September 4th, 2009 was a beautiful yet fateful Friday.   The sky was clear, lunch was good, and it also happened to be my last day working at NetApp.

Yes, it was my last day at NetApp – breaking up is hard to do, and this was a particularly challenging breakup!

I didn’t have the opportunity to send a formal farewell message to folks internally, so this will serve as my farewell (but not goodbye!)

For those of you who don’t know, I worked for NetApp in the Chicago District – Yes, this is the very same Chicago district who recently won Teamwork Award across all of the Americas in the hardest Q4 most businesses had to deal with in their entire business!   So, it goes without saying that I had the opportunity of working with a cohesive family which embodied teamwork.

Fortunately, I worked with, met and interacted with so many intelligent and passionate individuals, the entire experience of working for Fortune magazine’s #1 best company to work for was an absolutely great, engaging and rewarding experience like no other.    In the short time (2 years) I was with NetApp I have seen extraordinary change, the ecosystem of business and the economy go on a rollercoaster adventure.   Never once did these individuals stray, but instead stepped up to the occasion and became better for their actions.   I know in my stead, this trend will continue and I look forward to seeing the growth within the community over the passage of time.

So, while I will miss you all – this is only farewell, but not goodbye.  Fortunately the community we’re all a part of is a receptive and growing one.  Our paths will cross continually and growth and self-development will always be an agenda we all pursue.   My community involvement will not shrink, and likely will continue to increase.  And my communication back out of offers to the technology community as a whole (whether those be discount vouchers, opportunities, so on and so forth) will continue to flow like a tapped pool of knowledge!

I’m sure given the circumstance many of you may be interested in why I made this particular decision.   Know that through heavy calculation, this was chosen as the best decision for me and my family at this particular stage in my life, and is in no way a reflection of the absolutely amazing organization I am walking away from to the equally amazing organization I am going towards.  

I am particularly excited about the new role I will starting on September 14th, 2009 (My Birthday of all days!)   Yes, while this may read as though it is a rebirth; starting a new job on my birthday, I will be certain to bring the same level of passion, engagement and enthusiasm that every one of you who has ever met me is likely to recall. :)

The next chapter of my life will be living the rock star life of a Senior Technology Consultant at EMC, continuing my trend of raising awareness, education, doing the right thing, evangelizing and informing the Enterprise IT community.     I know what you’re saying “Wow Christopher, you’ve held one consulting role or another for the past 20 years” Damn straight skippy! A consultant is strangely what I grew up knowing and being, and the evangelist side of things is just a further extension of my adopted religion (Re: Facebook Religion status is listed as Technology:))

I will continue to be actively involved in giving back to various technology communities.   Within the Exchange community (there’ll be more to say on that soon ;)), within the Chicago Microsoft space in general (Chicago Windows Users Group), the global Microsoft space (TechEd) and the Training Community (MCT Summits, etc).  I encourage you to reach out to me through any of these avenues, not to mention LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, (vouchers ;)) and any number of random Security, Cloud and Virtualization events as they come up! (Oh, email is fine too :))

So, I wish every one of you I’ve had the opportunity to work with, customers, partners and colleagues alike the best! Do keep in touch and let me know how things are with you, and I’m glad to help in the various ways I can and do help within the community!    And to my future customers, partners and colleagues – I look forward to the opportunity to work with you!

Best of luck, I appreciate all of the encouragement and continue to look for good things from me… :)

Come on down June 2nd to the Chicago Microsoft Office to learn how to not only cut costs by virtualizing your datacenter but by learning so much more, and my good friend Ray LaMarca who will be presenting at the AON Center in Chicago on June 2nd!

The rest of the locations I’m sure will be an absolute blast, but considering I live in Chicago and personally know Ray, I think you should step up and take the morning to attend, learn, and perhaps win!   Do go sign up, the registration is handled through APC’s site, so don’t be surprised! :) 

For those of you in the ESX space who are religious about your installation and deployment of Host Utility Kits (I hope you are!) 5.1 has just been announced! Hooray!

