In The Cloud - How to prank the cloud

As a pre and post sales Systems Engineer, there is a lot of travel and often we travel with Account Executives (aka "Sales People").  I often travel to the mid-west with a salesman we will call "Bob".  We fly in the literal cloud to work on figurative cloud computing.  Bob doesn't check-in for his flight until an hour before (or less).  A year and a half ago I thought of a way to stay entertained in the clouds.  I called our corporate travel agent:

Me: Hi, this is Scott from Insight and I need to make a change to Bob's seat assignment.  Bob has a gastro intestinal issue and is embarrassed to talk about it… he needs to sit as close to the toilet as possible.  Please don't tell him I told you about this since he likes to keep it discrete and is too embarrassed to ask himself.  I kept a straight face and didn't chuckle (it was difficult not to laugh).

Agent: LONG PAUSE ….  Wow…ok, thank you for letting us know.  We will handle this discretely. 

Fast forward 1.5 years… Insight VP at our National Sales Meetings was talking about how Bob is very angry with the travel agent since he is always sitting next to the bathroom for over a year, yet his engineer is upgrading with miles (hard earned miles J ) to first class.  I couldn't let the travel agency take the blame and let everyone know what had happened.  My long-term prank was now over, but we were laughing so hard we were crying.

The moral of the story - check in for your flight the night before so you can change your seat.

Pranking in the Cloud,

Scott

This is my first blog rant and the goal is to talk about storage tidbits and interesting in the field stories.  I am on the road most of each month and see a lot of enterprise customers. 

Am I the only one sick of hearing about the "cloud"?  Did we just get tired of the words ASP, Outsourced, Hosted, Managed, or mainframe?  Make no mistake, "cloud" is real, but it is the most overused, rehashed I.T. word in recent memory.  As one of my colleagues put it, "Vaporware comes from clouds".

The product of the year that has been a sleeping giant for many years is MultiStore technology from NetApp.  What VMware does to servers, MultiStore does to storage.  The product has been available for 6 or more years and is now finally coming into the forefront with "cloud" methodologies since it provides for virtual storage that can move between physical hardware (both controller and disk) and also provides secure containment of virtual storage.

 If "cloud" puts great existing technologies like MultiStore into the mainstream and manufacturers enhance those technologies, I won't bash the clouds.

Scott

P.S. Clouds are for raining.