My first TechFieldDay

[Preamble: I have been invited by  GestaltIT as a delegate to their TechFieldDay from Oct 17-19, 2018 in the Silicon Valley USA. My expenses, travel and accommodation are paid by GestaltIT, the organizer and I was not obligated to blog or promote their technologies presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views]

I have attended a bunch of Storage Field Days over the years but I have never attended a Tech Field Day. This coming week, I will be attending their 17th edition, TechFieldDay 17, but my first. I have always enjoyed Storage Field Days. Everytime I joined as a delegate, there were new things to discover but almost always, serendipity happened.

This time, I enjoyed the weekend with my old Malaysian friend and ex-colleague, his wife (also an ex-colleague), and his family. I flew over from Nashville, TN, after attending Commvault GO 2018. I have not seen both of them for almost 18 years, and I was elated to catch up with them again. He has been working for Aruba Networks for 12 years now, and I am really happy to see them doing well here in the Silicon Valley. Yesterday, we took a hike to Almaden Quicksilver trail for the fun of it. Here’s a photo of our little excursion.

Over the weekend and today, I spent some time picking up OpenLDAP setup and configuration and it went well. It was a request from one of my customers, and I will be deploying it for them when I get home next week.

But my mind is on TechFieldDay. The lineup has Cisco, Oracle, Dell EMC, DriveScale and Hammerspace. And prior to this, some of the TFD17 delegates had a briefing about Hammerspace, in which I am excited to know more in depth when their session comes about on Wednesday. Hammerspace will be releasing embargoed details of their solution tomorrow on Tuesday, so I will leave it to them to their announcement.

I hope to meet with Hammerspace’s CTO, Trond Myklebust on Wednesday. I met Trond in Malaysia back in 2002 (or was it 2003?) when NetApp sent him to Malaysia to do some “customer facing” work. I hosted him for a day or two, as he shared his experience as an NFS client maintainer. It would be nice to catch up with him again.

Then there is DriveScale. I am hoping to meet Brian Pawlowski, who is the CTO of DriveScale. I don’t know Brian personally but I did some work for his wife, Aki Ueno, back when she was running marketing for NetApp ICON (Intercontinental). I used to be her marketing errand boy and I loved working with her. Brian himself, is a legend in NetApp and Sun Microsystems. His work in NFSv3 and NFSv4 was phenomenal and I have the utmost respect for him.

With 2 NFS gurus in Brian and Trond, I cannot wait for TechFieldDay 17 to start.