ESX Host Utilities 5.1 contain the following new features:

• Support for ESX 4.0 hosts.
• Support for role-based access control (RBAC) user names so that root access to storage controllers is not required.
• The mbralign program that fixes misaligned VMDK partitions.
• New timeout values added to config_hba to support software iSCSI initiators on 10 Gb Ethernet. Check the Interoperability Matrix for supported 10 Gb configurations.
• Updated SNIA API libraries for Emulex and QLogic adapters.
• An -expert option for the Host Utilities install command that installs the Host Utilities components but does not set timeouts or paths

And lots of other cool stuff, but these are the major high-lights, so get out there and download today! Hooray!

If there’s one thing about TechEd in my experience (Apparently, my experience isn’t everyones experience.. infact, I’m not sure ANYONE else experiences this ;)) is that it is a whirlwind adventure of constantly being on the run, on the go, and occasionally… getting heckled by the competition (Erk, can I call that ‘product’ competition? We don’t sell Laptops and Dell doesn’t sell storage [snicker ;)] :)

I like business cards, as they’re a good way to stay in touch with people you’ve met, definitely, right? Oh and Twitter, that’s good for it too.     But what if you don’t have any business cards? (ran out on the 1st day;)) I adopted the model of taking a photo of you and your badge.. Win?!

Because I wouldn’t want to publish anyone’s image and name without their permission, I’ll instead give you this one! (and this lovely story.. strangely retold many times throughout the show by others ;))

Meet mr Dell Guy, I didn’t catch his name (too blurry) but he definitely caught that I work for a competitor (Hey, I’m here as an attendee!) was my common response when assaulted! Even though I did have a number of lengthy and high quality NetApp related conversations, I had just as many good quality Education and Community conversations too.   But you don’t care about that! You care about the heckling! :)

Being at the front of the line, literally in the front as a drawing is called is always a good way to find out if you’re a winner, or… if you’re going to be publicly called out on.   Oh and a competitor being mic’d to a large crowd yelling out NetApp every other word, perhaps that is just good times. ;)

For what it is worth, I did not win the laptop they were giving away (Which mr Dell did say “You can’t win!”) as I scoff being a mere ‘attendee’ :)  Although if you’re interested I did win Flip Mino Ultra from Cisco (Notice Cisco in the background) – I’ll discuss that later in another story ;)

I wish I had more time to get around and enter into drawings or try to win mega-big prizes, but it was not in the cards.. I barely could pack all the swag I DID end up taking home, so no harm no foul! :)

Hey, are you going to TechEd? Stop by and visit NetApp (and me! :))

Join NetApp at Microsoft TechEd 2009

Booth 417

Join us at booth 417 to discover how you can do more and store less with NetApp. Guaranteed.* See how our comprehensive portfolio of storage and data management solutions can help you reduce costs, reach new levels of efficiency, and increase data protection in your Microsoft environment.

You’ll also have the opportunity to meet with our executives and technical experts. Together, we’ll look at how our innovative solutions for Microsoft Hyper-V™, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server®, and Microsoft SQL Server® can help your company go further, faster.

In addition to learning about NetApp® storage and data management solutions for Microsoft environments at the NetApp booth, you’ll get a free NetApp t-shirt and a chance to win an Amazon Kindle 2 and a $200 Amazon gift certificate in our daily raffle. You’ll also be entered to win our grand prize—a $5,000 AMEX gift card!

If you would like to get more in-depth information on our innovative storage and data management solutions for Microsoft environments while at TechEd, fill out the form to request a meeting with our executives or technical experts.

Furthermore, the kinds of things which will be covered?!

NetApp virtualization solutions for Hyper-V:  Enabling customers to realize the promise of a flexible, scalable, and efficient data center by eliminating common challenges with storage provisioning and data protection encountered when transitioning to a virtualized environment.
NetApp storage and data management solutions for Microsoft Exchange:  Helping customers reduce costs, increase availability and simplify management of their enterprise messaging systems.
NetApp storage and data management solutions for Microsoft SharePoint Server:  Helping customers reduce costs and improve availability by improving ways of managing and protecting their data in collaboration portals and document repositories across the enterprise.
NetApp solutions for Microsoft SQL Server: Enabling customers to reduce costs and increase availability using our highly efficient, scalable storage and data management solutions.

NetApp Birds-of-a-Feather session

NetApp will be hosting a Birds-of-a -Feather session, “Gaining Efficiencies with Virtualization” on Wednesday, May 13^th from8:00 pm – 9:00 pm.

So, come on down, and I’ll be there as well! Feel free to tweet me, or find me around!