I made it back to Nashville before noon on Saturday. A cross country red eye flight with a short layover in Atlanta put me into Nashville just in time. I was able to get a few hours with my kids, dinner with my wife and a bunch of friends from church, followed by dessert and more socializing with all those church friends over at my house. Sunday was full with church, time spent with my father explaining what this San Jose trip was all about(he was very interested in it all), a cub scout hike with my son, and more church. I’m still exhausted. I feel like I haven’t slept in days. I’ve had a nagging cough that air travel made worse and the weather is now 50 degrees warmer than when I left last week to go to California. My co-worker left my company to go work for a well known hardware vendor. His last day was Friday when I was in San Jose. As luck would have it, we had a major data center outage Friday afternoon. I spent the remaining hours in San Jose on the phone and glued to my laptop staring at switch configs. I didn’t get to really say proper goodbyes or even enjoy the final meal with everyone else as I was constantly jumping off and on a conference bridge to deal with the problems in the data center back home. In the end, the problem ended up being something outside of my control, so it was an extra kick in the teeth from the data center gods. In spite of it all, I feel like a million bucks!
Let me tell you why.
1. I love technology. – I love it to the core of my being. There is no greater joy for me than to immerse myself in the 1’s and 0’s of networking and consume mass quantities of information. I’ve never been one to understand people who do what I do for a living and have no real interest in technology outside of 8 to 5 Monday-Friday. Maybe that sounds somewhat elitist. Maybe that’s not a realistic attitude to have. I get paid to learn. That’s the coolest thing in the world. I guess I just recognize that opportunity for what it is and want to be around people who think the same way.
I have been a part of IT groups before where a core group of us had similar attitudes regarding the world of technology. We would feed off of each other and our efficiency and skillsets advanced much faster than all the other environments I have been in where not a whole lot of people shared the same drive and desires. Things change and our careers take us other places. Over time you start to shift back to what is normal for everyone else. You no longer look at Friday afternoon as an inconvenience since you have to put the toys away and go home for 2 days. You no longer wake up Monday morning excited to go into work. For a couple of days last week, I got that spark back.
Now, I don’t want you to think I have a depressing life. I LOVE my life. I love what I do for a living. I love just about everything about my life, and I work in a cubicle! My point, is that I was in the midst of a large group of technology zealots once again. Over the next couple of days, I would either witness or take part in countless discussions regarding networking, storage, virtualization, backups, or systems in general. These were discussions with people who were well versed in their respective areas. People who actually thought about technology as opposed to parroting talking points gleaned from a vendor slide deck. Some of them were published authors. I have a book collecting addiction. Being around authors rates pretty high on my scale of coolness.
2. I love talking to vendors. – My typical exposure to vendors is via their sales channel or third party reseller/integrator. This time, I was able to go straight to the source. I liked the fact that the companies I was exposed to at Tech Field Day 5 ranged from the very large like Symantec and HP, to the very small like Drobo, and Druva. I also saw the companies that fit in between those 2 groups like Xangati, Infoblox, and NetEx. I like talking to the vendors because they all want to differentiate themselves from one another. This means that in general, they have differing points of view as to how to solve a problem. By understanding each vendor’s approach, you can make a more informed decision.
I live on the corporate side of IT. If I make a recommendation in regards to the network, I need to make sure I make the BEST one possible. Yes it takes a lot of time and effort, but choices around hardware and software need to be treated with more care than one uses when selecting which brand of breakfast cereal to buy at the grocery store. I’ll talk to just about any vendor that lives within the network space. No matter how insignificant the product or company may seem, I want to know what it is they do. There is no such thing as being too prepared when it comes to making decisions about your network.
That was Tech Field Day in a nutshell for me. Lots of discussions with my peers and lots of discussions with vendors. For now, I am still trying to digest it all. Two full days worth of briefings and discussions will take a bit to sink in for me. If anything, I have a sincere desire to shore up my virtualization and storage knowledge. I just have to find the time to fit it in. Networking on its own is enough to keep me busy for years to come!
