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I’ve made it a point to attend every HP Discover conference I’ve been invited to as they always manage to provide a tremendous amount of technical information for me to ponder, discuss, and write about (Disclaimer: HP provides for my travel and registration). At the Las Vegas conference, for example, I covered some key improvements to the HP Smart Update Manager 5 application, including how to update a BladeSystem c7000 chassis, along with working with the HP ExpertONE to partake in their certification experience. This year holds true to that pattern as I gear up for the information extravaganza that is being prepared in Frankfurt, Germany for the EMEA edition of HP’s Discover conference. However, there’s a bit of a twist with this go around.

For HP Discover in Frankfurt, HP has been letting some excitement build up around a surprise storage announcement. The landing page includes a series of short videos in which questions are asked from the perspective of how we arrived at our current technology, planning for disaster recovery, and file based storage. A number of “timelines” build in reverse to show the decisions that face those who are managers and administrators within an IT environment.

There really isn’t any meat on the landing page yet, but I would imagine this is due to the desire to have a surprise reveal at the conference when David Scott (SVP and GM, HP Storage) gives his presentation on December 4th. In the meanwhile, I’ve got some suggestions below for those who wish to join in the conversation and stay current with the developing updates.

Staying Current

If you want to engage further on the topic, I suggest the content created by fellow vExpert Calvin Zito (@HPStorageGuy on Twitter). While he is quite passionate about HP Storage, he’s also a very straight shooter and good friend of the virtualization community.

Visit his Around the Storage Block blog or join the HP Storage LinkedIn group that he manages and moderates. Some of his recent topics include:

Your biggest challenges with information retention and analytics (free t-shirt for comments)
Excursions to enjoy on your visit to Frankfurt for HP Discover 2012, plus travel visa update (some really neat places to see!)
Are you coming to Frankfurt – what to see

Calvin also travels around with a case of Idaho Spuds to hand out. Which is awesome.

So weird looking and tasty!

And The Prize Giveaways?

As a way to further engage with you, the awesome reader that you are, I have some prize giveaways that you can enter to win!

Winners receive both of these items: HP ENVY 14-3010NR Spectre 14-Inch Ultrabook and HP Storage RDX Removable Disk Backup System.

I really wish I had one of these 🙂

And as an added bonus, I get to come up with whatever method I want in order to hand out the entries. Let the nefarious plans begin!

How To Win

It’s rather simple. The spirit of this prize giveaway is to encourage engagement with the HP Discover community and increase visibility of the upcoming storage announcement at Frankfurt. As such, I’ll make it easy to share and enjoy.

Option 1 – Leave a comment below with a brief narrative of how HP impacts you

Make sure to fill in the E-mail address box when you post a comment or include your Twitter Handle in the comment. The E-mail address is private and can only be seen by me.

Some ideas –

How do you leverage HP products now?
If you’ve been to or plan to visit HP Discover, what did you learn or enjoy?
Any HP success stories over unique challenges you want to share?
Bonus kudos from me if you include any links to a photo of you with an HP server / blade / switch / laptop / whatever!

Option 2 – Use the “Tweet” button below to share this post on Twitter

This option is easy – you just have to click a button. 🙂 If you include the #HPStorage hashtag, HP might even retweet you! Feel free to add your own flavor to the tweet.

Rules

Four (4) names will be drawn by me on Friday, November 23rd and submitted to HP for the first round of four (4) prizes. Winners will be announced the following week.
Another four (4) names will be drawn by me on Friday, November 30th and submitted to HP for the second round of four (4) prizes. Winners will be announced the following week.
You can only win once.
No guarantee you will win as other sources are also participating and submitting names for the four (4) prizes.
Blog Comment entries must include an E-mail address or Twitter handle to be eligible.
Prizes are handled by HP and will be fulfilled after HP Discover in December.