In the run-up to Tech Field Day – Virtualization Style #3- a lot of the chatter in my inbox from my fellow delegates involved a bit of groaning. We’re IT guys, we bitch a lot, after all, and most of it went like this:
I’ll software-define them right into /dev/null if they mention cloud too many times. Please sponsors, don’t overload us with marketing speak, was the general sentiment.
Though I’m the newbie in this delegate crew, I mentally plus oned many of these comments. None of us, certainly me, jumped on a airplane and left our Child Partitions behind just to get powerpointed to death. We, as a group, are allergic to Silicon Valley marketing.
So imagine how refreshing it was for me -and perhaps my colleague Delegates- that on Day One of #VFD3, the hype-words were kept to a minimum, the sponsors made available to us the Smartest Guys in the Room and Powerpoint, though present, played second fiddle to live demos and whiteboards. Yes, whiteboards, those wondrous things in front of which all the IT zoo animals go to ingest data, chew on it, and then and come up with a way out of the fix we’re in.
I think if anything, Day One’s theme -and perhaps the theme of #VFD3- wasn’t cloud, or software-defined this, agile that. No the theme for Day One for me was something much more down to earth, something very basic, something we can all touch and hold in our hands and comprehend.
#VFD3 Day One was all about* the DRAM, baby:
Hell yeah.
RAM. The one constituent part of my enterprise stack that’s consistently fast, trouble-free, wickedly small, and easy to provision, care for, and cool. RAM…the one thing I’ll always take more of yet can never have enough of. RAM: costly but mostly drama-free save for one thing : power cycling the server makes the RAM go blank, so obviously we can’t use it for pain points like storage, right?
And yet, two of the three vendors yesterday told us that yes, not only can you use RAM to multiply the benefits of already-fast SSD, or just bypass those slow-ass SSD drives in the first place, but that this once-heretical idea was ready for primetime, for your enterprise and maybe even your SMB.
Let’s dig in:
#VFD3 Day One – Atlantis Computing
Wilson.tech 
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