The ABCs of #VFD3

When I’m not in the lab or at work, I’m with the the Child Partition and having fun. Lately he’s been grabbing my finger as if it was a mouse and pointing it at the alphabet flip board below to retrieve on-demand information about it from his Parent Partition.

 

And so goes my life: at work it’s all about hypervisors and wringing the last bit of performance & value out of all the equipment that’s been entrusted to me, in the lab at home it’s about testing & playing with advanced ideas, concepts, and technologies and in the evening, it’s about teaching the Child Partition the ABCs.

Until today, that is, because today I’m leaving for Silicon Valley as a Delegate of GestaltIT’s awesome Tech Field Day, Virtualization Field Day 3 to be specific. I’m so excited I can barely contain myself: the sponsor line up is large and varied and I can’t wait to meet Stephen Foskett, Tom Hollingsworth and the Gestalt IT crew as well as the other delegates, some of whom are flying in from as far away as New Zealand & Europe!

On Twitter we’ve all been discussing what we’re looking forward to in the next few days, but there’s just too much, so I decided to list out what I’m excited about in Alphabet-style for the benefit of the Child Partition.

A is for Atlantis Computing: There’s been a lot of buzz about Atlantis’ new ILIO USX product, a technology the company says is the “biggest game changer since server virtualization.” That’s a bold claim and I can’t wait to dig into it. I also want to thank Atlantis for hosting a great & technical blog; back in January I used one of their blog posts to create some IOMeter workloads to test a Nimble array

B is for the Bay Area:  I’m a Southern Californian travelling to Silicon Valley who works as an IT engineer for a company with roots in California’s other great industry: entertainment. Also always love visiting the North; it’s hella cool up there.

C is for Coho Data:  “Open commodity hardware is used to create modular storage building blocks to scale out from TBs to PBs in a single system,” Coho says. And they have a cool slider demo on their website. You know what interests me about Coho? They promise storage at “web-scale” which is pretty much what my users think I have.

D is for the Delegates: I’ve been reading the blogs of my fellow delegates for quite awhile,so it’s going to be great to finally talk in the “meatspace.”

E is for Enterprise: Not NCC-1701D, rather Enterprise Technology. I’ll be among my peers and the learning will be intense & focused.

F is for Field Day: Still honored and amazed to be apart of Tech Field Day. It’s been hard to describe what it is to family: a professional organization of new & returning Delegates that meets periodically in the field to get hands on time with some of the most advanced enterprise technology that’s out there and face time with the guys who build it and sell it, organized by the tireless GestaltIT staff.

G is for Gestalt: I’ll just rip from their website: “an organized field having properties that cannot be derived from the sum of component parts; a unified whole”

H is for Hyper-V: No secret here, I’m a Hyper-V guy, and many of my esteemed Delegate colleagues are some of the sharpest minds in the VMWare ecosystem. For a Microsoftie, it’s unfamiliar territory being in second place, and so I struggle to frame it correctly: is Hyper-V the Rebellion and VMWare the Galactic Empire? Feels like it sometimes….VMware is everywhere and Hyper-V still struggles for traction. Happily, the the vendors sponsoring #VFD3 seem to get that there is another hypervisor out there besides VMWare, and yes, people actually run enterprises on it. As for me and my house lab, I’ve got VMWare here

I is for IT Blogging: We happy few who blog on technology and the enterprise!

J is for Just look at this note from previous delegates: It’s great. I wish every vendor would read it. How to Present to Engineers who blog. TFD

K is for Kicking bad habits: Whenever IT guys gather round, stories get told, lessons get learned, and laughter ensues. And when it’s all over, maybe you’ve learned enough to kick some of your own bad habits to the curb.

L is for Like buttons: You know them and you should click them as the Delegates and I bring you fresh on-the-scene reports, views and and thoughts from VFD3

M is for Management: I’m hoping to learn from the best and maybe offer my own insight to others as well. We’re engineers first but also, I’d argue, resource managers.

N is for Network Time Protocol: The Delegate Schedule is jam packed and without NTP, I’d be hopelessly lost.

O is for Operations: I’m down with the DevOps movement, I’m flexible and will flip printers with the help desk if needed, but at the end of the day I enjoy being an operations guy and I’ll be around others like me

P is for Pain Points: Let’s share them and overcome, shall we?

Q is for the q in FAQs: Struggling here.

R is for reporting: In another life, I might have been a reporter. I aim to be fair, concise, and balanced in all the blogging I do this week.

S is for Simpana: CommVault, one of the sponsors, is not your daddy’s backup vendor anymore. This Simpana product seems pretty interesting, and CommVault is Azure-friendly.

S is also for: Vendor schwag. And I’m bringing my own scwhag too

T is for Twitter: I struggle to be brief, as you can probably tell. Writing tweets focuses the mind. Follow #VFD3 or #TFD to catch it all live!

U is for Utility: My master’s degree is public policy-oriented and if there is such a thing as an amateur & totally untrained economist, I aspire to be it. Utility therefore, “represents satisfaction experienced by the consumer of a good.” I’m producing a good in the form of this blog, and I want my VFD posts to be useful for you, the reader. I hold the same standard to vendors. I demand satisfaction, sir!

V is for VFD 3 and virtualization: “Virtualization, ladies and gentlemen is good. Virtualization is right. Virtualization works. Virtualization clarifies, cuts through, and captures, the essence of IT,”  to borrow from Gordon Gecko.

X is for Purple Extreme Network switches: Just because.

Y is for Yet Another Single Pane of Glass? Sort of defeats the purpose.

Z is for ZFS: I think I know why Pure Storage, one of the sponsors, can deliver what they say they can deliver, and why their arrays come with so damn much RAM. ZFS has its drawbacks, but done right, it’s pretty amazing, and just might be at the heart of the disruption that’s occurring in the storage industry. And it’s a form of virtualization too. Good stuff!

That’s it. I’m off to BUR for a flight to SJC. See you there!