Tech Field Day : Additional Notes

The days here are Tech Field Day have been very packed and exciting.   

The conversations have been diving very deep into storage related discussions.  Not really my bag of tricks at that level but interesting for me none the less.  At the 3PAR building, 3PAR and Symantec Storage went into their presentations around their storage offerings.  One interesting thing that I took away from both presentations was some of the inherent problems and risks associated with ‘stock’ thin provisioning.  Issues with Oversubscriptions and free space reclamation that I was totally unaware of.  A fellow attendee who patiently explained the issues to me should be posting a more detailed explanation soon here. 
Keep an eye out on the Storage Architect if you are considering Thin Provisioning. I’ve come to the conclusion that I will not recommend thin provisioned storage unless the underlying SAN can reclaim the deleted storage.

The day rounded out with a visit to the Computer History Museum! 40 Years of computer Artifacts. Very Cool!

Other vendors that presented to us were Ocarina Networks [Software Data compression and DeDupe] and Nirvanix [Cloud Provider].  Nirvanix is a competitor to Amazon S3 providing remote disk and storage and gave us the opportunity to use their service for free for 1 year. I plan to take them up on that! 🙂

GestaltIT’s Tech Field Day Pictures courtesy of the Ugly Green Photographer!