Typing this at Schiphol airport, I can’t help feeling slightly tired. The alarm clock started blaring at 03:00 this night and with that, my trip to Storage Field Day 8 has officially started. With the first leg of the journey from DUS to AMS being over already, I can now settle for the long haul to SFO. It’s bound to be an incredibly exciting week once again and I’m looking forward to meeting up with a lot of familiar faces, two new members of the Tech Field Day family and 10 super exciting companies. Stroopwafels incoming!

The companies

Ten companies will be presenting at Storage Field Day 8, with the first companies starting on Wednesday morning. First up will be Coho Data and Pure Storage, both whom I’ve met at SFD6. It will be exciting to see what both companies have done in the year between presentations: Pure Storage’s IPO will no doubt be part of the conversation. Cohesity will have the last slot of the day. In fact they will be doing a product announcement today (the 20th of October at 9AM PDT), so we’ll only be one day late.. 😉

The second day will be busy, kicking off with Qumulo and afterwards Primary Data, Infinidat, and NexGen Storage. With the exception of Primary Data, all these companies are new for me.

The third day I’m looking forward to most: kicking off with Violin. I run into Violin equipment and the brand name often over here in the Netherlands but have never had the chance to get to know them properly. After Violin there’s a massive company we all know: Intel. They will no doubt be talking about their 3D XPoint technology and I’m dying to hear all the ins and outs about it. Deep tech at its best! Last but definitely not least will be Nimble Storage: at SFD6 a lot of us were amazed by the intuitive GUI and the thoughts put into manageability of the array. I’m curious to see if they’ve improved on this and how.

And for the rest…

There will be lots of tech talk in the limo and between sessions. We’re doing a Yankee swap again on Tuesday evening during dinner (with my present safely in my carry-on; don’t want it bouncing around!). And secretly (well, no longer secret I guess) I’m looking forward to the 28 degrees Celsius weather: last week we’ve had near-freezing temperatures and that’s just way too soon. So guess where I’ll be suppressing my jetlag this afternoon… outside!

Do tune in to the live video during the event at the TechFieldDay SFD8 website. Follow our live tweeting on Twitter using the hashtag #SFD8; you can ask your questions and one of us will relay it to the presenter.

Silicon Valley, here we come!