Greetings from Fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. For the third year, with apologies to Men Without Hats, I’m back in the Mandalay Bay Convention Center for Interop. 

This week, I’m actually a man without hats as well. My Big Data Safari hat is in my home office, and my virtual Cisco ears are back at home as well, next to the VPN router that was powered down before I headed for the airport. (Alas, after moving from Disney to Cisco, I lost the theme park discounts and the epic mascot reference.)

What are you up to at Interop this year, Robert?

So why am I back at Interop, when a dozen conference calls a day could have been in the cards for me this week? 

My readers, my fans, and my groupie all know that I’ve been a fan of the Psycho Overkill Home Office (POHO) for quite a while, going back to when I had a 19-server, 5-architecture environment with a 3-vendor network in my spare bedroom. Today it’s about 12 servers, all x64 (Shuttle, Intel, Cisco, Supermicro, Dell, and maybe another secret brand or two), and technically a 5-vendor network, but the idea is similar enough.

And having built a couple of startups up from the under-the-desk model to a scalable, sustainable production-grade infrastructure, the overkill in my home office and labs has led to efficient and effective environments in my workplaces. 

This week I’m taking a break from my usual big data evangelism and the identity aspects of working for a huge multinational juggernaut. It’s a bit of a relief, to be honest; earlier this month I attended my first event in 10 months as a non-booth-babe, and now I’m getting to focus on my more traditional interests. 

What’s on the agenda this week?

I’m looking forward to return visits to the folks at Sandisk, Opengear, and Cradlepoint. Cradlepoint was the first interview I did two years ago at Interop 2013, and I’ve been a customer on my own for many years; Opengear was a presenter at Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live 2013; and I last talked with Sandisk at Storage Field Day 5 about a year ago, as well as having been a Fusion-io customer at a previous job. 

I have a couple of other meeting requests out, so we may hear from a couple of other POHO/SOHO/ROBO/lab staples, and I’ll at least be dropping by their booths in the Interop Expo to see what’s new. 

While I’m only recording this week for notetaking convenience, I am starting to ponder what to do about the podcast I’ve been thinking about for a couple of years. So maybe I can pull in some interesting people from time to time… last night’s conversation over Burger Bar shakes with Chris Wahl and Howard Marks probably would have been fodder for several podcasts alone (and I don’t think any of us even had any alcohol!).

And seeing as a number of my friends are presenting this year, including Chris and Howard, I’ll be trying to make my way to their sessions (although there’s a LOT of overlap, and triple-booking isn’t uncommon… there’s a lot more than the Expo floor to experience at Interop, as always).

So where do we go from here?

If you’re at Interop, who are you looking forward to seeing/hearing/heckling/buying drinks for? (And if you’d like to meet up, catch me on Twitter at @gallifreyan.) If not, check out the exhibitor list at interop.com/lasvegas and let me know who you are curious about on that list.