Following on from my previous post about a quick intro to Storage Field Day (#SFD12) that I was invited to attend in San Jose this week as an independent thought leader, I wanted to get a quick post out on the list of vendors we are supposed to be seeing. If you are new to what Tech Field Day / Storage Field Day events are, you’ll also find an intro in my above post.
The event is starting tomorrow and I am currently waiting for my flight to SJC at LHR, and its fair to say I am really looking forward to attending the event. Part of that excitement is due to being given the chance to meet a bunch of other key independent thought leaders, community contributors, Technology evangelists from around the world as well as the chance to meet Stephen Foskett (@SFoskett) and the rest of the #TFD crew from Gestalt IT (GestaltIT.com) at the event. But most of that excitement for me is simply due to the awesome (did I say aaawwwesommmmmmeee?) list of vendors that we are supposed to be meeting with to discuss their technologies.
The full list & event agenda goes as follows
Wednesday the 8th
- Watch the live streaming of the event @ https://livestream.com/accounts/1542415/events/6861449/player?width=460&height=259&enableInfoAndActivity=false&defaultDrawer=&autoPlay=false&mute=false
- 09:00 – MoSMB presentation
- MoSMB is a fully compliant, light weight adaptation of SMB3 made available as proprietory offering by Ryussi technologies. In effect its a BMS3 server on Linux & Unix systems. They are not a technology I had come across before so really looking forward to getting to know more about them and their offerings and their partnership with Microsoft…etc.
- 10:00 – StarWind Presents
- Again, new technology to me personally, which appears to be a Hyper-Converged appliance that seem to unify commodity server disks and flash with multiple hypervisors. Hyper-Converged platforms are very much of interest to me and I know the industry leading offerings on this front such as VMware VSAN & Nutanix fairly well. So its good to get to know these guys too and understanding what are their Unique Selling Points / differentiators to the big boys.
- 13:00 – Elastifile Presents
- Elastic Loud File System from Elastafile is supposed to be able to provide application level distributed file / object system spanning private cloud and public cloud to provide a hybrid cloud data infrastructure. This one is again new to me so keen to understand more about what makes them different to other similar distributed object / storage solutions such as HedVig / Scality from my perspective. Expect my analysis blog post on this one after I’ve met up with them for my initial take!
- 16:00 – Excelero Presents (hosted at Excelero office in the Silicon Valley)
- These guys are a new vendor that is literally due to launch themselves on the same day as we speak to them. Effectively they don’t exists quite yet. So quite exciting to find out who they are what they’ve got to offer us in this increasingly growing, rapidly changing world of enterprise IT.
- 19:00 – Dinner and Reception (Storage Cocktails?) with presenters and friends at Loft Bar and Bistro in San Jose
- Good networking event with the presenters from the day for peer to peer networking and further questioning on what we’ve heard from them during the day.
Thursday the 9th of March
- 08:00 (4pm UK time) – Nimble Storage Presents
- Nimble are a SAN vendor that I am fairly familiar with and have known them for a fairly long time and I also have few friends that work at Nimble UK. To be fair, I was never a very big fan of Nimble personally as a hybrid SAN vendor as I was more a NetApp, EMC, HPe 3Par kinda person for hybrid SAN offering which I’ve always thought offer the same if not better tech for roughly a similar price point, with the added benefit of being large established vendors. Perhaps I can use this session to understand where Nimble is heading now as an organisation and what differentiators / USP’s they may have compared to big boys and how they plan to stay relevant in an industry which is generally in decline as a whole.
- 10:45 – NetApp Presents (At NetApp head office in Silicon Valley)
- Now I know a lot about NetApp :-). NetApp was my main storage skill in the past (still is to a good level) and I have always been very close to most NetApp technologies, from both presales and deliver perspective and was also awarded as the NetApp partner System Engineer of the Year (2013) for UK & Ireland by NetApp. However since the introduction of cDOT properly to their portfolio, I’ve always felt like they’ve lost a little market traction a little. I’m very keen to listen to NetApp’s current messaging and understand where their heads are at, and how their new technology stack including SolidFire is going to be positioned against other larger vendors such as Dell EMC, HPe 3Par as well as all the disruption from Software Defined storage vendors.
- 12:45 (20:45 UK time) – Lunch at NetApp with Dave Hitz
- Dave Hitz (@DaveHitz) who was the NetApp founder is a legend… Nuff said!
- 14:00 – Datera Presents
- Datera is a high performance elastic block storage vendor and is again quite new to me. So looking forward to understanding more about what they have to offer.
- 19:30 – San Jose Sharks hockey game at SAP Center
- Yes, its an evening watching a bit of Ice Hockey which, I’ve never done before. To be clear, Ice Hockey is not one of my favourite sports but happy to take part in the event :0).
Friday the 10th of March
- 09:00 (17:00 UK time) – SNIA Presents (@Intel Head office)
- The Storage Networking Industry Association is a non profit organisation made up of various technology vendor companies.
- 10:30 (18:30 UK time) – Intel Presents (@Intel Head office)
- I don’t think I need to explain / introduce Intel to anyone. If I must, they kinda make some processors :-). Looking forward to visiting Intel office in the valley.
All and all, its an exciting line up of vendors and some old and some new vendors which I’m looking forward to meeting.
Exciting stuff, cant wait…! Now off to board the flight. See you on the other side!
Chan