Thanks TechCrunch for bringing us the Cloud Computing Round Table this Friday afternoon!

When it was announced that this cloud event was going to go on, those of us who couldn’t be there were concerned about our ability to catch it.

But in the passion and the inspiration of the Cloud and industry, they were able to get it streamed so folks like me in Chicago and folks across the world (to the tune of ~1500 watchers) were able to catch this great event.

A number of companies were showing off their products in the beginning and the clear winners were Veodia and Diomede Storage

Veodia—Video recording through the cloud.

Diomede Storage—Cheap, green storage with power-saving technologies at one tenth the cost of Amazon S3. Or so they claim..

They were judged, appropriately by this panel of judges:

Dan’l Lewin, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft
George Zachary, partner, Charles River Ventures
Geoff Ralston, CEO LaLa
David Bernstein, VP/General Manager, Cisco
David Kralik, Silicon Valley office Director of Newt Gingrich

And the interaction and discussion which ensued was enjoyed by all.  They did go easy and hard on some of the folks, but that is the game.

In all, the whole event was pretty active on Twitter as well with #tccloud as well as regular discussion and conversation.  Some of the more active folks discussing the event were myself, @cxi, @ashley_martin, @neerajKA, @missrogue, and @tekoppele

The ustream.tv livechat was pretty active as well! But none of us cached that for posterity!

One of the major questions was – Will this information be available for watching later, and the answer is Yes! The Cloud Computing Round Table is available here to watch.

So, if you were able to catch it, excellent! If not, I encourage you to watch it after the fact.

The panelists had some great talking points, and the discussions albeit very light were informative to the parties watching.

Special thanks to the Round Table of folks:

Vic Gundotra, VP Engineering, Google
Amitabh Srivastava, Corporate VP, Windows Azure
Lew Tucker, CTO, Cloud Computing, Sun Microsystems
Scott Dietzen, SVP Communications Products, Yahoo
Paul Buchheit, Co-founder, FriendFeed; creator of Gmail
Werner Vogels, CTO Amazon
Mike Schroepfer, VP of Engineering, Facebook
Gina Bianchini, CEO, Ning
John Engates, CTO, Rackspace

Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce.com

Thanks all of you who participated in the discussions… and I swear I’ll launch that Cloud blog when I have some free time… I just need 15 minutes ;)

Welcome to the thunder in a series of ‘when cloud computing goes wrong’ type scenarios.

Cloud computing it touted for its reliability, scalability and stability, infact it doesn’t even need backups, but we’ll take them anyway!   Until THIS happens.

SearchStorage ANZ reports that “in late January, ma.gnolia experienced a catastrophic data loss event and turned to backups to restore its database of users’ bookmarks. Both the primary and secondary backups failed irrevocably.”

I guess it just goes to show, that your cloud is only as stable as your infrastructure, your backups are only as good as your restores, and your business is only as viable as your ability to maintain and sustain it.    Being in a cloud doesn’t make you immune to getting struck by lightning, infact it increases the likely-hood even more when you’re not grounded.

Grounded definition according to cxipedia:

Having solid foundation, connected to stable technologies, having backups and ensuring that data is recoverable from them.

I’m sure if they had a shadow test/dev environment they could have rebuilt from that, but I guess that’s just my sensibilities coming through. grin.

This isn’t the notorious fluffy G, but instead is an (honestly) very well produced piece on Deduplication as it stands with the competition – Or as described in the YouTube release:

So, my personal and honest assessment? Which I’m sure you’re waiting to see ;)

I have to say, it’s very well produced, orchestrated and organized.   It didn’t look tacky (like those EMC dating videos I’ve seen, or Virtualization Girl)  The filming quality, audio representation, and the dynamic of the event – started off in a very emotional context.   For some reason, e-Squared reminded me a bit of Chuck Hollis (The beast from the east :)) .. I’m not sure why that is, but I think that’s kind of cute in my own mind ;)

I don’t really have an impression of double-D as to who they’re really giving me an impression of, I guess that’s just par for the course though. ;)

What really gets me is the “my technology crunch data anywhere” near the end, which really speaks well to the deduplication in primary as well as secondary, instead of some other methods in which it’s done.. But I won’t enter into that religious debate solely on this video alone, but those of you out there know exactly what I mean ;)

Final Assessment: Very well done, I don’t feel like it’s a 1990’s dating video recorded in someone’s basement, real cred, value and rocking ;)

Every now and then the discussion comes up “Where do I find ‘x’ people on twitter?”  I usually resort to random google searches, sometimes finding what I’m looking for, sometimes not quite so much!  So here is my repository for you, me and my cat to find people easier.

NetApp Folks are Twittering!

Storage Folks Are Twittering

Virtual Twits including a script which will auto-add them for you!

PowerShell Twitterers, including a script which will auto-add them for you!

C Level Tweeters

December: Newspapers that use Twitter (Thousands of accts on Twitter!)

60 New York Times profiles on Twitter

UK journalists on Twitter

USGovernment on Twitter

Hunger Twitterers

And that’s all I have for a repository right now – if you have a list which should be added here, or you think I should include some specific grouping, make it known :)

So, here is a breakdown of the NetApp folks on Twitter!

	Name + Blog	Twitter ID!
	Christopher Kusek	@cxi
	Michael Moeschler	@moesch
	Eric Pederson	@onStorage
	Kostadis Roussos	@kostadis_netapp
	Jeff Bearer	@jeffbearer
	Val Bercovici	@valb00
	NetApp	@NetApp
	NetAppUK	@NetAppUK
	Jeremy Merrill	@JeremyMerrill
	David A. Chapa	@davidchapa
	Samantha Moulton	@SamMoulton
	Mike Riley	@MSR11
	Kaitlyn Dierkes	@kdierkes

And a specific mention for the NetApp+Virtualization folks! ;)

	Name + Blog	Twitter ID!
	Chris Gebhardt	@chrisgeb
	Abhinav Joshi	@Abhinav_Joshi
	Brian Gracely	@bgracely
	Jack Mcleod	@VirtuallyNetApp
	Keith Aasen	@keith_aasen
	Vaughn Stewart	@Vaughn_Stewart

If you feel you should be added to this list, let me know and I’ll be sure to add you accordingly!