As most of my readers are probably aware, I run the Tech Field Day event series, bringing in a panel of independent IT folks like myself with cool companies. This week is Storage Field Day 3, and I thought you might like to know a bit about what we’ve got planned!
We started with a generalist event (Tech Field Day) before adding Networking Field Day, Wireless Field Day, and Virtualization Field Day. But it took three years for me to hold my first Storage Field Day – after all, I’m a storage guy, and I didn’t want the event to be sidelined as “a storage thing”!
Now that we’re no longer worried about that (Networking Field Day and Wireless Field Day have become icons in their space), I’ve added a regular storage event to the roster. Twice a year, we bring together cool storage people and companies, mix them together for a few days, and see what happens!
We decided to take the event to the Denver, Colorado area for the first time this week. Although Denver is a traditional storage location, nearly every company participating is from out of state! Even so, it’s a great scenic city with lots to offer, not to mention direct flights from just about everywhere.
Once again, the delegates come from afar: Four from the Netherlands and two from Italy join eight from the USA. It’s exciting to bring people together like this, and one of the coolest things about the event in my opinion! We’ve also got quite a few first-time delegates – who says storage blogging is stale?
Things get really interesting on the presenter side. While Networking and Wireless Field Day tend to fill up with “big gorillas” like Cisco and Juniper, Storage Field Day has evolved into the premiere venue for startups to get their messages out. This time we’ve got nine (!) companies presenting over a three-day period, each with their own 2-hour timeslot. It’s so cool to have this many companies involved – who says storage is a mature industry?
I invite you to join us at Storage Field Day, even if that’s only possible online. Tune in Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday morning (April 24-26, 2013) at TechFieldDay.com and watch everything unfold through the miracle of Livestream! Afterwards, head over to our YouTube channel to watch recordings of the whole thing!