Did you know that Gestalt IT had an email newsletter? Well, we do! We’ve started sending out notifications once a week or less about the goings on with Gestalt IT, Tech Field Day, and related topics. We’d like to encourage our readers to subscribe, so we’re announcing a contest to let you all know it exists! [...]

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.

As Compellent, a sponsor for Gestalt IT’s Tech Field Day Seattle, interviewed me for a post on their blog, I thought it would be fun to turn the tables and interview them right back! You will notice some similarity in the questions and answers – this was entirely coincidental, since we did not see each other’s answers prior to submitting them! Following are three questions answered by Compellent Director of Corporate Communications, Liem Nguyen. Read my answers over at Compellent’s Around the Block blog!

Gestalt IT is pleased to announce the next date in our ongoing series of Tech Field Day events. The Field Day delegates will convene in Seattle, WA on July 15 and 16, engaging some of the most innovative and interesting IT infrastructure companies.

There was much to see from HP at Tech Forum in Las Vegas, but we wanted to highlight some of the smaller companies exhibiting there. Two in particular caught our attention: Silentium, with their noise-reducing server racks, and QLogic’s entry-level Fibre Channel switches.

The Boche.net and Gestalt IT VMworld 2010 contest is over, and the winner is Greg Stuart. We couldn’t be happier with the result.

We were pleased to be invited to attend HP’s annual Tech Forum event, held in Las Vegas on June 21-24, 2010. Among the many announcements made by HP, the massive DL980 and new blade servers stood out, along with the StorOnce data deduplication technology. Since not everyone could attend this event, we recorded some video from the show floor to give a feeling of being there.

Although Tech Field Day Seattle hasn’t officially been announced yet, we have started naming names. Six delegates have been confirmed and announced so far, all of them new to the event.

Want to go to VMworld 2010 in San Francisco but can’t afford the trip? Boche.net is giving away a conference pass, and we’re going to help make the trip happen by kicking in the airfare.

This week’s Tech Field Day roundtable discussion is an audio chat on the subject of stack wars – the creation of all-in-one “stacks” of IT equipment by the major vendors. These stacks have been quite a hot topic of discussion both inside Gestalt IT and in the community as a whole.