Storage Field Day 10 – Wrap-up and Link-o-rama

Disclaimer: I recently attended Storage Field Day 10.  My flights, accommodation and other expenses were paid for by Tech Field Day. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event.  Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

SFD-Logo2-150x150

This is a quick post to say thanks once again to Stephen, Tom, Megan and the presenters at Storage Field Day 10. I had an enjoyable and educational time. For easy reference, here’s a list of the posts I did covering the event (they may not match the order of the presentations).

Storage Field Day – I’ll Be At SFD10

Storage Field Day 10 – Day 0

Storage Field Day 10 – (Fairly) Full Disclosure

Kaminario are doing some stuff we’ve seen before, but that’s okay

Pure Storage really aren’t a one-trick pony

Tintri Keep Doing What They Do, And Well

Nimble Storage are Relentless in Their Pursuit of Support Excellence

Cloudian Does Object Smart and at Scale

Exablox Isn’t Just Pretty Hardware

It’s Hedvig, not Hedwig

The Cool Thing About Datera Is Intent

Data Virtualisation is More Than Just Migration for Primary Data

 

Also, here’s a number of links to posts by my fellow delegates (and Tom!). They’re all really quite smart, and you should check out their stuff, particularly if you haven’t before. I’ll try keep this updated as more posts are published. But if it gets stale, the SFD10 landing page has updated links.

 

Chris M Evans (@ChrisMEvans)

Storage Field Day 10 Preview: Hedvig

Storage Field Day 10 Preview: Primary Data

Storage Field Day 10 Preview: Exablox

Storage Field Day 10 Preview: Nimble Storage

Storage Field Day 10 Preview: Datera

Storage Field Day 10 Preview: Tintri

Storage Field Day 10 Preview: Pure Storage

Storage Field Day 10 Preview: Kaminario

Storage Field Day 10 Preview: Cloudian

Object Storage: Validating S3 Compatibility

 

Ray Lucchesi (@RayLucchesi)

Surprises in flash storage IO distributions from 1 month of Nimble Storage customer base

Has triple parity Raid time come?

Pure Storage FlashBlade well positioned for next generation storage

Exablox, bring your own disk storage

Hedvig storage system, Docker support & data protection that spans data centers

 

Jon Klaus (@JonKlaus)

I will be flying out to Storage Field Day 10!

Ready for Storage Field Day 10!

Simplicity with Kaminario Healthshield & QoS

Breaking down storage silos with Primary Data DataSphere

Cloudian Hyperstore: manage more PBs with less FTE

FlashBlade: custom hardware still makes sense

Squashing assumptions with Data Science

Bringing hyperscale operations to the masses with Datera

Making life a whole lot easier with Tintri VM-aware storage

 

Enrico Signoretti (@ESignoretti)

VM-aware storage, is it still a thing?

Scale-out, flash, files and objects. How cool is Pure’s FlashBlade?

 

Josh De Jong (@EuroBrew)

 

Max Mortillaro (@DarkkAvenger)

Follow us live at Storage Field Day 10

Primary Data: a true Software-defined Storage platform?

If you’re going to SFD10 be sure to wear microdrives in your hair

Hedvig Deep Dive – Is software-defined the future of storage?

Pure Storage’s FlashBlade – Against The Grain

Pure Storage Flashblade is now available!

 

Gabe Maentz (@GMaentz)

Heading to Tech Field Day

 

Arjan Timmerman (@ArjanTim)

We’re almost live…

Datera: Elastic Data Fabric

 

Francesco Bonetti (@FBonez)

EXABLOX – A different and smart approach to NAS for SMB

 

Marco Broeken (@MBroeken)

 

Rick Schlander (@VMRick)

Storage Field Day 10 Next Week

Hedvig Overview

 

Tom Hollingsworth (@networkingnerd)

Flash Needs a Highway

 

Finally, thanks again to Stephen, Tom, Megan (and Claire in absentia). It was an educational and enjoyable few days and I really valued the opportunity I was given to attend.

SFD10_GroupPhoto

Exablox Isn’t Just Pretty Hardware

Disclaimer: I recently attended Storage Field Day 10.  My flights, accommodation and other expenses were paid for by Tech Field Day. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event.  Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

exablox-logo-black

Before I get started, you can find a link to my raw notes on Exablox‘s presentation here. You can also see videos of the presentation here.  You can find a preview post from Chris M. Evans here.

