I’ve started shipping the Top vBlog 2015 coins that were custom made this year courtesy of Infinio to the Top 50 bloggers. I’m sending them out in small batches due to all the work packing them, printing labels, filling out customs forms, etc. When you receive yours you might find a something little extra in the package courtesy of Nutanix who is providing a coin holder and lanyard so you can proudly wear your coin around your neck. Just imagine how cool you would look wearing it around your house, at the grocery store, in your office or even at VMworld.

So when you receive yours in the mail, give a shout out to Nutanix and Infinio and post a picture of yourself wearing it on Twitter with the hash tag #TopvBlog2015. Bonus points for whoever has the most creative photo.

Scott Davis from Infinio who was a special guest on the Top vBlog 2015 results show is presenting a webinar for technology geeks tomorrow, that sounds pretty cool so go sign up now! Also speaking of cool, Infinio was recently named by Gartner as one of the Cool Vendors in Storage Technologies for 2015, find out what Garnter had to say about Infinio here.

A new wave of disruptive innovations in the storage industry is shaking up familiar architectures and technologies. These innovations promise to drive down costs, simplify storage in the data center and challenge the long-established vendors and data center status quo. Hybrid Arrays are the new normal and All-Flash Arrays and Hyper-Converged Infrastructure solutions are serious contenders in the appropriate use cases.

This webinar will cover disruptive storage technologies and the solutions they are driving. You will learn about:

• Core storage technology innovations for performance (such as PCI-e and DIMM-based Flash/SSD, and NVMe technologies) and for capacity (such as SMR (shingled) drives)
• Mobile/cloud application influences on storage including a shift to scale-out architectures, object & cloud storage trends
• Storage product architectures such as All-flash and Hybrid arrays, Hyper-converged Infrastructure, Software-defined storage & I/O optimization technologies

As I’ve been pretty involved with 3PAR support for VVols during my day job at HP, my VMware storage marketing counterpart contacted me and wanted me to write a guest post on their storage blog on implementing VVols on 3PAR. So if you are interested in that head on over there and give it a read. Thanks to Mauricio Barra and Ken Werneburg for the opportunity.

You have to love VMware’s acronyms and trying to figure out the proper case for them. vSAN or VSAN, vMotion or VMotion, VVols or VVOLs, the only consistency VMware has with case in their acronyms in being consistently inconsistent and every acronym is subject to change (and frequently does).

So when I asked one of the VMware storage product marketing managers for VVols about the proper case for the VVOL acronym back in December when we where developing a technical paper on VVols they had decided on VVOLs so that’s what we used in all of our documentation.

Fast-forward to two  weeks ago when one of our VVols developers asked about this again as he heard it was lower-case now so I checked with Rawlinson and he confirmed that they had changed back to using lower-case VVols for the acronym. I talked to the same VVol marketing manager last week and mentioned it to him and he hadn’t heard that but after checking he confirmed that they internally agreed to use VVol instead of VVOL.

So short answer is use VVol/VVols and not VVOL/VVOLs. Also note that this is an un-official acronym as VMware prefers to spell it out in all of their official documentation. But we all know how the IT world loves acronyms so you’ll probably here it mostly referred to as VVols.

I was digging through some old Top vBlog archives and came across the video that Steve Herrod recorded on blogging and thought I would share it. Years ago I wanted to do something special for the bloggers as part of the Top vBlog results announcement so I contacted Steve Herrod to see if he would be willing to record a short message about blogging and its importance to the community. It’s at the beginning of the Top vBlog Results show from 2010, back then we pre-recorded it and edited it before publishing it. So give it a watch to see what he has to say about blogging and watch the rest of it if you want to see myself, Simon, David and John Troyer do the countdown of the Top 25.

I’ve been running the annual Top vBlog voting for the last 6 years and as the process is very time-consuming I’m always looking for ways to improve and streamline things. I was recently reading a post from Rene which had some ideas including using stats to determine who the top bloggers. I don’t really like that idea as it then becomes more like a video game to see who can get the highest score and people will do anything to get it.

There is no doubt that Top vBlog is a popularity contest but isn’t pretty much everything that we vote on in life such as the Presidency, Pro Sports All-star Teams, America’s Got Talent, etc, that’s just the nature of what voting is and that’s really OK as long as it doesn’t get out of control. If we start trying to rank things purely based on statistics you lose the most important element, what the people think and want. The fact of the matter is that the stats will mostly line up with the voting results.

When I open the voting I try to give two key pieces of guidance, first make sure bloggers understand that while this is a popularity contest the intended voters are those that work with virtualization technologies and not everyone in your office or who you are Facebook friends with. Second for voters to be fair and to take the following into account when choosing their favorite blogs: Longevity, frequency, quality and length, you can read more about those areas here.

So I probably won’t be radically changing things but I am open to suggestions to try and make things better. One suggestion that I did like from Rene was on the post counts for the year of each blog. Right now I display blogs in the voting survey alphabetically to keep them all on level ground, but I bold the previous years top 50 so they stand out. I like the idea of sorting them by number of posts so the most active bloggers are near the top and those that hardly post at all are near the bottom. Because there are so many blogs now this will help get the most active bloggers better visibility on the survey. I’ve looked around to see if that could be automated by scrapping blogs and parsing the archives to get the number of blog posts but haven’t found anything that will do that. Andreas manually did this by going to each blog so I can probably leverage some volunteers to divide and conquer and do the math for me.

As far as using other metrics like like if they wrote a book, presented at VMworld and how many people follow them on Twitter I don’t find those as being a good measuring stick to how good and popular a blogger is and it penalizes a lot of the bloggers. So if you have any suggestions put them in the comments, one crazy idea I had was to make it into NCAA Basketball play-off style with the bloggers all facing off to the make it to the Sweet 16 and then the Final Four, but while that sounds cool I don’t think that would play out well. Here are some other things I’d be interested in having feedback on:

• Should it be open it up to selecting more than 10 blogs?
• Should categories be optional?
• Are there any additional categories that might be interesting?
• Should blogs be displayed on the survey in # of posts order from most to least?
• Any other ideas or suggestions you have!

I am also looking to implement a database-backed system instead of the current WordPress tables model which is a bear to update, this would make it more of a directory style and would be much easier to work with. I’m looking into a few options for that right now.

Sound off in the comments and look forward to hearing from you.