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Posts Tagged ‘gestaltit’

I’m late posting about this so I’ll be short. Tuesday 08/10/2010 is the deadline to enter and win a free conference pass, airfare, and hotel accommodations for VMWorld 2010 in San Francisco, CA. Go to GestaltIT.com and register NOW!

Here’s some various contest info as pasted directly from the post Announcing the Gestalt IT “Get Away to VMworld” Contest!:

“Here’s the deal: Thanks to our generous sponsors (Xsigo and Symantec), we’ll pay airfare, hotel, and registration for one lucky and deserving person out there to attend VMworld San Francisco 2010! That’s right – you get to go to VMworld for free!”

“Entrants must explain how they plan to “pay it forward” if they get to go to VMworld. Will you start a blog? Write some tutorials? Contribute to a forum or online community? Present to your local VMUG? Get creative and spread the wealth of knowledge you get from the event!”

“HOW TO ENTER

Ok, so how can you enter this contest? Here are the simple steps:

1. Consider how attending VMworld would help you and the broader community
2. Fill out the contest entry form
3. Plan on stopping by the Symantec and Xsigo booths at the show and thanking them for their support
4. Consider publicizing the contest by sharing this article with friends and associates
5. Consider subscribing to Gestalt IT with RSS, by email, on Twitter, or in iTunes
6. Consider supporting DonorsChoose.org and donating your swag to school kids in need”

“You have through Tuesday, August 10 to enter. The winner will be announced on the VMware Community Roundtable Podcast, Wednesday August 11 at noon Pacific time!”

Check out the whole GestaltIT post for more details and some fine print. Good Luck and I hope to see you there!

On Wednesday I’ll be "passing the (virtual) dutchie from coast to coast" as I fly from Georgia to Washington. Veeam will be presenting to the TFD Delegates first thing Thursday morning. During our presentation look for Veeam to be be "pulling out jives and jamboree handouts." I’ll tweet and blog what I can, but I’m sure the Delegates will provide their own "jig-saw jazz and the get-fresh flow."

As with TFD events in the past, Weds through Friday Twitter will rattle like "bottles and cans (so I advise you get ready)  and just clap your hands and just clap your hands."

Listen / watch the embedded YouTube video in order for this post to make a little more sense!

Here’s the list of all star attendees and sponsors as provided by GestaltIT.com:

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I recently participated in an interesting roundtable discussion with the gang over at GestaltIT.com about the popular trend in the market today of vendors either providing or partnering to provide all in one hardware platform solutions. Stephen Foskett recorded the conversation and has published it as Episode 6 of his Tech Field Day Podcast series. Podcast 6: Stack Wars Roundtable 1 features an all-star roster of virtualization, storage, and networking bloggers and engineers. Interestingly enough, everyone offers different opinions and points of view on the what, where, when, why, and how of “the Stack Wars.” In the end the podcast actually helps clarify some strategy and positioning of a hardware stack in the market.

With me on the podcast is:

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Surely you’ve heard about Drobo by now? As the presenter in the last slot of the GetsaltIT Tech Field Day (TFD) schedule a few weeks ago,  Data Robotics was probably the most anticipated session by my fellow Delegates. I’ll admit, I had heard enough about the technology during the 2 day event that I was looking forward to the presentation as well. Data Robotics did not disappoint. Evidence can be seen in the enthusiasm expressed in the various posts and videos published since that session.

As always, I’ll leave the deep technical details of Drobo’s unique and patented Drobo BeyondRaid technology to my fellow storage bloggers and stay focused on how Data Robotics fits in virtual infrastructure. In this post I expand a little on why the Drobo storage device is a VMware HCL certified, simple to implement and expand iSCSI SAN targeted for SMB customers that is an exciting alternative. Finally I offer opinions based primarily on my virtualization server administrator perspective.
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Here is my video of the GesaltIT Tech Field Day Party at The Computer History Museum in San Jose, CA. It’s not exactly high quality work, but provides some good images of the museum, the event and people, the presentation of the "thank you" gift to Stephen Foskett, and then Foskett’s appreciation speech for the event organizers and sponsors.

Sorry about the shaky video and frequent unfocused shots. I tried to edit out as much as possible without making the video hard to understand. Consider this my “Blair Rich” style of filming – except there are no “up my nostrils” angles. (if you saw the movie you’ll hopefully get that joke!)

GestaltIT Tech Field Day 1 Party from Rich Brambley on Vimeo.

I’ve also created a Vimeo album of all the Tech Field Day videos I could find. Check it out for several other of the attendees videos as well.

The video (in my video) on the screen was created by Marc Farley and Sunshine Mugrabi to set up our presentation of Foskett’s gift. Now, that’s a great video! I’ve embedded it here in this post, but it’s real home is on the StorageRap blog. Watch it too and see what everyone was laughing at!

GestaltIT Tech Field Day is over, and the attendees and sponsors have indicated they were extremely pleased with the event. This is not to say that everything went well the whole time. In fact, if you followed along on the social media conversation then you caught some interesting tweets and replies during the brief moments that waned. However, those times were few and far between and mostly insignificant in the total experience of all who participated. The great thing was that the sponsors monitored the social conversation (Twitter) too, so any criticism was truly constructive and lead to direct questioning about how to make it better. After all, the presentations will be repeated for other engineers and customers and refining the message betters the audience reaction next time.

All that being said, I wanted to offer my thoughts on what I think could help both sides during future GestaltIT Tech Field Days (yes, it looks like there will be others!)

Watching CLI Demos Is Like Listening to the Ballgame On The Radio

I’m not saying using CLI demos, configuration, or hands on labs are bad, but watching text scroll down a screen is not exactly engaging either. If CLI commands are the method of configuring the product’s features then so be it, but Read the rest of this entry »