ve never felt the need to create a business card for myself.

However, I learned on my recent trip to Southeast Asia that the giving and receiving of business cards is very much alive and well. In this region of the world it is an important way of showing honor and respect.

In Southeast Asia, when you give and receive a business card, you should hold it with both hands, with the card facing the recipient. When you receive a card, you should read it carefully and slowly. If you are sitting down to a meeting, you should place the cards you have received in front of you for the duration of the meeting. And you should always keep cards in a card case, not in your pocket.

So, in order to prepare for future trips, I’ve finally printed my own set of business cards and bought a card case.