Category Archives: Events

Looking forward to Cisco Live 2013 in Orlando!

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Welcome to those of you coming here through the Cisco Live 2013 Twitter List.

It looks like I’ll be able to make it to Cisco Live this year.

If you’d asked me even ten years ago if  I’d ever be doing something like this, I would have asked if you’d gone off your meds. I was not a Cisco fan, partly because I worked in what became Nortel’s Ethernet switching division (the old Rapid City Communications group, which brought the Accelar/Passport 1000/8000 lines to market and pushed Cisco’s hand in bringing out Gigabit Ethernet).

(If we meet at CLUS, and if the rum is good, maybe I’ll tell you the Alidian story. Or not. Depends on who’s buying the rum.)

But I’m expanding my horizons, and I’ve spent over a year working in a UCS C-series (rackmount) environment, becoming sort of a subsistence expert on the platform (with lots of help from friends at Cisco of course). And I could see myself building on this experience in the future.

So I’m looking forward to my first big vendor event, meeting up with new and old friends, learning more about my new “home” platform and more about what’s around it as well.

It’ll be a busy June for me, as I’m headed for Austin to participate in Tech Field Day 9 the week before… and conveniently my company has a facility just outside Orlando that I’ll be able to bring the family to for a couple of days after Cisco Live.

Thanks for visiting… hope to see you in the comments, on Twitter, and at Cisco Live.

Greetings from Storage Developer Conference 2012

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I’m in Santa Clara this week (a whopping five miles from home) for the SNIA Storage Developer Conference (SDC).

I’m here as a guest of SNIA and Gestalt IT, who are sponsoring my attendance. I’ll be participating in daily SDC Tech Field Day roundtables–check out techfieldday.com at 2pm Monday and 1:30pm Tuesday and Wednesday, Pacific Time, to see my TFD colleagues and I review the past day’s material from the perspective of the end user of storage technologies.

An Englishman In New York?

I’ve been doing storage beyond DAS since 2001 (A Disk Space Odyssey?), and dabbled in the Windows interoperability world. But some of this material is way over my head. I’m a sysadmin by trade, not a storage developer or hardware designer. When I asked my boss for time off to come to this conference, he asked “do you really want to develop for storage?” And in the sense of writing code, no. I don’t care to write a line of code under the covers at this point.

But in the sense of growing in my experience, my trade, and my awareness of things that I’m not quite blamed for yet, definitely, I’d like to develop for storage.

It is good to get a sense of perspective. As some of you may commiserate with, I’ve been known to work with “experts” who know things that make no sense in the real world. CIFS/SMB is dead. Hadoop is dead. Hardware is dead. Vegan cookies are tasty.

This week I’m hearing from some of the most prominent people in the storage industry from the functional side (as opposed to the commercial product and sales side), and even if a fair bit of it is above my clue grade, it’s giving me perspective. And even if it’s not always useful to correct those “experts,” it’s good to know for myself and my own work what’s really worth knowing.

As I started writing this post, I was in a room with kernel and Samba developers and a lot of other people who work miracles in very low level code for the CIFS/SMB2/SMB3 layers in Linux. Steven French from IBM, who wrote the original CIFS support for Linux, was speaking, and getting corrected by some of the people who are qualified to do so.

Not all experts take correction well. The ones who admit when they’re wrong are the ones you want to pay attention to, unless you like driving around in circles. I’m expecting quite a few of that sort of expert this week at SDC. The ones that know their stuff but can still learn/refine, that is, not the ones who drive around in circles.

Back To The Fray

I’m going to get back to my sessions… tune in online at http://techfieldday.com/event/rsdc12/ (or come to the mezzanine if you’re here at SDC) for the first Tech Field Day roundtable today at 2:00pm Pacific time. And follow me at @gallifreyan on Twitter to see sporadic live comment on whatever I’m watching at the time.

Disclaimer: SNIA and Tech Field Day are sponsoring my presence at SDC this week. My blog and roundtable activities are based on my own perspectives, not necessarily those of SNIA, SDC, or Gestalt IT/Tech Field Day. And while my badge does mention my employer’s name for identification purposes, I am not formally representing my employer at SDC, and my opinions do not reflect the positions or opinions of my employer.

 

rsts11: Silicon Valley VMUG UC, and Storage Field Day

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Quick thoughts on the SVVMUG Conference

I survived the Silicon Valley VMUG (VMware User Group) conference event on Wednesday. It was an interesting mix of educational and informative presentations, and vendor exposure and conversations. I have some thoughts to write on later… including a grand unifying theory of tech conferences (that will require a bit of graphic work)… but I thought I should put a note out there to thank the organizers for making an excellent event for the 500+ of us who registered, most of whom seem to have shown up (as I did).

