Last week, after the Exec Event in Palo Alto, I joined my friend W. Curtis Preston for his first Backup Central Live! event. Curtis has spent years educating IT pros about data protection, this was the first week of a new series of self-produced events. And let me tell you, although I’ve seen him present dozens of times, Curtis was really in his element here. He held the packed room enthralled, and the vendor sponsors I talked to were very pleased about the event!
Introducing Backup Central Live!
The Backup Central Live! series are day-long seminars across the USA in 2011. Each event includes over 3 hours of content from “Mr. Backup”, W. Curtis Preston, as well as presentations from Jacob Farmer and the sponsoring vendors. The seminars are free for qualified end-users, which includes most of the readers of this blog!
Curtis and company will cover the challenges of backing up and recovering data in a variety of settings:
- Virtualized servers (e.g. VMware, Hyper-V, Xen)
- Very large servers and data centers
- Remote offices and laptops
- Data retained for multiple years
The session also includes technical detail about key products and technologies:
- Cloud Backup Services
- Deduplication
- Continuous data protection (CDP) and near-CDP
- Archive software
- Tape and its proper role
Attendees even get free breakfast and lunch, which was of a good hotel caterer quality in my opinion.
Stephen’s Stance
I knew Curtis could put together quality backup content, but the crew deserves credit for such a professional and successful event. They attracted some great sponsors, too, including AppAsure, Aptare, FalconStor, NEC, Quantum, Spectra Logic, and Cirtas. And Jacob Farmer’s involvement was a pleasant surprise, too: I’ve always enjoyed the deep technical conversations I’ve had with him!
If you enjoyed my own backup, archiving, and storage seminars in the past, I know you’ll love this event. The next Backup Central Live! cities are as follows. If you’ll be around, you really ought to attend!
- Orlando, FL Feb 1 Register here
- Houston, TX Feb 8 Register here
- Chicago, IL Feb 22 Register here
My only suggestion for the crew is that they get a bigger room next time!
It would be nice if non-sponsored solutions were presented at these events. It’s a real pain to always get “buy product A from vendor A” solutions without any of the other options presented. For example, not once at these kinds of events is ZFS ever discussed. Nor are any non-Windows-based options.
There’s a lot more to “the storage world” than “the big guns”, VMWare, and Windows. Would be nice if someone would actually accept that and do a presentation based on that.
Curtis is very independent, so I’m sure he would talk ZFS, rsync, etc if he 1) knew anything about them; and 2) felt they were advisable. I’ll talk to him and see if he’ll add some of this sort of content!