The Seattle Tech Field Day was actually 2 days. Across those 2 days, the TFD delegates watched 5 presentations from 5 different vendors, plus had a mixer-style dinner with all the vendors. Most of these presentations were storage and virtualization related. Only one vendor, F5 Networks, would be considered to be a networking company, and even their presentation showed some of their fancy new integration with VMware.

I am in Seattle, WA for the third GestaltIT Tech Field Day (TFD). This time I am part of the presenting team for Veeam Software, and we are first up on the agenda. As with other recent events, I am using Cover It Live (CiL) to provide real time coverage and of our presentation and the reaction of the delegates (bloggers) attending. The best part about using Cover It Live is the event can be played back in the future, so check it out even if you missed it live.

Following my return from my first Tech Field Day I have been reading through my notes and reflecting on the vendors I saw when I was in Seattle. Of the vendors I saw the one that surprised me most was NEC, everyone has heard of them but not everyone actually knows what they do or what products they make. As we found out during our visit, NEC have a broad technology portfolio and have quite an interesting offering in the storage space.

Presentation #3 was by F5 networks at the F5 Technology Center. Compellent presented to the Tech Field Day delegation about their automated storage solution which they call “Fluid Data”. View Compellent’s introductory video. The final Tech Field Day presentation was from NEC, on their HYDRAstor storage array.

Josh O’Brien, who consults in the world of Data Center 3.0 and blogs at staticnat.com, joins the Prime Pushers for the podcast. In this show, we go off on the week’s more interesting news, and discover a bit of technology that Greg actually likes! (He went on so long, we blushed and had to look away.)

Unless you’re “in the know”, terms like “layer 2″ can seem mysterious, making it all the more plausible when someone touts the benefits. It seems logical: “Bare-metal” communication must be better, faster, and cheaper than higher-level “everything over IP” approaches, right? But it’s not quite that simple.

So Cisco “announced” the Cius Android tablet. It’s not innovation. It’s just a cheap knockoff that’s easy to do.

I try and avoid licensing at all costs, it’s a horrible subject and one that strikes fear in to many. When you add virtualisation in to the mix it tends to get a little more complicated and you often find that the rules change on a reasonably regular basis. I was involved in a discussion today about Citrix XenDesktop and an interesting point came up when discussing licensing Virtual PCs. Someone mentioned something called the Microsoft VDA, I hadn’t a clue what they were talking about so I did a little digging around to find out more.

Chuck has just written a blog which was very similar to a blog that I was working and I agree with a lot of what he says but I’d take it a lot further and there are some interesting conclusions and potentials along the way which could open the market for interesting innovation going forward.

Having worked in Corporate Infrastructure for many years, fighting the good fight and trying to get the enemy to conform to best practise and generally think beyond the next line of code that they are writing, I surrender! I throw the towel in!