I have been a fan of the Tech Field Day events for some time. They provide a really interesting approach to tech marketing and are a great way of keeping up with the latest developments in the industry, as tech startups and established players alike take to the stage to showcase / discuss (and often get grilled by the delegates about) their shiniest new toys and features.
One of the key services I see the guys at TFD providing (free!) to the community is helping to maintain our knowledge of the bewildering array (pardon the pun) of vendors and solutions that are available out there, in an easy to consume format. It’s important to keep up with current trends and releases in the storage arena, even if you only have vendor X or Y in your current environment. If only so that when your IT Director says to you he wants to go out and buy vendor Z you can have a sensible, fact based conversation as to why or why not to consider them (instead of the obvious knee jerk reaction which they will potentially be expecting!). In my case I’m just a massive geek who loves talking / learning / reading / writing about tech, so keeping up definitely isn’t a chore for me! 🙂
So with that in mind, I am very honoured and excited to have been invited to attend Storage Field Day 8 from the 21st to 23rd October this year. Thank you very much to Stephen Foskett (@SFoskett) and Claire Chaplais (@cchaplais) for the awesome opportunity!
I would consider myself an IT generalist with a penchant for virtualisation and storage. The thing that has really drawn my interest to the storage field has been the fact that it is one of the fastest moving parts of the industry today, with the most innovation and potential disruption from startups.
You don’t have to be an established player to be successful any more. The cost of entry when basing your solutions on Intel chips and white box chassis with a layer of cleverly written software is a heck of a lot cheaper than the custom hardware driven solutions of the past! As many companies have a wide selection of storage silos across their estates, it is also not so difficult to encourage them to try out your new solution to initially replace a single silo either. Lastly lets be honest, we all like an underdog, and there are quite a few underdogs nipping at the bellies of the 880lb storage gorillas as we speak!
For the past three years I have been working as a Solution Architect at Claranet, an independent pan-European managed services provider, designing hosting solutions for the mid-market; an interesting and challenging sector where aspirations sometimes exceed budgets. That said, I will try not to repeat the traditional service provider mantra of “Can I securely multi-tenant it?” and “Do you provide an Opex commercial model?” too much…
I am really looking forward to enabling my brain sponge and soaking up the vast combined knowledge of the delegates and presenters at the event (some of whom I listen to regularly on the highly recommended podcasts Greybeards on Storage and In Tech We Trust and all of whom are known for producing awesome community content), so be sure to check them out and follow them on twitter!
The list of vendors at SFD8 is extensive too… with some new names who only came out of stealth in the past year along with the more familiar ones, it should be a fascinating week!
You can join the live stream during the event, and recordings of all sessions are available after, all of which you can find here:
http://techfieldday.com/event/sfd8/
PS: Being half Saffa, half Scot I was a bit concerned I might miss some of the RWC 2015 action by being in the States during the semi final stage, but after spending this Saturday sitting in the stands during the (now infamous) SA vs Japan game, I’m sadly less concerned about that possible outcome now!