So, here we go again, next week I’ll be attending one of the best industry events on storage: Storage Field Day 4.
The event
This one is part of a wider group of vertical events (others are about virtualization, networking and wireless) reserved for bloggers and organized by Stephen Foskett and his team. The best of this event, apart the constant good hospitality and the value of other delegates, is the quality of technical stuff you can find during the sponsor sessions.
Usually, most of the sessions are managed by CTOs or other technical people involved in product development and it’s not unusual to go very deep on how products are designed and technology works. It’s always a great opportunity, especially for people like me who live very far from Silicon Valley, to understand all the whys and hows about products and related stuff. This is even more true and important when you meet startups with such innovative and disruptive technology in their hands.
The sponsors
The sponsors list of this Storage Field Day is notable and I have a lot of expectations. Some of them are totally new to me (and the market) but others are already well know here in Europe too:
Avere: a NAS optimization startup but, if I’m well informed, we will see much more than that at this event (I’m totally thrilled about the opportunities opened by the evolution of their technology)
Cleversafe: You know, I’m very fond of object storage and this company is one of those with the most interesting product implementation out there. Very curious to know the news.
CloudByte: This is a young company but its product has already been released in GA a while ago. It’s a software solution to realize storage systems with a very interesting QoS feature (ISPs are the primary target but the product has something interesting to say on enterprise space too).
Coho data: That’s new! Coho announced the product a few weeks ago: totally scale-out high-performance next generation storage system with object storage technology in the back-end. Very impressive at a first glance, I’m expecting a great session from them!
Gridstore: This startup has recently released the third version of its product, adding a lot of features and full Hyper-v support. We are talking about a software-defiend storage solution for Microsoft environments which implements a sort of virtual controller that takes advantage of servers’ CPUs. The approach is quite interesting but previous releases have shown some limitations, I’m vey curious to know if they overcame those limits and the product is now ready for a broader adoption.
Nimble storage: One of the most known storage startups. I’ve already written many blogs about them. They are now working on their IPO but I also hope for news on the technical side.
Overland Storage: Producer of tape libraries and other storage solutions, the company hasn’t been going through a brilliant period in the last years in terms of revenues. Very curious to find out what they will be showing at this event.
Oxygen cloud: Oxyngen Cloud delivers a sync&share solution designed for enterprise use and it’s compatible with Microsoft Active Directory. It’s not very common here in Italy so, for me, it’s like a new discovery. I’ve only spent little time on their website but I’ll dig up about this product for sure.
Proximal Data: Another server-side SSD caching solution. This is going to be a very crowded segment with tons of similar products, it will be very interesting to find out more about them too. Finding technical (and commercial) differentiators for all these solutions is going to be quite difficult. Will Proximal data be able to somehow surprise me?
Virident: This company has been recently acquired by Western Digital. It produces PCIe flash cards and software to take the maximum advantage of them in terms of caching, availability and data management.
Bottom line
I can’t lie: I’ve high expectations about the sessions and I’m very glad to meet and chat with all these independent bloggers once again: it’s the mix of the two that makes this event really interesting.
I’ll do my best to cover all the sessions with articles, tweets and opinions. In any case, I think that, as for the past editions, all the sessions will be recorded and broadcasted live.
Stay tuned!
Disclaimer: I was invited to this meeting by GestaltIT and they paid for travel and accommodation, I have not been compensated for my time and am not obliged to blog. Furthermore, the content is not reviewed, approved or published by any other person than the Juku team.
