Last week, I let the cat out of the bag regarding the next Tech Field Day event, which kicks off on Thursday! Today, let’s take a look at the great lineup of companies that will be presenting at this event. Many are new startups, including Nutanix, Pure Storage, and SolidFire, while others are more established, like Nasuni, Symantec, DataDirect Networks, Arista and Arkeia.
Thursday, September 15
One of the highlights of VMworld with the debut of Nutanix. They received a lot of attention, as well as a “Best of VMworld” award, for their scale out “compute cluster”, which incorporates servers storage into a blade form factor. We’re very pleased to have the fine folks from Nutanix joining us at Tech Field Day as well! Tune in at 8:00 AM Pacific time on Thursday to learn more.
A company I’m very glad to see at Tech Field Day is Nasuni, which is much more than a cloud storage gateway. I’ve been working with Nasuni for almost a year now, and am very familiar with their offerings and technology. But I’m betting the delegates might not know what they’re up to. And I’m very pleased to let you know that Nasuni CEO Andres Rodriguez will be covering some excellent new information during their 10:30 AM Thursday session!
Symantec is perhaps the most-frequent Tech Field Day presenter, but this is a break from the past Backup Exec- and NetBackup-focused sessions. This time we’ve got the Symantec Storage folks (i.e. Veritas) and they’re spilling the beans on the long-awaited version 6.0 of Storage Foundation. I’m a big fan of this software, having used it for over a decade, and am looking forward to hearing what’s new at 1:30 PM.
While touring the show floor at the NAB show earlier this year, I ran into DataDirect Networks, probably the biggest and most successful storage company most people have never heard of! DDN sells tons of storage in the media and entertainment business (explaining their focus on the NAB show), but they have a lot of great products that are gaining attention in other markets as well. We are very pleased that DDN will give us all a peek at what they are working on at 4 PM Thursday!
Party With The ExecEvent
Every Tech Field Day event has featured a Thursday-evening party so the presenting companies and invited delegates can get to know each other better. In the past, we’ve visited venues as diverse as the Computer History Museum, The Museum of Flight, and Fenway Park, and have invited friends and locals to join us. This time we’re doing something different again.
We coordinated the date of Tech Field Day with our friends over at The ExecEvent so we could throw a joint Thursday evening bash. Joining our presenters and delegates will be the representatives of various companies who are meeting in Santa Clara for that event. This gives everyone involved another reason to attend the party, and will likely lead to many interesting industry discussions.
Friday, September 16
I’ve previously written about the all-flash enterprise arrays announced by Pure Storage at VMworld, where they got lots of attention. Now it’s time for the Tech Field Day delegates to take a closer look at their technology. Join in Friday morning at 8 AM Pacific to hear what they’ve got to say.
Arista Networks can be considered a “friend of the event” after presenting at Networking Field Day last year, and more so since they are allowing us to use their facility for the rest of the day Friday. We’ll start off with Arista themselves at 10:30 Pacifc. They’ll undoubtedly cover their high-performance Ethernet switches with a twist: VMware integration (another “Best of VMworld” winner) and the ability to run certain applications right in the chassis. Nifty stuff.
SolidFire is generating tremendous buzz in the industry with their all SSD storage solution. Targeted at storage service providers, the SolidFire storage appliances deliver massive performance and efficiency as well as automated management. We are thrilled that SolidFire will be able to demonstrate their product to the Tech Field Day delegates at 1:30 PM Friday.
We’ll wrap up with a backup industry veteran, Arkeia Software. Although perhaps not the most well-known name, Arkeia is staking a claim on distributed data protection leveraging a special twist on data deduplication and even offering a credible solution for cloud servers. Tune in at 4 PM Friday to learn more!
Stephen’s Stance
Tech Field Day 8 really is the most diverse and startup-laden event we’ve ever hosted. I am personally very excited to see every presentation, and invite you to join in live on Thursday and Friday between 8 and 6 Pacific. Live streaming video will be at TechFieldDay.com!