 

It’s Not Just the Hardware

I waxed lyrical about the Exablox hardware platform after seeing it at Storage Field Day 7. But while the OneBlox hardware is indeed pretty cool (you can see the specifications here), the cloud-based monitoring platform, OneSystem, is really the interesting bit.

According to Exablox, the “OneSystem application is used to combine OneBlox appliances into Rings as well as configuring shares, user access, and remote replication”. It’s the mechanism used for configuration, as well as monitoring, alerting and reporting.

OneSystem is built on a cloud-based, multi-tenant architecture. There’s nothing to install for organisations, VARs, and MSPs. Although if you feel a bit special about how your data is treated, there is an optional, private OneSystem deployment available for on-premises management. Exablox pride themselves on the “world-class” support they provide to customers, with a customer-first culture being one of the dominant themes when talking to them about support capability. Some of the other benefits of the OneSystem approach is:

  • The ability to globally manage OneBlox anywhere; and
  • Deliver seamless OneBlox software upgrades.

Exablox also provide 24×7 proactive monitoring, providing insight into, amongst other things:

  • Storage utilisation and analysis;
  • Storage health and alerts; and
  • OneBlox drive health.

The cool thing about this platform is that it offers the ability to configure custom storage policies and simple scaling for individual applications. In this manner you can configure the following data services on a “per application” basis:

  • Variable or fixed-length deduplication;
  • Compression on/off;
  • Continuous data protection on/off and retention; and
  • Remote replication on/off.

 

I Want My Data Everywhere

While the OneBlox ring is currently limited to 7 systems per cluster, you can have two or more (up to 10) clusters operating in a mesh for replication. You can then conceivably have a whole bunch of different data protection schemes in place depending on what you need to protect and where you need it protected. The great thing is that, with the latest version of OneSystem, you can have a one-to-many replication relationship between directories as well. This kind of flexibility is really neat in my opinion. Note that replication is asynchronous.

SFD10_Exablox_Mutli-siteReplication

 

Further Reading and Final Thoughts

If you’ve read any of my recent posts on the likes of Pure, Nimble and Tintri, it would feel like everyone and their dog is into cloud-based monitoring and analytics systems for storage platforms. This is in no way a bad thing, and something that I’m glad we’re seeing become a prevalent feature with these “modern” storage architectures. We store a whole bunch of data on these things. And sometimes it’s even data that is vital to the success of the various business endeavours we undertake on a daily basis. So it’s great to see vendors are taking this requirement seriously. It also helps somewhat that people are a little more comfortable with the concept of keeping information in “the cloud”. This certainly helps the vendors control the end user experience form a support viewpoint, rather than relyin on arcane systems deployed across multiple VMs that invariably fail at the time you need to dig into the data to find out what’s really going on in the environment.

Exablox have come up with a fairly unique approach to scale-out NAS, and I’m keen to see where they take it from here. Features such as remote replication and the continuing maturity of the OneSystem platform make me think that they’re gearing up to push things a little beyond the BYO drives SMB space. I’ll be interested to see just how that plays out.

Ray Lucchesi did a thorough write-up on Exablox that you can read here, while Francesco Bonetti did a great write-up here. Exablox has also published a technical overview of OneBlox and OneSystem that is worth checking out.

 

Storage Field Day 10 – (Fairly) Full Disclosure

Disclaimer: I recently attended Storage Field Day 10.  My flights, accommodation and other expenses were paid for by Tech Field Day. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event.  Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

SFD-Logo2-150x150

Here are my notes on gifts, etc, that I received as a delegate at Storage Field Day 10. I’d like to point out that I’m not trying to play companies off against each other. I don’t have feelings one way or another about receiving gifts at these events (although I generally prefer small things I can fit in my suitcase). Rather, I’m just trying to make it clear what I received during this event to ensure that we’re all on the same page as far as what I’m being influenced by. Some presenters didn’t provide any gifts as part of their session – which is totally fine. I’m going to do this in chronological order, as that was the easiest way for me to take notes during the week. While every delegate’s situation is different, I’d also like to clarify that I took 5 days of training / work time to be at this event (thanks to my employer for being on board).

 

Saturday

I paid for my taxi to BNE airport. I had a burger at Benny Burger in SYD airport. It was quite good. I flew Qantas economy class to SFO. The flights were paid for by Tech Field Day. Plane food was consumed on the flight. It was a generally good experience.

