On Thursday last week, I attended the Dell Storage Vision Day press event. It was held at Chelsea Football Club, which luckily didn't seem to deter anyone from coming! Journalists attended from across Europe, including the UK, Netherlands, France, Germany, Italy, and Russia.

We also had a fantastic line-up from the spokesperson side - first up to present was Robin Kuepers, head of storage, EMEA, and James Quarles, Director of Enterprise Solutions. They gave an overview of the EMEA storage landscape including the latest trends, which was brought to life by two customer presenters: Zafar Chaudry of Liverpool Women's NHS Foundation Trust and Marcel Dumont of Schoolbank.nl, the second largest social networking site in the Netherlands.

Zafar's presentation focused on how the Trust is using a Dell/EMC storage solution to support server virtualization from VMware. Marcel then discussed how he has implemented a Dell EqualLogic storage infrastructure to support exponential data growth associated with the social networking craze. Although Zafar and Marcel are using different storage technologies, one thing was clear; they both turned to Dell to tackle two of the hottest IT trends today - virtualization and social networking - and they have already experienced significant benefits ranging from cost savings to a reduction in management time related to storage-specific issues.

Next up was Tony Lock, an industry analyst from Freeform Dynamics. Tony discussed current issues in the storage market with some strong survey data, giving the journalists a lot to think about before the coffee break!

The second part of the day was led by Praveen Asthana, Global Director of Storage and Networking, and John Joseph, Vice President, Dell EqualLogic Solutions. Both Praveen and John flew over from the US to share with the journalists Dell's current and future plans in storage. They both discussed Dell's commitment to deliver on the promise to Simplify IT - from offering a broad range of products for different types and sizes of customers and also including designed-to-order services for customers that need solutions for their unique requirements. The video below captures pieces of Praveen's and John's presentations.

Last but not least, we got to take a tour of Chelsea Football Club at the end of the day – loved seeing the press room where the managers hold press conferences at the end of each game, as well as sitting in the manager’s chair right on the sideline!