Virtualization Field Day #2 / Silicon Valley- pre event

Well I have escaped from the wet and dreary shores of Sydney to spend some time geeking it up with the crew for the Virtualization Field Day #2. Having been to one of these events before I know just how much hard work and fun it can be. Its so great to hang out with people so smart in their field, plus to hear direct from the best people within the presenting vendors.

The activities start Wednesday night with a get together dinner. Thursday and Friday are all of the vendor presentations. I arrived this last Sunday to do a few days work of meeting before the event. Of course I had to do a bit of the usual Silicon Valley shop hop around some of the favourite haunts for all things geek.

One place I went today, that I had never thought of before, was to Apple HQ. Here is some guy who was wearing a suit, who wears a suit in the valley, only me!

Who's the stiff in the suit!

The cool thing is that there is a company store there. Its not like an Apple store. It has a lot more Apple merchandise. It also has a t-shirt that can only be purchased from the Apple campus store. Of course I had to get one.

Apple Company Store

Of course I also had to do a trip to Fry's and pick up something. Ended up getting a 4 port 1G switch for the home office. I am sick of 100Mb transfer speed between me and the Drobo storage device (which hangs off a Mac mini). Also some of those nice little pop up speakers for use in hotel rooms etc. This is on top of the other stuff I pre-shipped to my hotel, none of which has arrive yet. I pre shipped a bunch of t-shirts from ThinkGeek for the kids and a SSD drive for me.

One place I have never been to here in the US is In-N-Out burger. My American friends rave about it. So I had to check it out.

The back wall of In-N-Out burger, the view from the car park.

I had to go the whole hog and get a burger, fries and a shake. I am told the way to order your burger is "animal" style, which means it comes with (I think) sautéed onions and chilli. The person I was with sort of made a mistake and somehow also ordered their fries done "animal" style. Can you believe it, they actually do that. Here is what it looks like.

After eating mostly healthy food for about a year it was great to chow down on great fast food. This stuff is fresh, you have to wait for it to be cooked. The fries are cut from whole potatoes just before they are cooked. However my stomach rebelled about half an hour later, the temple had been defiled! But was worth it. Repeat after me, "In-N-Out is occasional food!".

But what is going to be really fun this week is hanging out with the old friends plus some new people at the field day. The attendees this year are Edward Haletky, Bill Hill, Mike Laverick, Dwayne Lessner, Scott Lowe, Roger Lund, Robert Novak, David Owen, Brandon Riley, Todd Scalzott, Rick Schlander and Chris Wahl. Some real who's who of virtualisation thinkers. 

The vendors this event are interesting, we have Symantec, Zerto, Xangati, PureStorage, Truebit.tv and Pivot3. Some big names their, some interesting new ones and great to see that I will get to hear the thoughtful words of Mr Backup himself, aka Mr W. Curtis Preston again. 

The only vendor I will call out specifically as sparking some very high interest from me pre event is Zerto. They have DR capabilities with full integration to VMware vCloud Director. As I deal daily with one of the leading deployments of vCloud Director in the service provider space this really gets my brain juices flowing. There is big interest in this topic and I am really keen to see exactly what these guys have. I want to separate the hype from the reality and really hope that the reality is an exciting story.

You can see the details of the whole event over at the Field Day site http://techfieldday.com/, the links page really gives you all the resources you need.  The sessions will be broadcast online and you can follow the tweet stream via the hashtag #VFD2. 

More updates as the events unfold.

Rodos