GestaltIT Tech Field Day!

November 11, 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 https://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])