 

Tuesday

When I arrived at the hotel I was given a bag of snacks by Tom. The iced coffee and granola bars came in handy. We had dinner at Il Fornaio at the Westin Hotel. I had some antipasti, pizza fradiavola and 2 Hefeweizen beers (not sure of the brewery).

 

Wednesday

We had breakfast in the hotel. I had bacon, eggs, sausage, fruit and coffee. We also did the Yankee Gift Swap at that time and I scored a very nice stovetop Italian espresso coffee maker (thanks Enrico!). We also had lunch at the hotel, it was something Italian. Cloudian gave each delegate a green pen, bottle opener, 1GB USB stick, and a few Cloudian stickers. We had dinner at Gordon Biersch in San Jose. I had some sliders (hamburgers for small people) and about 5 Golden Export beers.

 

Thursday

Pure Storage gave each delegate a Tile, a pen, some mints, and an 8GB USB stick. Datera gave each delegate a Datera-branded “vortex 16oz double wall 18/8 stainless steel copper vacuum insulated thermal pilsner” (a cup) with our twitter handles on them. Tintri provided us with a Tintri / Nike golf polo shirt, a notepad, a pen, an 8GB USB stick, and a 2600mAh USB charger. We then had happy hour at Tintri. I had a Pt. Bonita Pilsner beer and a couple of fistfuls of prawns. For dinner we went to Taplands. I had a turkey sandwich and 2 Fieldwork Brewing Company Pilsners.

 

Friday

We had breakfast on Friday at Nimble Storage. I had some bacon, sausage and eggs for breakfast with an orange juice. I don’t know why my US comrades struggle so much with the concept of tomato sauce (ketchup) with bacon. But there you go. Nimble gave us each a custom baseball jersey with our name on the back and the Nimble logo. They also gave us each a white lab coat with the Nimble logo on it. My daughters love the coat. Hedvig provided us with a Hedvig sticker and a Hedvig-branded Rogue bluetooth speaker. We had lunch at Hedvig, which was a sandwich, some water, and a really delicious choc-chip cookie. Exablox gave each of us an Exablox-branded aluminium water bottle. We then had happy hour at Exablox. I had two Anchor Brewing Liberty Ale beers (“tastes like freedom”) and some really nice cheese. To finish off we had dinner at Mexicali in Santa Clara. I had a prawn burrito. I didn’t eat anything on the flight home.

 

Conclusion

I’d like to extend my thanks once again to the Tech Field Day organisers and the companies presenting at the event. I had a super enjoyable and educational time. Here’s a photo.

SFD10_disclosure1

 

Storage Field Day 10 – Day 0

Disclaimer: I recently attended Storage Field Day 10.  My flights, accommodation and other expenses were paid for by Tech Field Day. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event.  Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

SFD-Logo2-150x150

This is just a quick post to share some thoughts on day zero at Storage Field Day 10. I can do crappy tourist snaps as well if not better than the next guy. Here’s the obligatory wing shot. No wait here’s two – one leaving SYD and the other coming in to SFO. Bet you can’t guess which is which.

SFD10_plane1     SFD10_plane2

We all got together for dinner on Tuesday night in the hotel. I had the pizza. It was great.

SFD10_Food

But enough with the holiday snaps and underwhelming travel journal. Thanks again Stephen, Tom, Claire and Megan for having me back, making sure everything is running according to plan and for just being really very decent people. I’ve really enjoyed catching up with the people I’ve met before and meeting the new delegates. Look out for some posts related to the Tech Field Day sessions in the next few weeks. And if you’re in a useful timezone, check out the live streams from the event here, or the recordings afterwards.

Here’s the rough schedule (all times are ‘Merican Pacific).

Wednesday, May 25 9:30 – 11:30 Kaminario Presents at Storage Field Day 10
Wednesday, May 25 12:30 – 14:30 Primary Data Presents at Storage Field Day 10
Wednesday, May 25 15:00 – 17:00 Cloudian Presents at Storage Field Day 10
Thursday, May 26 9:30 – 11:30 Pure Storage Presents at Storage Field Day 10
Thursday, May 26 13:00 – 15:00 Datera Presents at Storage Field Day 10
Thursday, May 26 16:00 – 18:00 Tintri Presents at Storage Field Day 10
Friday, May 27 8:00 – 10:00 Nimble Storage Presents at Storage Field Day 10
Friday, May 27 10:30 – 12:30 Hedvig Presents at Storage Field Day 10
Friday, May 27 13:30 – 15:30 Exablox Presents at Storage Field Day 10

You can also follow along with the live stream here.