I also thought I’d mention the VMUG Advantage membership option, which I only learned about the day before. You can get a free VMUG membership, and associate with your local VMUG if one exists, at http://www.vmug.com. This will likely qualify you for any local events like this week’s Silicon Valley conference, and give you access to the local VMUG community.

If you’re looking at using classroom training or certification testing from VMware, going to VMworld, or purchasing a license for Workstation 8 or Fusion 4, look into VMUG Advantage. For $200 a year (or less with a discount code), you get access to a wide range of eLearning courses, 20% off on classroom instruction, 20% off one certification exam a year, $100 off VMworld registration, and a 30% discount on one of the desktop virtualization products per year.

(I believe you can choose Workstation or Fusion, and not both, for this discount… however, if you’re on VMware’s marketing mailing list, you will probably see a 15-30% discount on Workstation every few month, and I’ve seen 20-40% discounts on Fusion in the same mailings.)

By the way, I attended this event as a free member of the local VMUG, and while I received free lunch and coffee/soda, these considerations did not impact my opinions of the sponsors.

Oh look, Storage Field Day

I’m also pleased to report that I’ve been invited to be a delegate[1] to the first Storage Field Day later this month in Silicon Valley. Looking forward to seeing Robin Harris and The Other Scott Lowe again, and meeting more independent thinkers on storage for the first time. There will be a couple of familiar names on the other side of the blogger “dragon’s den” tables as well, including PureStorage and Coraid, and some folks I haven’t been all that formally introduced to, such as Nimbus Data and Tintri (the latter I actually met Wednesday at the VMUG).

Early in my career I did a fair bit of storage work, and much as going to work for Nortel pushed me into networking, going to work for 3PAR pushed me even further into storage technology. I’ve done a range of implementations since then, from what was more SPOD than JBOD (i.e. “steaming pile”, or at least overstacked pile), to conventional Engenio and EMC and 3PAR, so it will be particularly intriguing to come up to speed on what’s closer to the bleeding edge, or at least the warm and shiny edge… and have a feel for what’s coming in advance.

I expect that my “deep generalist” nature is a benefit that I bring to the Tech Field Day events. There are a lot of people there who are waders-deep in the specific topic, and I may learn as much from the other delegates as I do from the presenters and sponsors, but by being ankles deep in almost everything (except sales… whew…) I can offer a valuable perspective and maybe ask a question that wouldn’t be obvious to someone who lived the specific flavor of technology 24/7. Like why there’s a Rick Roll easter egg[2] in the new vSphere Client.

So I’m looking forward to the Storage Field Day experience on April 26-27, and the “bonus” Solid State Storage Symposium on April 25. You can probably still get a ticket to SSSS if you’re gong to be near San Jose, California on April 25, and you should be able to see most of the presentations all three days via online streaming at techfieldday.com. You can also keep an eye on realtime conversations on Twitter on the hashtags #SFD1 and #techfieldday.

[1] As with all Tech Field Day events, the sponsors and presenters will be providing for my lodging, meals, and entertainment during the event. They may also provide gifts or promotional items. We definitely appreciate their support for these events. However, as Tech Field Day delegates, we’re not beholden to the presenters as far as content and perspective (or even reporting/blogging at all) . You’ll hear what each of us thinks, from our own perspectives, if we think it’s worth writing or talking about.

[2] I hope you didn’t look too long for the easter egg… I’m just making that up.

rsts11: #VFD2 Day 0 rollup

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Greetings from the Silicon Valley representative/delegate to Virtualization Field Day 2 by Gestalt IT. In about 9 hours we’ll be on a bus/limo to the first presentations of #VFD2 (watch our updates throughout the rest of the week on Twitter!).

Let’s Get It Started In Here

We had our opening ceremonies/hometown gift exchange/thorough discussion of kangaroo scrotums (hope there wasn’t an embargo on those) and great dinner at Zeytoun across the road from our home base at the Doubletree. I won’t write much about the meal (although I will probably Yelp it later).  It was fun getting to know and chat with the other eleven delegates and our fearless leader Matt Simmons (@standaloneSA). We’re missing Steve Foskett, but he had family priorities that meant it was right for him to miss his first of 14 TFD events.

