VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘techfieldday’

I am in Seattle, WA for the third GestaltIT Tech Field Day (TFD). This time I am part of the presenting team for Veeam Software, and we are first up on the agenda. As with other recent events, I am using Cover It Live (CiL) to provide real time coverage and of our presentation and the reaction of the delegates (bloggers) attending. The best part about using Cover It Live is the event can be played back in the future, so check it out even if you missed it live.

I’m automatically pulling in the tweets of all involved, so I should have a good stream of both bloggers and sponsors represented here.

I’m using the following twitter lists:

• @TechFieldDay/tfd3-sponsors
• @TechFieldDay/tfd3-delegates

Look for my occasional commentary as well, but I’m not sure how much time I’ll actually have to participate. I’ll end the coverage when our time is up, which should be roughly 3 to 4 hours.

Click through the page break for the CiL widget and tune into the fun!

By the way, we are providing the first ever public demo of Veeam Backup and Replication 5.0 SureBackup!

Read the rest of this entry »

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!

Ocarina Networks presented to us during the Day 2 morning session of the GestaltIT Tech Field Day. Their presentation was a deep dive into storage compression and optimization. If you read my Ideas About Presenting To Engineers from earlier this week, then you’ll know what I mean when I say that Ocarina had “black magic” that wasn’t as interesting to me as how and where the solution was deployed in the data center. After all, Ocarina claims that they will optimize and compress data on any storage device. I wanted to know how they could integrate with existing, third party storage before I was ready to absorb how their compression and de-duplication was actually achieved.

I don’t want to mislead anyone – almost all of my fellow delegates where deeply impressed with the block by block algorithm lesson on Ocarina’s technology. The storage gurus where so into it I had to wait for the hands on labs to start before I could get my questions answered. In fact, I never did the labs because I spent the whole time at the white board understanding the deployment options.

My post is therefore about implementation options of an Ocarina solution. I’m using several quotes from posts by Carter George, co-founder of Ocarina Networks, taken from the Online Storage Optimization Blog to help me explain the deployment options. Then I’ll cover some ideas about how could Ocarina function in a virtual environment.

For those that want to know more about the deep dive on the Ocarina technology, follow the links at the end of this write up to my fellow attendee’s posts. Read the rest of this entry »

The VMworld 2009 Hands on Labs (HOL) VI was not the only VMware Global Engineering Technical Operations Team (GETO) managed infrastructure at the Moscone Center in 2009. The VMware Cloud Pavilion Booth and it’s demos, some customer demos, and even the VMTN Lounge and vExpert booth (I used personally) was run from a self contained, mobile rack. That rack was/is powered by MDS Quadv Servers and Xsigo I/O Virtualization Solutions.

MDS and Xsigo were sponsors of the GestaltIT Tech Field Day, and their presentations were first on our Day 1 agenda. Although I knew VMware (big thanks are due to John Troyer for setting everything up!) would be hosting these sessions at their head quarters in Palo Alto, I did not make the connection between the companies until I arrived on site Thursday. The aforementioned VMworld 2009 mobile rack is currently running in the VMware Briefing Center and is patiently waiting to be shipped again by the GETO team to the next conference or event.

Here are some of my notes about the capabilities of the rack. I may have misunderstood some of the wiring details. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

Take a 9 minute drive around the storage block with Marc Farley of 3PAR as he uses an analogy of mismatched socks to explain how Autonomic Storage can eliminate human error in storage provisioning for virtual servers and databases. In the beginning of the video Marc goes off on a tangent Twitter rant where you might recognize some twitternames mentioned.

It’s worth the ride!

3PAR was one of the sponsors during the GestaltIT Tech Field Day in San Jose, CA last week, and announced Autonomic Provisioning with the press release titled 3PAR Changes the Way Utility Storage is Provisioned for Virtual Server and Database Environments

Check out Marc’s StorageRap blog and all of his Steering Wheel Camera videos on YouTube. The episode where he gives fellow storage bloggers Dave Graham (EMC) and Stephen Foskett (Nirvanix) a ride to the San Francisco airport on the last day of VMworld 2009 may also be interesting to VM /ETC readers.

Day 2 – Here We Go Again!

I’m throwing in the towel on trying to live blog/journal Tech Field Day. The event is too engaging and it’s all I can do to keep up with the conversation on Twitter while actually trying to learn so much new technology and products.

As in Day 1, please check the embedded Tweetgrid after the page break to follow my real time reactions as the day goes by. You can also follow all the Tech Field Day bloggers and their tweets with the multi column, web based Tech Field Day Tweetgrid.

I have been successful uploading my photos simply because I need to keep my phone and camera charged! Here is my album so far, and I’m sure I will update it more as day 2 goes by.

Read the rest of this entry »