Today was the second day of the Gestalt IT Field Days.

Starting at 7:30am it was a short walk across the street from the Hotel to the offices of Ocarina Networks. Ocarina do content aware storage optimization and they did a great job of taking us through their technologies along with some deep dives by their CTO on how compression and de-dupe work for different data types.

Next was Nirvanix who are a Cloud storage platform. You can use them as tier "n" for a backup destination or as a Storage Delivery Network (they have 5 locations across the globe).

W. Curtis Preston then launched Truth In IT, a new online community for users of technologies to freely exchange information whilst receiving formal product research materials and testing results. Curtis also provided the great lunch. Thanks!

From here it was back onto the bus and over to Data Robotics the company behind the amazing Drobo storage devices. Drobo have a great technology called BeyondRAID which lets you protect data across multiple drives where the drives can be different sizes, there is also zero admin. I was in a group of four people who won a Drobo device to take home so expect to hear more from me about this amazing little unit. Of course I had to head to Frys afterwards to pick up a few large drives to whack into it, unlike a lot of Geeks in attendance I don't have a stack of SATA disks laying around the house.

Here is the video summary from the day with each of the vendors explaining their technologies.

Of course over the next few days I will review my notes and write up some technical items on some of the technologies with my thoughts. There were some great things discussed today so there is much to write.