In a couple of hours I’ll be airborne again heading west towards Silicon Valley. This time it’s for Storage Field Day 10 or #SFD10 on the Twitters. It’s the usual recipe: 12 delegates from around the world and 9 companies (start-ups and established companies alike) explaining their vision on the storage market and how their products work. I love these events because in three days time we’ll be bombarded with a whole lot of information on existing and upcoming storage tech. In my mind, there’s no other event with this information density: afterwards it usually takes a couple of days to let it all trickle through. Or as we say in Dutch, “make cheese out of it”… (of course it’s about cheese)
Travel
So today is Tuesday, which means I’m hopping from DUS to LHR to SFO and breathing airplane air for the next 13-odd hours. I really love this connection since there’s no layover in the US, hence no rechecking of bags and all that tediousness. Plus I think British Airways does a pretty good job to be honest. The LHR to SFO leg is actually only 11 hours in total, so that’s not too bad: perfect for a nap and a movie.
(BA, if you’re reading this, those last status miles to oneworld Sapphire status would be much appreciated… 😉 )
After landing there will be a mandatory gym session (to try and wake myself up again and get my body into the PST timezone), followed by the first official Tech Field Day event: the Welcome Dinner w/ Yankee Swap! Everyone will be bringing something from their area/country to swap: booze, watches, paintings, Australian integration packs with Koala bears and Tim Tams, etc. It’s seriously good fun and feeds my wanderlust addiction, so yeah… looking forward to it! I’ve got something really local with me this time…
Wed-Thu-Fri
On Wednesday the real program will kick off. We’ll start with a briefing over breakfast: Stephen will explain the rules of the game for everyone, we’ll be handed our mics and cables by Ben and his crew (for the live broadcast) and the Dutch people will be forcing stroopwafels onto everyone. We’re actually with three Dutchies now, so expect people to become fatt… I mean… making somewhat of a more full screen appearance as the week progresses.
First Storage Field Day 10 presenter on Wednesday is Kaminario, followed by Primary Data and Cloudian. All of these companies have presented at one or several other Storage Field Days and I’m looking forward on how they’ve progressed since then. The presentations will all be held in the hotel, so I’m hoping for plenty of strong coffee to combat the lack of sunshine and moving around.
In the evening we’ll be gathering at Gordon Biersch in San Jose for food and chat; Tech Field Day friends are more than welcome to join, so reach out to either me or Stephen on the Twitters and we’ll make sure you get in!
Thursday we’ll have presentations at Pure Storage, Datera and Tintri. The first one I’ve had the pleasure of attending several presentations of, the latter two are new to me. Datera came out of stealth just over a month ago and Tintri announced a couple of new systems last week, so I guess we won’t be bored…
In the evening we’ll be having another dinner (at a brewery, hmmmm…) and… an escape room activity! This will actually be my first escape room ever, so I’ll have to make up my mind on the whole brewery vs escape room thing. There’s an insane amount of smart minds at these Tech Field Day events, so if there’s no broadcast on Friday… the brewery won!
Friday we’ll be having breakfast at Nimble Storage: I’m looking forward to see some results on their Predictive All-Flash Array roll-outs after attending their launch event back in February. Afterwards it’s Hedvig and Exablox to finish off the week.
Saturday – Help!
Since there wasn’t a feasible home bound flight out of SFO on Friday evening, I’ll be staying one additional night and flying out on Saturday afternoon. Initially me and Arjan were planning to visit Alcatraz in the early morning, but unfortunately we missed the last batch of Saturday tickets: looks like the Saturday early bird tickets sell out well over a month in advance, wow! Alternatives are more than welcome: if you’ve got a recommendation, let me know in the comments or over Twitter!
The URL to remember during and after the event is: http://techfieldday.com/event/sfd10/. During the event it will host the live stream and afterwards the videos will end up here. In the weeks after Storage Field Day 10 most of the delegates will be writing blog posts about what they’ve seen and learnt, which will also be aggregated on that page.
Follow the Twitter spam using hashtag #SFD10 (I apologize in advance for the increased volume of tweets). I’ve also created a Twitter list with all the delegates which you can find here, so you don’t miss out on all the gossip which we forget to tag.