Storage Field Day 7 – Wrap-up and Link-o-rama

Disclaimer: I recently attended Storage Field Day 7.  My flights, accommodation and other expenses were paid for by Tech Field Day. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event.  Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

This is a quick post to say thanks once again to Stephen, Claire and the presenters at Storage Field Day 7. I had a great time, learnt a lot, and didn’t get much sleep. For easy reference, here’s a list of the posts I did covering the event (not necessarily in chronological order).

Storage Field Day – I’ll be at SFD7

Storage Field Day 7 – Day 0

Storage Field Day 7 – Day 1 – Catalogic Software

Storage Field Day 7 – Day 1 – Kaminario

Storage Field Day 7 – Day 1 – Primary Data

Storage Field Day 7 – Day 2 – VMware

Storage Field Day 7 – Day 2 – Connected Data

Storage Field Day 7 – Day 2 – Springpath

Storage Field Day 7 – Day 3 – Cloudian

Storage Field Day 7 – Day 3 – Exablox

Storage Field Day 7 – Day 3 – Maxta

Storage Field Day 7 – (Fairly) Full Disclosure

Also, here’s a number of links to posts by my fellow delegates. They’re all switched-on people, and you’d do well to check out what they’re writing about. I’ll try and update this list as more posts are published. But if it gets stale, the SFD7 landing page has updated links.

 

Ray Lucchesi

Data virtualization surfaces

Transporter, a private Dropbox in a tower

Object store and hybrid clouds at Cloudian

 

Enrico Signoretti

It’s storage showtime! #SFD7

Storage Field Day 7, links and live stream

When looking good is no longer enough

File Transporter, private Sync&Share made easy

Thinking different about storage

Rumors, strategies and facts about Hyper-converged

 

Mark May

I’m going to Storage Field Day 7!

It’s almost time! #SFD7 is next week!

Day 0 of SFD7 – Yankee Gift Swap and delegate dinner

Goodbye to Storage Field Day 7

Storage Field Day 7 – Primary Data

 

Christopher Kusek

I’ll be attending Storage Field Day 7 – Now with Clear Containers!

 

Jon Klaus

Storage Field Day 7, here I come!

Storage Field Day 7 is about to start!

Storage Field Day 7 – Catalogic ECX reducing copy data sprawl

Storage Field Day 7 – Exablox OneBlox: scale-out NAS for SME

 

Vipin V.K

It’s Storage Field Day again…! – #SFD7

 

Keith Townsend

Kaminario – Storage Field Day 7 Preview

Maxta – Storage Field Day 7 Preview

Primary Data – Storage Field Day 7

Springpath – Storage Field Day 7 Preview

Transporter – Storage Field Day 7 Preview

VMware – Storage Field Day 7 Preview

Exablox – Storage Field Day 7 Preview

Cloudian – Storage Field Day 7 Preview

Catalogic Software – Storage Field Day 7 Preview

CopyData yeah… Long live Data Virtualization

Hyperconverged vendor Maxta announces SDN partnership

 

Chris M Evans

Storage Field Day 7 – 11-13 March 2015

Storage Field Day 7 – Initial Thoughts

SFD7 – Catalogic Software Addresses Data Copy Management

SFD7 – Connected Data, Transporter and Private “Cloud” Storage

SFD7 – Primary Data and Data Virtualisation

 

Arjan Timmerman

The Storage Field Day 7 Delegates

Software Defined Dockerized Springpath HALO at #SFD7

 

Finally, thanks again to Stephen, Claire (and Tom in absentia). It was a great few days and I really valued the opportunity I was given to attend.

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Storage Field Day 7 – Day 3 – Exablox

Disclaimer: I recently attended Storage Field Day 7.  My flights, accommodation and other expenses were paid for by Tech Field Day. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event.  Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

For each of the presentations I attended at SFD7, there are a few things I want to include in the post. Firstly, you can see video footage of the Exablox presentation here. You can also download my raw notes from the presentation here. Finally, here’s a link to the Exablox website that covers some of what they presented.

