Back to SFO for Storage Field Day 14!

SFD LogoStorage Field Day 14 is taking place next month on 8-10 November in Silicon Valley. After having to skip one Storage Field Day, I’m glad to be back at the table for this one. If you look at the event page, it might seem there’s not that many presentations going on: only 4 companies listed as of today. But don’t be mistaken: Dell EMC will have 5 presentations, so we will not be slacking!

The companies

Currently there are four three companies scheduled to present: Dell EMC, E8 Storage, Infinidat and Scality.

I saw Scality present back at Storage Field Day 11. I vividly recall their focus on a specific market segment (e.g. excluding ultra low latency and tape workloads), and the fact it seemed a perfect fit for PACS environments I was working on back at that time.

I’ve blogged about Infinidat before; they are relentless in providing a reliable platform, and back that up with a 7-nines (99,99999%) uptime guarantee. That equates to 3,2 seconds of downtime a year, so I’m hard pressed in seeing how they might increase this number any further. We’ll see what the presentation brings. Unfortunately Infinidat is no longer presenting at this Storage Field Day due to a funding round. We’ll see them June next year though!

Another Israeli company presenting at Storage Field Day is E8 Storage, and they will be presenting for the first time. I didn’t know this company, but their website mentions all the fancy low latency, rack-scale NVMe flash, so it’s bound to get interesting. I’ll be curious to see if and how any data services are added on top of all this high performance NVMe flash, and how it impacts latency.

Dell EMC is also presenting and they bring 3 different groups (high-end, mid-range and data protection) for a total of 5 presentations. So expect a Dell EMC heavy Storage Field Day. As you might know, I’ve also attended Dell EMC World back in May. I’m hoping for some new information, especially technical details.

More companies might be added to this list, so keep an eye on the techfieldday website.

Bring in the big guns!

There will be at least two Dutch people (Arjan and I) at Storage Field Day 14, so if you see stroopwafels on camera: sorry about that! We’ll try to keep the crackling packaging away from the microphones.

The other delegates are a mix of familiar and new faces. I’m looking forward to socializing with them in Ramon’s limo and at the various lunches and dinners. Crew wise, Stephen will be ensuring that nobody erroneously mentions CIFS and Nikki will be making sure everything runs smoothly.

Did I mention I’m looking forward to be sitting at a table with a bunch of very smart people? It’s akin to drinking from a fire hose and by day 2 my brain is probably overheating. But it’s so much fun. Stay tuned, follow the #SFD14 hashtag on Twitter, and see you in a few weeks!