Storage Field Day 11 is taking place on October 5th to 7th in Silicon Valley, and I’m delighted to report: I’ll be one of the delegates again. In fact, this will be my 5th event! Wouldn’t it be awesome if British Airways reads this blog and hands me some champagne to celebrate as soon as we’re in the air…
The Tech Field Days are organized by GestaltIT and follow an efficient concept. A number of companies are invited to present to a number of picked individuals (delegates) and the 2 hour sessions are broadcasted live over the interwebs. The sessions are very interactive: delegates will be asking questions throughout these presentations. People back at home can ask their questions on Twitter (don’t forget the hashtag, which is #SFD11 for this event), and usually one of the delegates will pick it up and voice it towards the presenters.
The companies
On a Storage Field Day you can obviously expect storage companies of all sizes and ages. We’ve had respected, well-known companies such as Intel, and we’ve had start-ups just coming out of stealth mode, launching their product at a Storage Field Day. This time we’ll have 8 companies presenting:
For those people that can count; yes, that’s only 6. Two of them are still in stealth mode, so their logos are created with invisible inkt.
From this list of companies I know Avere, whom presented at my first ever Storage Field Day. They create a NAS caching layer which will simplify the movement of NAS data between on-premises, private cloud and public cloud. You can find my post from SFD6 over here. It looks like they’ve launched a brand new storage system recently, so I guess we’ll be hearing all about it!
Intel is also a familiar face at Tech Field Days in general. Apart from having an amazing briefing center with a big glass box of Intel CPUs, you only have to watch one of their presentations to see their involvement in pretty much ALL of IT. Not just hardware like CPUs and NICs and whatnot, but also a lot of software initiatives. If you don’t believe me, read Dan’s post from SFD8.
Another recurring presenter is Primary Data; check out my latest post over here. They intend to break down the storage siloes which could exist due to different technologies and storage brands.
With regards to the other companies: I see plenty of HGST and Seagate disks in the field, so lets see what they are going to present (either on disk media or maybe storage systems?). Scality I know by name but not in-depth: they offer scale-out object storage in a ring architecture. Looking forward to see how that works!
What’s next?
On Tuesday night we’ll have dinner with all the delegates and the Tech Field Day crew and exchange local gifts in a “yankee swap”. It will be good to see all the familiar faces again, and meet the new delegates; there’s quite a few newbies this time!
For the people back at home: follow the #SFD11 hashtag on Twitter and tune it to the livestream. I’ll probably be blogging about some of the companies in the weeks after Storage Field Day 11, so keep an eye on this blog.
