Oh yes, I’m honoured to be included in the TFD crew yet again. I previously was included in Storage Field Day 1 and Storage Field Day 5 but also at several of the smaller RoundTable events at VMworld, Cisco Live and Interop New York. TechFieldDay is by far the most interesting event for an independent blogger like myself. This for two major reasons:
- You get to see the newest of new technology (or newest iterations) explained by the smartest brains of the respective companies
- The team of likeminded delegates brings the best out of yourself and each other. This is way more than just an old boys club 😉
Those IT convention roundtables are also a very good way to actually get a few of the bloggers onsite that would otherwise never make it on their own dime. Therefor I am very grateful to all the sponsors that make it possible for me to cross the Atlantic and have a nice bed on site!!! (this was a disclaimer, peeps!). And before I forget it: Thank you VMware for the bloggers pass! All together this type of sponsorship saves me at least $4000 !!!
EXTRA !
Historically the TechFieldDay events and the Roundtables have been organised quite differently. The EXTRA will bridge those two types of organisation. Other then just a few small cameras out of the backpack we will see the great crew we already know from the bigger events and I’ve heard live-streaming could be an option. A second difference is that the delegates stay together all afternoon where the roundtables at previous events were more of a walk-in for which presentation you were interested.
SPONSORS:
TechFieldDay Extra is 3 afternoons of which I will be attending day 1 and 2. Here are the sponsors. As a token of gratitude towards the sponsors you can expect a dedicated blogpost for each one with their News from VMworld.This also counts for the sponsors of my blog Veeam, Unitrends, Nutanix, Infinio, Maxta and Nimble Storage (currently no campaign but have supported on previous campaigns).
======== MONDAY ========
DataGravity
They have finally launched! DataGravity makes in their own words: The World’s First Data-Aware Storage. What’s that? I’ll quote Stephen Foskett on this one: It’s like someone mashed up a storage array, a CDP appliance, an SRM application, and an eDiscovery tool all in one. – Read his first insights here, you’ll find mine next week.
Asigra
They went first last year at VMworld and they are doing it again. Asigra is a cloud based backup company that is trying to revolutionise the backup paradigm through a different type of licensing rather than a technical differentiator. Asigra wants us to start focussing on the cost of recovery instead of the cost of backup. I’m very much looking forward to how that model has worked for them in the last year and if the see that adoption they anticipated for.
Watch that episode from last year here.
Solarwinds
Solarwinds is well know for powerful but simple to use tools for the IT admin. Specialised in the areas of networking (flow managers, topology tools, performance monitoring, …) or overall systems management (servers, storage, IP management, …). Secondly I don’t know a single vendor that has so many great FREE Tools as well. Lastly Solarwinds has their own general IT community where a lot of great conversations are held. You’ll find many of the TFD delegates writing posts on the THWACK community.
I have no idea what Solarwinds will present at TFD as they have so much to offer. They are also a returning sponsor so feel free to check out the Solarwinds introduction session from TechFieldDay 9 (2013)
======== TUESDAY ========
SanDisk
SanDisk has been around for a while. Most of us know them from SSDs or SD-cards. But more and more we hear their name in the datacenter space. Not in the least from the venture efforts with other storage vendors like Nexenta, Tegile, Panzura or Whiptail (now Cisco). They also have quite some financial power for acquisitions like the SSD manufacturer SMART Storage (Enterprise SATA SSDs) last year and this year Fusion-IO for no less than $1.1bln.
As the FusionIO acquisition is pretty recent I doubt we’ll hear a lot about those plans. But if you want to see some other great stuff they are working on I’d suggest you have a go at the ULLtraDIMM presentation from Storage Field Day 5. ULLtraDIMM is basically consistent flash technology (MLC) on a DIMM socket.
Zerto
Zerto is specialised in virtualization replication. Where SRM for example is quite limited to the type of underlying storage replication, Zerto is more flexible as it works on a host-based software level. I never truly followed up with Zerto myself but as data-protection is one of my go-to technologies I truly look forward to what new stuff they have to offer.
It’s been a while (2012) since Zerto was at TechFieldDay but this Zerto Virtual Replication overview from Storage Field Day 2 is definitely your way in.