EMC World in Pictures

The EMC road show rolled into Las Vegas this week for the vendor's annual conference, luring more than 9,000 IT managers, vendors, and journalists to Sin City:Figure 8: Vegas wakes up to another quiet, understated day.

At least the venue for EMC World, the cavernous Mandalay Bay Convention Center, provided some respite from the sweltering 107-degree temperatures outside:

Figure 5: The Mandalay Bay shimmers in the glaring Nevada sun.

Once inside, though, vendors were doing anything to get their marketing message across; EMC even had a singer dressed up as a Celerra NAS device:

Figure 2: Celerris serenades Byte and Switch.

Brocade took a slightly different approach; sending their lycra-clad DCX Man super-hero out to save the masses:

Figure 7: Brocade's DCX man: saving the day.

Sadly, EMC CEO Joe Tucci was somewhat less animated, instead focusing his super-powers on Flash memory and spin-down disks:

Figure 11: Tucci tells it like it is (without the help of a baseball).

Music was also one of the big themes of this year's EMC World, which kicked off with a concert by the Goo Goo Dolls:Figure 3: No, I hadn't been drinking!!Figure 10: The Goo Goo Dolls: barely a mention of data de-dupe and thin provisioning.

EMC Global Services and Brocade both used the "Guitar Hero" video-game on their booths, turning IT managers into would-be rock gods:

Figure 9: EMC Global Services' Info Hero Booth: the calm before the axe-wielding storm.

EMC was also offering a shiny BMW Z4 as a prize in a series of geeky challenges. These included tests of techies' virtual provisioning talents and their ability to quickly configure an NS20. (Byte and Switch performed miserably.)Figure 6: The BMW Z4 Series: Good things come to geeks who code.

For some of us, it was all just too much excitement:

Figure 4: Taking a well earned break from the EMC propaganda machine.

So, that's EMC World done for another year, although Byte and Switch will be back in Vegas for Symantec Vision next month and VMWorld later this year. It looks as if Sin City is already gearing up to play host to the storage hordes:

Figure 1: Las Vegas: It'll be nice when it's finished.

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