Gestalt IT is pleased to announce the first date of 2010 in our ongoing series of Tech Field Day events. Our next event will convene in Boston, MA on April 8 and 9, engaging some of the most innovative and interesting IT infrastructure companies in Massachusetts.

Day 2 of HP Blades Day took place in a new location – the Customer Experience Centre. We reviewed the previous day’s presentations with a quick question & answer session, learned about client virtualisation (VDI), and took a factory tour.

It’s been a long, strange trip for Overland Storage. Best known in recent years for the tape backup libraries it sold through Hewlett-Packard, Overland is in the midst of an iSCSI-focused renovation at the hands of former Snap Appliance and Data Robotics execs. Could this reboot breathe new life into Overland as well as the SMB storage market it is focused on?

HP Blades Tech Day 1 is now over and what a whirlwind of a day it was.  Here is a summary of the day’s activities.

HP recently commissioned Tolley Group to benchmark their BladeSystem c7000 against the Cisco UCS 5100. The short report focuses on two results, and reads like so many competitive benchmarks in the IT industry: Tolley focuses on metrics that highlight the strength of HP’s solution and the weaknesses of Cisco’s. What’s the real value of pinpoint maximum-performance benchmarks like this?

Silicon Angle claims that Cisco is dumping HP as a partner and it makes sense. After all, HP and Cisco have been trading blows for the last two years and progressively escalating the war. Once the Acadia / VCE project was announced, it was clear where Cisco is planning to go.

Today HP will announce two new storage arrays.  Although taken from different product families, the hardware will be branded in a consistent manner, demonstrating HPs desire to bring together a range of storage technologies they’ve purchased over the last few years.

Dell picked up clustered NAS pro Exanet, finally signing the dotted line after months of speculation. The US $12 million purchase follows reports that the company was going into receivership in December after failing to repay a US $10 million loan from Kreos Capital.

I wanted to address this whole “Don Joey” thing. See, I’m not at all like this in person. I’m more like a friendly grandfather. I guess my Italian heritage makes people take me wrong.

So we got this growth problem, but there’s also an opportunity, and that opportunity is in Round Rock. How can we swing it? Simple: We got a great asset to sell off.