Day 2 of the Tech Field Day kicked off with a trip to Ocarina Networks. For those who don’t know (a) Ocarina offer a “data reduction” appliance (b) an ocarina is a small oval, china flute. I say data reduction as the Ocarina appliance uses a variety of methods for reducing data size, including compression and de-duplication. The main presenters for Ocarina were Carter George and the CTO Goutham (Gou) Rao. Rather than deliver death by PowerPoint, Gou chose to whiteboard his entire session, getting into some significant depth on the theory behind data reduction techniques. The whiteboard approach was very informative  and popular with the delegates, generating lots of conversation.

Next up was Nirvanix. Nirvanix are a “cloud storage” company, operating in the same space as Amazon S3. After providing an overview of the company, Peter Pistek provided details of CloudNAS 2.0 a software offering which enables a Linux or Windows server to act as a NAS device, storing the data directly in Nirvanix’s cloud. This is a product I’ve reviewed in the past and previously I’ve not been favourable towards it. Expect to see my review of the 2.0 version in the near future.

Day 2 lunch was provided by W Curtis Preston and was followed by “Mr Backup” taking us through his new venture – Truth In IT, a paid-for community portal to assist clients in evaluating storage products (initially backup).

The afternoon was taken up by a trip to Data Robotics, creators of the Drobo storage device. This session was probably my most anticipated of the week and I wasn’t let down. It was superb – for a number of reasons. Firstly, CEO Geoff Barrall took us through the product in more depth, answering some of the questions I’ve always had around the way Drobo’s BeyondRAID technology operates. This will become a post in its own right, expect to read it over the coming week.

The Field Day delegates then split into groups for a practical session, followed by a questionnaire, the winners of which would receive a Drobo each. The winners were; Team #1 – me, Rod, Devang and Simon! Now I have two Drobo devices for my data.

The most anticipated part of the Drobo session was the unveiling of two new Drobo products. Details are under embargo until November 23rd, however I can say the new devices will fill out the Drobo range very nicely. Expect a post on this as the embargo date is reached.

Day 2 wrapped up with dinner at a local italian restaurant and signalled the start of delegate’s long trips home.

In summary, the first Gestalt IT Tech Field Day has been a great success. The presenters have been open with their product information, keen to discuss details and helped to provide a lot of insight into their thinking and strategies. Fortunately, no-one fell into the “marketing slideware” trap. Expect to see posts over the coming weeks and days that delve into some of the details we’ve seen over the last two days. As a group we’ve covered a huge number of topics to even attempt to put into a single post.

Congratulations to Stephen Foskett for setting the event up. A great deal of thanks also need to go to Claire Chaplais and Sunshine Mugrabi, without whom the event wouldn’t have happened. One final thought; where and when will Tech Field Day 2 be?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/33818355@N07/sets/72157622693448519/

Disclaimer/Disclosure: The sponsors and presenters of the Gestalt IT Tech Field Day event have only paid for my accommodation and travel expenses in San Jose during this trip. I am not employed or paid by any of the sponsors/presenters to express my views. I have received a Drobo storage device as part of the competition held at Data Robotics during the Field Day.  I also received a nice Drobo body warmer & T-Shirt and a T-Shirt from 3Par, plus a number of assorted USB memory sticks.

So Storage Expo is over for another year.  As usual it was the mix of meeting old friends, finding out who had moved to work with who and working out how early to head out to the pub!

For me, there were a number of interesting take aways:

• SVC 5.0 – lots of new stuff here that will form part of a new post at some stage.  Probably the biggest change being the use of SSDs in the chassis of the SVC server itself.
• Ocarina – being touted on the Bluearc stand.  More investigation on the potential benefits required here.

Other than that the most obvious difference was the lack of EMC and Netapp on the stands.  The whole show had the feeling of moving towards more midrange rather than enterprise customers.  Next year there will be no separate Storage Expo but rather it will integrate into  360 IT and move to Earl’s Court from Olympia.

So a couple of funny (ish) stories.  While wandering the floor on the Wednesday, I spotted Hu Yoshida sitting at the Hitachi stand.  I introduced myself, but I don’t think he had any idea who I was.  Perhaps it was the jet lag!

I managed hold out until 12:30pm before heading to the pub (Hand and Flower) for a beer.  I was promptly accosted by HP, giving away free beer vouchers.  Unfortunately, HP giving away free beer took me completely off guard and I forgot to use my free 3Par vouchers.  Perhaps that was a good thing.

Have a look at the attached photos; the rack shows the Ocarina device.  The other photo shows 3Par’s marketing banner in the pub.  Perhaps not the best place to advertise a “keep thin” promotion!