I have to admit it’s weird being the only one from Silicon Valley here. It’s easy to live in the Valley and feel like technology only exists here, or only thrives here. But we’ve got folks who make their living and livelihood at virtualization from across the country, across the pond, and somewhere that has a famous opera house on the other side of the world. So it can give a sense of proportion, although I am happy to have Fry’s, Central Computer, Action Surplus, Weird Stuff, and Halted within a couple miles of home, and most of the big names in technology nearby as well.

wolfgang puck single serve

In-room coffee done right

Welcome To The Hotel (in) California

I’m back in my room, and I think many of the delegates took the opportunity to get wound down for bed in their respective rooms across the hotel (we’re not the only geeks in the house — Ethernet Summit is winding down tomorrow it seems — but we’re not wearing name tags).  I have to make some comments on the hotel experience, having spent some time in hotels in Las Vegas, Seattle, and Los Angeles in the last six months.

The in-room coffee is, in fact, the best I’ve found yet. W Seattle and Hard Rock Hotel did not have in-room coffee, and LAX Marriott has weird disposable-brew-basket coffee that, while it tastes good, is really enough for one cup but they only give you one unless you ask. Doubletree is putting out a two-bay Wolfgang Puck branded pod-based coffeemaker that uses Senseo-style pods (Puck’s line is provided though, individually wrapped). There are two cups, two sleeves, two lids, and enough coffee and treatments for 2-4 cups. It’s probably not as good as I would have made with my Clever Dripper and some fresh-ground coffee, as I went for on my LA trip last weekend, but it’s pretty good, convenient, and drinkable even after Starbucks closes.

Also, the service is excellent so far. I called their “careline” to get help with the wifi, figuring out how to get my free service provided as part of the reservation. It was explained promptly and courteously, and I even had time to add my Hilton number to the reservation before I got overly annoyed with the phone itself. 🙂 The people are great, greet you by name, and provide all the information you need (and a warm chocolate cookie at check-in too).

I have to say the room and the experience almost rise to the level of a Disney deluxe resort at WDW. Cell/wifi is better here than at Wilderness Lodge, but it’s much closer in experience quality than any of the other hotels I’ve been in over the last few months. (When I last stayed at Wilderness Lodge, I was not a cast member, so I didn’t get special rates or treatment… my last visit to WDW was as a cast member but at a moderate resort.)

I’ve already discovered a thing or two I’ve forgotten, and while I could drive home to pick up a few things, it wouldn’t be in the spirit of the event, so I’ll just rush to the lobby store in the morning… and be grateful I had a spare mini/micro USB adapter still packed from the weekend to charge my phone up.

Tomorrow, Tomorrow

Tomorrow we’re off to see Symantec in the morning (did they really say we’re leaving the hotel at 7:30am? AIEEE), and then Zerto and Xangati will come see us in the afternoon. I’ve worked with Symantec in the enterprise antivirus/endpoint protection arena as a customer before, and have long used their Norton end user security products at home. Never got around to deploying their backup solutions (one of my two certifications ever was Legato Networker about a decade ago).

Zerto is new to me, other than an amusing Twitter exchange last week… I met Xangati at Tech Field Day 5 over a year ago now as a fly-on-the-wall sort of guest, and am looking forward to seeing where they’ve come with their offerings.

Disclaimer

As you’ll see me mention a few times this week… the presenters/sponsors for VFD2 are providing for my lodging, meals, and entertainment over the next 48 hours, and may also provide gifts or promotional items. We definitely appreciate their support for this event. However, as Tech Field Day delegates, we’re not beholden to the presenters as far as content and perspective (or even reporting/blogging at all)  by virtue of their generous support of the event. If something is interesting, noteworthy, yawnworthy, or downright unfathomable, you’ll hear it from me because it’s what I think, not because the provider of said something supported the event. If it’s just bleh, you may not hear about it at all, but hopefully that won’t happen. Same goes for the other delegates as well; we’re here as independent thought leaders, not cheerleaders (I’ll be the first to say I shouldn’t be wearing a skirt anyway).

More tomorrow… watch Twitter for live treatment of the presentations, and check back on rsts11 for more detailed coverage as time permits and interest warrants.

Some thoughts from Tech Field Day 5, Day 1.

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I’ve been watching some of much of TFD5 on the streaming site, taking advantage of the “home game” via Twitter. I was invited to join the last bit of today’s session in person, and had a good time meeting the delegates and a couple of the vendor reps as well as seeing Xangati. But I’m an indirect participant so far. Thanks to Steve Foskett for inviting me and everyone for making me feel welcome. Well, maybe not everyone.

