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.

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About cfheoh

I am a technology blogger with 30 years of IT experience. I write heavily on technologies related to storage networking and data management because those are my areas of interest and expertise. I introduce technologies with the objectives to get readers to know the facts and use that knowledge to cut through the marketing hypes, FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) and other fancy stuff. Only then, there will be progress. I am involved in SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association) and between 2013-2015, I was SNIA South Asia & SNIA Malaysia non-voting representation to SNIA Technical Council. I currently employed at iXsystems as their General Manager for Asia Pacific Japan.

3 Responses to My first TechFieldDay

  1. Pingback: My first Tech Field Day - Tech Field Day

  2. Trond Myklebust says:

    Hi Chin-Fah,

    Thanks for remembering me. I have very fond memories of that trip to Malaysia…
    I’m unfortunately unable to attend the Tech Field day in person this time, but I do hope you find time to attend our demo, and talk to the Hammerspace team on site, including our CEO David Flynn.
    All the best!
    Trond

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