VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘gestaltit’

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 »