My Next Adventure

A funny thing happened on my way to my 11 year anniversary at Xiotech….

For those of you that are new to my blog, here is a little background information.  I started with Xiotech back in January 2000 and embarked on a remarkable ride.  The past 10+ years were amazing, with tons of professional and personal opportunities but as they say, all great things must eventually come to an end and this ending is especially difficult.

Xiotech is a FANTASTIC company, and Alan Atkinson and his team of rock stars are bound and determined to take this company to great places. I think in the pure storage space, there are very few that can go head to head with Sicola’s ISE technology.  It’s just solid.  Although this is an end to my Xiotech career, it’s an absolutely awesome start to the next chapter in my life and has me vibrating with excitement (my A.D.D is in OVERDRIVE).

What would compel me to leave a company like Xiotech?  This is a place that I’m pretty well respected and that I’ve passionately been spreading the evangelistic pure storage message these last 10+ years.  I have not been just drinking the Kool-Aid but making it in large batches!

Well, I found myself in a really awesome position to join a team of passionate, like-minded individuals in a group that is held in high regard in the cloud space.  This position will allow me to spread my wings even further and continue to speak about the cloud and virtualization.   I describe this change as giving me an opportunity to no longer talk just about the car in the proverbial garage (storage), but the whole house.  I look forward to sharing my passion about virtualization (storage, server and desktop), infrastructure, backup, replication, security and, most importantly, how to pull it all together holistically into something customers can use to drive value and efficiency in the data center.  Does anyone want to guess where I’m going?  If not, keep reading!

This group was pulled together by a pretty remarkable individual with an equivalent passion for this space.  So much passion that he was able to convince the powers that be to start an organization with the sole purpose of evangelizing the cloud.  This person’s name is Chad Sakac and his group is sometimes referred to as “Chad’s vArmy”  (click the link – it ROCKS) but at EMC they are known as vSpecialists.  Their mission is to spread the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) message.  He and his team have recruited some of the best and the brightest—and I can’t tell you how excited I am to nerd out with them.

I’d like to thank Marty Lonergan, John Elliott and the Dallas (and various other) vSpecialist team members  (@daverdfw, @lynxbat, @teeglasgow, @pgkeilty, @Justin_Lauer and @abhojwani) for giving me an opportunity to add value to the organization.  This is an incredible opportunity for me to work for the “powerhouse” of the cloud industry in the absolutely most coveted position of an EMC vSpecialist.

Finally, due to my change in focus and for the respect I have for Xiotech, I’m going to “retire” this blog site.  Starting soon, I will be shutting off the comments and changing my twitter handle name.  Moving forward, you can start following me over at www.vTexan.com ( Cool huh !)  If you currently e-mail subscribe to the StorageTexan blog, I would encourage you to do the same at vTexan.

Stay tuned for more cloud and virtualization goodness on http://www.vTexan.com.  I have an incredible amount of things to absorb over the next few months and look forward to sharing my experiences with my readers. 

 Until then…

@StorageTexan soon to be @vTexan 🙂