Tech Field Day Recap – Virtualization Field Day 2

I’ll have more on an individual session or two in the coming days, but I wanted to take the time to provide a brief recap of Virtualization Field Day 2.

It was great to see the familiar faces of Edward Haletky, Mike Laverick, Roger Lund,  David Owen, and Rick Schlander while meeting Rodney Haywood, Bill Hill, Dwayne Lessner, Scott Lowe, Robert Novak, Brandon Riley, and Chris Wahl for the first time. It’s solid group of people on both personal and professional levels.

Day zero allowed time for all of the delegates to arrive and closed with a welcome dinner at Zeytoun. We had great food; our hometown gift exchange; a shrine and webcam chat with Stephen who was not able to make it to TFD for the first time, but for the right reason.

For sponsors on day one we had Symantec, who's competing strategy appeared to PowerPoint overload, Zerto with their solid continuous data protection DNA, and Xangati with their monitoring solutions and perfect bacon execution.

Day one ended with a private tour and mystery theatre at Winchester Mystery House.

On tap for day two was flashy Pure Storage, Pivot3 with their integrated storage and compute solution and W. Curtis Preston with TruthinIT for a “battle of the bloggers.”  To be honest, I surprised myself by how much I enjoyed that last session.

There was a lot of good content, but the ones that really appealed to me were Pure Storage, Zerto, Pivot3, and Xangati so I’ll summarize each of those briefly for now.

Pure Storage

Fast, cool, exciting technology in an environment that matches. Wowed by their space from when we walked in the door to their tech in the presentation and to the lab. And the Psycho Donuts seemed to go over well for many.  RBaaS (Red Bull as a Service) was saw a trial run as well.

Zerto

Gil was back for another Tech Field Day and this time with CTO and Co-founder Oded Kedem to talk about the upcoming 2.0 release of their flagship BC/DR product. Zerto visited us at Tech Field Day 8 in Boston and won this year’s vmworld Best of Show.  Each time I’ve seen their tech I have wished that I worked in the segment to which it is marketed.

Pivot3

They came with an appliance, out of the box, configured it during the presentation in 40 minutes, and then used it in a demo. How great is that?  Pivot3’s tech DNA comes from the likes of Adaptec and Compaq and is branching out from the surveillance industry. Having founder and CTO Bill Galloway present showed their commitment to Tech Field Day.

Xangati

Bacon, ice cream, and Star Wars references abound is not a bad way to start with this crowd, and Xangati appears to have one of the best monitoring products for your virtual infrastructure. They’ve been concentrating on VDI lately and their focus was on the VDI Dashboard.

 

We brought it all to a close at the end of day two with great food and conversation at Antonella’s.  Unfortunately Rodney Haywood could not join us; he needed to start his long journey home.

 

Disclaimer
My travel, accommodations, and meals were paid for by the Tech Field Day sponsors. Often there is swag involved as well. Like me, all TFD delegates are independents. We tweet, write, and say whatever we wish at all times, including during the sessions.

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