I wanted to get this blog out to give some really interesting information that happened yesterday while the EMCElect had a chance to have a social conversation with John Roese, Global CTO of EMC Corp.

John started on giving his background as CTO of several tech companies in his career history.  It was really interesting to hear his background and also that he is a Chairman for Cloud Foundry as well.

Once we got into the deep of Q/A we really started to talk about security and how it plays in IT in general.  We talked about the transformation that IT is taking now which was also a theme of the week here at EMCworld.

A lot of data needs to be secure and traditional file based systems, are not adequate especially around analytics.  John talked about secure autoclaves that provide security around analyzing data queries to people that need it.  This way people are only working with the data that they have for the specific query or work set.

We also talked about how a lot of the new security / big data stuff is very PKI intensive which hurts performance during analytics.  This is a very heavyweight model with cloud security and now some people are going back to things that are more simple like Kerberos, etc.

Then we talked about Genomics data and this is where things got really interesting.  He talked about the Worlds center of Genomics – common place where people access central genomics – what they discovered is that it hasn’t become clear on how to become that center.  They originally started putting everything in google cloud engine, and then they said woops, that info is really personal.

What could the evil doers of the world do with this information if for some reason it was made public?  Well DNA could be sequenced and planted at a crimescene…through DNA fabrication and basically be framed for a crime.  We talked about how DNA fabrication equipment is fairly inexpensive as well.   So there you have it Blacklist or CSI fans, I bet you see this in a future episode!

We talked then about Twitter data and how queries can be run to see what kind of trends are going on in the world and actually map it out.  2 places in the world where all twitter day is aggegrated.  MapD and MIT.

Someone also asked about Data Governance – Value of data conversation and research behind it is awesome.  Insurance companies are trying to place value on data and write policies on this but they really don’t know what it the value is.  Steve Todd at EMC has written about this on his blog and guess what?  He’s also an EMCElect 🙂 You can check out his blog here: http://stevetodd.typepad.com/

So lastly, we talked about how when datasets get bigger, metadata matters. The problem behind this is that in an exoscale environment (100’s of PB’s) is that you can’t build out something that is posix compliant, so he was talking about how people are starting to work or experiment with ad-hoc filesystems that could be created dynamically as you work with that data to fulfill these needs.

We concluded by talking about GINA which is a program at EMC that sparks innovation.  Anyone that sends data to gina@emc.com will be indexed.  I didn’t quite understand exactly what GINA does, but you can read about innovation and the program here: https://www.emc.com/corporate/sustainability/workforce/innovation.htm

That was about it!  It was a very good conversation and I look forward to doing something like this in the future!

@sangeek