First, to go beyond the point Networking Nerd made, “Streaming video is frowned upon by almost every cell phone provider.” It’s an imprecise science on the move, in any setting… apparently one host’s network security policy was also a hindrance, and it probably didn’t help that I had the “BBC Closing Sites Archive” torrent running full-stream on my part at home. But hopefully future hosts will be better prepared. The Computer History Museum’s wifi was apparently providing close to 10 megabits each way, so we know it can be done.

Second, it may make more sense to push a smaller-footprint solution upward than to squeeze an enterprise solution downward. I caught most of the Druva presentation on near-CDP aimed at portable computers. I’m going to try it out myself (I have a dozen portable computers at home, and I can probably borrow a portable Mac other than my Mac Portable (yes, I have one, it’s verra nice)… and then I’ll relay it to my IT team at work. Sure, we have Time Machine for the Macs, but there are a fair number of Windows machines where near-CDP would be a good idea, especially for remote and mobile workers.

Third, being able to play back activity patterns in your virtualization environment looks really cool. Some of you saw a bit of my live tweeting from the Xangati presentation. They’re doing a product that visualizes and “records” what interacts in your virtualization setup, from the VM infrastructure to the network. Having deployed and monitored a six-node XenServer Enterprise cluster, I can say it’s very painful to keep an proactive eye, or even a quickly reactive one, on even a simple environment where VMs and storage may interact with each other and run over each other. I’ll likely be putting their free ESX tool into my personal lab at work and seeing how it works. My IT team is working on managing a small pile of ESXi boxes as well (my pile of ESXi boxes are nested virtually inside a physical ESXi box).

Fourth, it’s interesting to contemplate a solution independently of its pricing, but when a site isn’t very forthcoming about product pricing, I find myself less likely to seriously consider it. Sure, make me get in touch to get discounts, promos, free lunch, polo shirts with built in Beats By Dre ear buds, and so forth… but I have to feel that I can get away with buying something before I’ll dive into it in my copious investigation time. Sort of a phase 1 sanity check against possible benefits and returns. One of the vendors didn’t have obvious pricing, just an obvious free eval. Google helped me find their pricing page though, and it wasn’t that bad.

Fifth, did Curtis Preston actually express a  longing for the growth of the “private cloud” ? I guess not.

Sixth, I probably have a mild feel for how Mr Backup feels about that phrase, from how I felt when someone compared a semi-realtime backup product to Dropbox (which is a great product, and a company with a cool office in San Francisco). SugarSync has more pertinent features, like configurable backup directories (I back up my Dropbox to SugarSync just to be redundant), but it’s still a directory backup tool, not a recoverable system backup.

Seventh, from the “hallway track” and Virtual Bill, I learned there’s a free open-source virtual switch for Xen (XenSource and XenServer, it seems) and KVM: openvswitch. I knew about the free Arista Networks vEOS virtual switch for VMware, but it’s nice to see something for the Xen side of the house. I’ll admit I still don’t do deep enough virtualization work to need these, but it should happen sometime this year. And while vEOS doesn’t have the features that drew me to Arista (buffered Gigabit Ethernet and top-of-rack 10GBase-T), it seems well worth a look.

Eighth, in case you haven’t looked at VMware Player recently, it’s worth a peek/re-peek. I used a personal VMware product back in the Workstation 2.x days (when I got a hobbyist license for $99 per platform), and when Player came out, it was somewhat crippled. In particular, it was a pain to make new VMs. You had to get a downloaded program or find the website that created vmx containers, or start from a Virtual Appliance and try to work your way from there. Now, not only can you readily prepare a VM from scratch, you can also use Unity, to display individual app windows from your guest OS in the host OS. Pics or it didn’t happen? OK. This means with the right prep, you can run your favorite Internet Explorer on your gentoo or ubuntu laptop. Or you could do something more sane, like run a browser appliance for security/compartmentalization, run an older version of Windows or Linux or Solaris or FreeBSD, or even just keep Xeyes up on your Windows box to confuse your friends and distract your enemies.

That’s all I can think of at the moment, and it’s actually a lot considering most of this was on the side monitor while I was doing somewhat real work in the foreground. I don’t know how much of tomorrow’s events I will watch in realtime, as we have a new hire to welcome with an expensive lunch.

As an aside:

You can find me on Twitter as @gallifreyan … be warned that another side of my geekiness, the Gallifreyan side, will be approaching its annual apex as Gallifrey One approaches next Thursday through Sunday in Los Angeles. #gally is the hash tag to watch for or avoid as the case may be. And in case you’re wondering, my Doctor was Rowan Atkinson.