tl;dr:

Check out HP Storage Tech Day 4 live streaming at  hpstorage.me/14RhvY0 starting Monday 7/29 at 8am Pacific/11am Eastern

Follow all of the attendees on twitter via this Twitter List (and follow @johnobeto and @geekazine as well–I couldn’t add them to the list)

Or follow the larger twitter conversations around these events at hashtags #HPTechDay and #NthSymp

Followup posts:

• Rough Cut: HP Moonshot and CEO Meg Whitman

It’s going to be a busy summer

I just got back from a team-building event at Disneyland Park last week… and I’m headed back for Anaheim this weekend to join an auspicious group of technologists for the HP Storage Tech Day and then move on to the Nth Generation Symposium. Many thanks to HP for inviting me to the events.

Going back to 3PAR, to 3PAR, to 3PAR

It’s an odd reunion of sorts for me. As some of you know, I got my start in network administration supporting the Gigabit Ethernet group at a startup that became part of Nortel Networks.

A year after leaving Nortel, I got my start on non-local storage administration at a startup that became part of HP. I took over sysadmin duties at 3PAR in 2001, from a couple of developers who went back to doing the code (and yelling at me for not believing the All Functions In One Server gospel, but that’s another story), and went on to run the first InServ storage device in production outside the labs. 

So at the HP Tech Day, in addition to seeing some deep details on HP’s software defined storage and storage management platforms, we’ll be hearing from my former coworker, and now HP Fellow, Siamak Nazari on the StoreServ platform. There’s more coming after that, as @hpstorageguy Calvin Zito mentions on this “guest bloggers” post below the formidable list of Tech Day bloggers.

Then on to the Nth Symposium

Then we move on to three days at Nth Generation Symposium, a conference put on by HP’s channel partner in Southern California, Nth Generation. The keynote speaker will be HP CEO Meg Whitman, who I very indirectly worked for at eBay (she was the exec of the week at my eBay new hire orientation in 2006, which was pretty cool), but I’m also looking forward to seeing my boss’s  boss from 3PAR, HP Storage General Manager David Scott (pictured above during the HP/Dell bidding war).

You can join us, virtually…

There will be live streaming of the HP Tech Day, and some bits of Nth may see live coverage as well. Stay tuned here for further details on streaming and other resources, and check out some of the other Tech Day bloggers.

• Nate Amsden, techopsguy.com
• Nina Buik, connect-community.org, @ninabuik
• Dave Hurst, thesuperdave.com, @the_super_dave
• Ray Lucchesi, Silverton Consulting, @RayLucchesi (a fellow Tech Field Day alum – #SFD1)
• Jake Ludington, Digital Lifestyle, @jakeludington
• Me, Robert Novak, rsts11.com, @gallifreyan
• John Obeto, AbsolutelyWindows.com, @johnobeto (also fellow TFD alum – #TFD9)
• Jeffrey Powers, Geekazine.com, @geekazine (the patron saint of live streaming for this tech day)
• Derek Schauland, Technically Speaking, @webjunkie (a third fellow TFD alum – #SFD1 as well)
• Bob Stein, ActiveWin.com, @activewin

You can watch our tweets (and others) from now through the event at hashtags #HPTechDay and #NthSymp

I’ve created a Twitter list for these folks, in case you want to pull up a search window in your client. Feel free to use the HP Storage Tech Day 4 twitter list to watch what we’re seeing and doing during the event next Monday. (I couldn’t add John Obeto to the list for some reason, and I left Jeffrey Powers off because he was about 10x the tweet traffic of everyone else combined. Feel free to watch them separately if you like.

…or physically, for a modest sum…

If you’d like to attend the Nth Symposium, it’s apparently too late to get in free (that boat sailed July 19th, alas–hope my coworkers who kept saying they were going got registered and approved in time). However, for a modest fee you can still  join us at the Disneyland Hotel next week for an impressive agenda, featuring many HP execs as well as cool names from partner companies as well (Boyd Davis of Intel, Martin Casado of VMware, and quite a few others).

Rob’s highlights

For the HP Tech Day agenda, I’m especially looking forward to the StoreServ Deep Dive, and the storage management deep dive in the afternoon (with OpenStack). Obviously the 3PAR technology has come a long way since I rolled the gear across from 4245 to 4209 Technology Drive. They’ve made impressive moves since I bought my last system, an E-series at Trulia a few years ago. I tend to see more of the smaller scale/cutting edge storage tech at Tech Field Day events, so this should be a good balancing factor.

For the Nth Symposium, some of the key talks I’m looking forward to are:

Tuesday

• Big Data Analytics (HP Autonomy)
• New Style of IT (Meg Whitman)
• HP and Cisco (Bill Swales, HP Industry Standard Servers)

Wednesday

• Converged Storage (David Scott)
• Hadoop, Vertica, and Applications (Girish Munada of HP HAVEn)

Thursday

• Wicked Information (Noumenal)
• Intelligent Hybrid Storage (X-IO Technologies)

And since it’s right there…

• Depending on how worn out I am Tuesday night, I will probably be heading into the parks after the showcase closes. If I know you (it’s a small world…), touch base and maybe I’ll bring you along. 🙂

Disclaimer: Travel to HP Storage Tech Day/Nth Generation Symposium was paid for by HP; however, no monetary compensation is expected nor received for the content that is written in this blog.