GestaltIT Tech Field Day!

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Tomorrow night I am heading out to Silicon Valley to attend an invitation only Tech Field Day organized by GestaltIT.  Never heard of Tech Field Day?  Understandable, this is the first one!  Organized by GestaltIT’s founder, Stephen Foskett and inspired by the HP Tech Field Day, this will be a unique event to which independent bloggers like myself, will be given up close and personal access to some great hardware, software and services provided by a select few vendors.  I would imagine the hopes for the companies are to expose people via social media to their products and services in a very targeted way.  The hope for me is to learn about some new tech and meet some fellow bloggers and engineers to learn a few new tricks from!  I am really looking forward to this event!

The 2 day event starts tomorrow and already there has been significant buzz about it within our virtual blogosphere.  Here’s the skinny on it :

I’ll start with the Attendees :
This will be my first opportunity to meet most in real life but have been reading many of their blogs for a while and get a feeling that this will be a very technical group. Stephen has pulled together a group of people from varied technical backgrounds (Networking, Storage, Virtual) and geographic locations (East Coast, West Coast, England and Australia to name a few)!

Rich Brambley           VM /ETC Gestalt IT           RBrambley               Chris Evans    The Storage Architect Gestalt IT       ChrisMEvans
Greg Ferro                 EtherealMind Gestalt IT   EtherealMind           Bas Raayman  Renegade’s Technical Diatribe          BasRaayman
Rod Haywood            Musings of Rodos              Rodos                      John Hickson Studio Sysadmins                               StudioSystems
Greg Knieriemen       Storage Monkeys              Knieriemen              John Obeto    Absolutely Windows                           JohnObeto
Devang Panchigar      StorageNerve Gestalt IT   StorageNerve           Nigel Poulton Ruptured Monkey                              NigelPoulton 
Ed Saipetch               Breathing Data Gestalt IT EdSai                       Robin Harris  StorageMojo                                       StorageMojo
Simon Seagrave         TechHead                         Kiwi_Si                   Rick Vanover  Virtualization Review Tech Republic RickVanover
Stephen Foskett       GestaltIT                           Sfoskett

I am very excited to meet and hang with this group.  Browse through the blog list above and you will notice a very diverse set of people.  Hopefully I can hold my own within this group.   You can follow the real-time tweets from everyone at http://twitter.com/TechFieldDay/tfd1-attendees

Next up (in no particular order) the Sponsors:
Although, lesser known companies for me and I am excited to find out what each can bring to a virtual environment.  Personally, I am very interested in seeing Data Robotics’ DroboPro which is a low cost VMware Certified iSCSI SAN since I am currently in the process of rebuilding my lab.  (These would be AWESOME take homes! [Hint, Hint])

  
   

The following sponsors will not be presenting, but they have offered to provide support for other portions of the event:

   

Finally the Agenda: