Next week, I will be presenting "Protecting your Containers and Virtual Machines from Disasters and Cyberthreats" at the KubeCon2025 conference in Atlanta GA. I will cover how IBM Storage Defender will be the ideal platform for backup/archive/anomaly detection as organizations transition from Traditional IT to cloud-native containers.
To learn more about the KubeCon2025 North America event, visit: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/kubecon-cloudnativecon-north-america/
Can you believe this will be my first speaking engagement at a conference in the past five years?! I started speaking in 1990, my first being a SHARE conference in Anaheim, CA. I remember watching a presentation about "Hyperlinks" which were very "futuristic" at the time, but today, we take them for granted. The World Wide Web would launch a year later.
After 10 years of SHARE and GUIDE conferences for the z/OS and IBM Z mainframe community, I branched out to Linux in the early 2000s. I helped getting Red Hat Linux to work on the S/390 platform with our disk and tape storage systems, ran a z800 mainframe with Linux in the IBM Tucson lab, and knew that Linux was going to be a big part of our future! Shortly thereafter, IBM decided to use Linux as the basis for nearly all of its storage systems.
In 2003, I was the "Technical Evangelist" for Storage Virtualization with SAN Volume Controller (SVC), and our global data platform, the General Parallel File System (GPFS), now called Storage Scale. VMware was a relatively new company, and here I was trying to explain that Storage Virtualization solved many of the same problems that Server Virtualization offered to solve.
In addition to conference like IBM Edge, Oracle OpenWorld, and Gartner Summit, I was also presenting a variety of topics at the IBM Tucson Executive Briefing Center (EBC), conducting on-site ILM assessments for customers, and teaching Top Gun classes for IBM sellers and Business Partners on various continents. In some years, I was travelling over 35 weeks.
My dream job came in December 2018, when I joined the team to run IBM Tech University events. These were 1500-2500 person events all over the world, focused on IBM storage, servers and professional development. I was part of the team that created the curriculum, vetted speakers, and managed the event logistics. Sadly, I only had the job for 17 months. COVID-19 shut down not just IBM events, but pretty much the entire "Conference industry".
But just like after a big forest fire, life returns. I was pleased when IBM acquired Red Hat in 2019. With my background in Linux, I learned Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift, writing and running containerized applications on our internal CIO Cirrus cloud platform. My background in Storage Protect and Storage Scale helped me gain expertise in other IBM offerings, like IBM Fusion, IBM Storage Ceph, and Storage Defender.
I will be in Atlanta all week, Nov 10-14, for the KubeCon2025 event, but my talk specifically is on Wednesday. IBM has booth #700 so when I am not attending other keynotes or breakout sessions, I will probably be there to help answer questions.