Brief Overview

Exablox was founded in 2010 and launched publicly in April 2013. There are two key elements to their solution:

  • OneBlox – scale-out storage for the enterprise, offering converged storage for primary and backup / archival data; and
  • OneSystem – manage on-premises storage exclusively from anywhere, providing visibility, control, and security without cost / complexity of traditional management

Here’s a photo of Tad Hunt (CTO and Co-founder) showing us the internals of the Exablox appliance.

IMG_1214_11

 

Architecture

Exablox started the presentation by talking about what we want from storage re-imagined (my words, not theirs):

  • Scale out;
  • Deduplication;
  • Snapshots;
  • Replication;
  • Be simple yet powerful; and
  • Be managed from everywhere.

The Exablox approach is not your father’s standard storage presentation play. Instead of providing block storage via SMB / NFS, or object storage via APIs, it instead presents file protocols via the front-end and services these with object storage on the back-end.

exablox-architecture-diagram

Technology Vision

Exablox’s approach revolves around software-defined storage (SDS) and storage management, with the following goals:

  • Manage the policy, not the technology;
  • SDS “wrapped in tin” for the mid market;
  • Eliminate complexity;
  • Plug-and-play; and
  • Next generation features.

They deliver NAS features atop object storage:

  • Without metadata servers;
  • Without bolt-on NAS gateways;
  • Without separate data and metadata servers; and
  • To scale capacity, performance, or resilience: just add a node.

 

Technology Benefits

Exablox say they can create scale-out NAS and object clusters atop mixed media – HDD, SSD, Shingled drives. This approach delivers the benefits of object storage technology to traditional applications:

  • By using standard file protocols; and
  • eliminating forklift upgrades – single namespace across the scale of the cluster.

They also use “RAID-free” data protection:

  • Self-healing from multiple drive and node failures;
  • Rebalancing time proportional to the quantity of objects on the failed drive;
  • Mix and match drive types, capacities, technologies; and
  • Introduce next generation drives without long validation cycles.

This provides the ability to scale capacity from TB to PB easily, whilst also offering:

  • Zero configuration expansion; and
  • Manage from anywhere capability.

Exablox say they are able to support all NAS workloads well. Whereas other object stores are designed primarily for large files, a OneBlox 3308 can handle 1B objects. All nodes perform all functions: storage, control, NAS interface, with a node being a single failure domain.

 

Hardware Notes and Thoughts

For the purposes of this post, I wanted to focus on the OneBlox appliance. While the OneSystem architecture is super neat, I still get a bit of a nerd tingle when I see some nice hardware. (BTW if Exablox want me test one long-term I’d be happy to oblige).

Exablox claims to be the sole provider of the following features in a single storage solution:

  • Scale-out deduplication;
  • Scale-out, continuous snapshots;
  • Scale-out, RAID-less capacity;
  • Scale-out, site-to-site disaster recovery; and
  • Bring any drive – one at a time at retail pricing.

They also support auto-clustering, with each node adding:

  • Capacity;
  • Performance; and
  • Resiliency.

The Exablox 3308 appliance:

  • Is seriously bloody quiet;
  • Uses 100W under peak load;
  • Has 8 * 3.5” drive bays, supporting up to 48 raw TB; and
  • Can use a mix of SATA & SAS drives.

Here is a picture of some appliances on a rack.

IMG_1213_cropped

Further Reading

I was impressed with the strategy presented to me by Exablox, and the apparent ease of deployment and overall design of the appliance seemed great on the surface. I’d like to be clear that I haven’t used these in the wild, nor have I had any view of any benchmark data, so I can’t comment as to the effective performance of these devices. Like most things in storage, your mileage might vary. But I will say they seem quite inexpensive for what they do, and I recommend taking a more detailed look at them.

I also recommend you check out Keith’s preview post on Exablox.  For a different perspective on the hardware, have a look at Storage Review’s take on things as well.

Storage Field Day 7 – (Fairly) Full Disclosure

Disclaimer: I recently attended Storage Field Day 7.  My flights, accommodation and other expenses were paid for by Tech Field Day. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event.  Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

My full disclosure post will be nowhere near as epic as Justin’s, although he is my role model for this type of thing. Here are my notes on gifts, etc, that I received as a delegate at Storage Field Day 7. I’m going to do this in chronological order, as that was the easiest way for me to take notes during the week. While every delegate’s situation is different, I’d also like to clarify that I took 3 days of vacation time and 2 days of training / work time to be at this event.

Saturday

I travelled BNE -> SYD -> SFO. A period of time passed and I consumed plane “food”. This was included in the price of the ticket. Alcoholic beverages were not, but I stuck with water. United (economy class) is all about the destination, not the journey.

Tuesday

On Tuesday night we had the delegate dinner at Dasaprakash Indian Restaurant. They specialise in Southern Indian Cuisine and you can check out their menu here. I had a bit of everything, and two cokes. I think one was diet. They may have been trying to tell me something. As part of the gift exchange I received a beautiful home-made jewellery set from Claire. Let’s be clear that this is for my wife, not me. I also had one Dos Equis at the hotel bar after dinner. [edit: Keith also pointed out that Claire gave us all  a care pack of various American snacks, including some cookies and “diet” beverages].

Wednesday

At Kaminario’s presentation on Wednesday morning I was given a pen and USB portable battery. Primary Data gave me a portable whiteboard, notepad and tiny little briefcase (useful for storing business cards in). The SFD networking event was held at BowlMor in Cupertino. I had a variety of snack food (including those tiny hamburgers) and a Stella Artois. Manish Apte from SanDisk gave me a 16GB USB stick at the networking event on Wednesday night as well.

Thursday

Thursday morning we had a continental breakfast at VMware. I had a coffee and a doughnut. They also gave us a Captain VSAN t-shirt. Connected Data provided us with a Greek lunch. They also very kindly provided each delegate with a Transporter 1TB private cloud appliance (worth approximately $249 US RRP), and a 4GB Drobo USB stick. SpringPath gave us a  pen, a sticker, a travel mug, and a USB car charger.

For dinner on Thursday we went to Billy Berk’s. I had a mix of starters and the Mojito Skirt Steak as a main. I also had 3 Stella Artois beers. We then went and watched “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” at the Camera 12  Downtown in San Jose. Tech Field Day covered everything, including the bottle of water and Reese’s Pieces. Here’s a picture.

SFD7_Gifts_Reeses

Friday

On Friday we had breakfast at the hotel. Cloudian provided me with a leather folio and pen. Exablox gave me a great espresso courtesy of Sean Derrington. Exablox also provided lunch in the form of a gourmet sandwich and Lays crisps from Specialty’s Cafe. It was great. Maxta gave us a wooden Maxta Jenga box and a pen / 2GB USB drive. We then had drinks and snacks (happy hour) at Maxta afterwards. I had two bottles of water and a whole bunch of prawns (shrimp). Tech Field Day then made sure I got to SFO safely.

Conclusion

I’d like to extend my thanks once again to the Storage Field Day organisers and the companies presenting at the event. I had a great time. Since I can’t think of a good way to wrap up this post I’ll leave you with a photo.

SFD7_Gifts_Swag

Storage Field Day 7 – Day 0

Disclaimer: I recently attended Storage Field Day 7.  My flights, accommodation and other expenses were paid for by Tech Field Day. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event.  Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

This is a quick post to let you know about my first day at Storage Field Day 7. I don’t want to make it a travel blog by any means, but I thought a few touristy snaps from a grainy smartphone were in order.

Here’s a shot of the wing. Of a plane. I took it from BNE to SYD.

SFD7_Day0_Wing

They don’t give you a lot of room on United in cattle class. But it’s more about the destination than the journey, and somebody else paid for my ticket.

SFD7_Day0_Legroom

Still, I got to travel through time, leaving BNE at 10:00 on Saturday 7th and arriving at SFO at 09:15 on Saturday 7th. I literally never get tired of that joke. So I got to spend some time with a friend in the Bay Area prior to catching up with my SFD7 comrades. We did a bunch of stuff, including checking out the Chinese New Year celebrations in SF on Saturday night.

SFD7_Day0_Cracker

Tuesday evening we all got together and headed to Dasaprakash for some “Fine South Indian Cuisine”. It was different to the Indian fare I normally have in Australia, and made for a nice change.

Anyway, enough with the holiday snaps. I just wanted to thank Stephen and Claire for having me back, making sure everything is running according to plan and for just being really very decent people. Look out for some posts related to the Tech Field Day sessions in the next few weeks. And if you’re in a useful timezone, check out the live streams from the event here.