I met some really great and SMART people at this event. Several of them I already knew from Twitter, and some of them I had read their blogs prior to this event. Others were affiliated with vendors, so I had never heard of them, except for some of the people from the larger companies. My RSS feed list has grown by quite a few entries as a result of this trip.
If I could give any advice in regards to this kind of event, it would be this. Go register to be a Gestalt IT Tech Field Day delegate. Do it NOW. If you love technology, if you love talking about technology, and if you want to mix it up with vendors in their own back yard, this is the event for you. I was taken care of very well by Claire and Steven. Nothing was overlooked. Every single vendor that presented seemed interested in us being there. Nothing was off limits in terms of what you could ask. Of course, there’s no guarantee they are going to answer it. The vendors still have to protect their intellectual property and rightfully so. Never in a million years would I have imagined that I would be able to engage someone like the CEO of Symantec and ask a direct question and get a direct answer. I also wouldn’t have imagined myself ever talking to the CEO and CTO of a company like Druva. I spent at least 15 minutes talking with them about their company, social media, and other similar things at the Computer History Museum. Without a doubt it was one of the high points of my trip to San Jose. I could go on and on about other incidents, but it wasn’t my intention to ramble on in this post.
Oh, and lest I forget to tie into the title of this post I should answer the question: “Now what?” Well, I still have to finish preparing to take the CCIE Route/Switch lab. However, I find myself wanting to give equal time to ramping up in the VMware and storage networking worlds. I spent several days in the midst of some storage and virtualization experts. What can I say? They have made me a convert. Or maybe it’s just that I want to understand a bit more of what they were talking about if I ever run into them again. 🙂 In the near future, I want to write a bit about the various vendors. In particular, I will focus on Xangati, HP, Infoblox, and NetEx. They have more of a network-ish focus and that’s the area I focus on. That’s not to say that I won’t comment on the others. I really enjoyed the data deduplication talk from Symantec!
I cannot say thank you enough to everyone who made this event possible. Stephen Foskett played the role of our fearless leader very well. Claire was the driving force behind the scenes making sure everything went off without a hitch. The audio/visual crew produced some very high quality stuff even in the face of several technological glitches. The vendors were very gracious in hosting all of us. I appreciate their interaction from the presentation standpoint as well as their active Twitter presence. Bonus points to Xangati for the bacon and chocolate espresso beans! As for the delegates, well I am humbled to have been among you. Some of you are used to interfacing with these companies at this level. I personally, am not. I do look forward to reading your writings and hope to run into you again at some point!
*****Disclaimer*****
As a Tech Field Day delegate for Gestalt IT, my flights, hotel room, food, and transportation were provided by all of the vendors that presented during this event. This was not provided in exchange for any type of publicity on my part. I am not required to write about any of the presentations or vendors. I received a few “souveniers” from the vendors which were limited to t-shirts, water bottles, pens, flash drives, notepads, and bottle openers.
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You just rattled off some of my sentiments exactly! There simply isn’t enough time in the day to play with this stuff. I teach Networking which is a whole other challenge and although keeps me stronger than ever with the fundamentals, I do run the danger of falling behind on the more complex stuff.
I think you are dealing with the same issue many networking engineers encounter. There aren’t many of us and you have to be working in a fairly large data center or IT dept for there to be even a few of you. Thus when you do end up immersing yourself with other networking techs it can be very rejuvenating! I can never understand why people in tech don’t have the same passion for technology in general. I’m basically interested in anything that’s kind of neat in the digital realm! You ever get that blank response back when you find something cool that Google or some small startup have done and you started ranting about it with enthusiasm??..8)
Another challenge is dealing with students who have signed up to get an education in this field to prepare for a career in IT, yet moan and whine about the technology instead of lighting up. All I can do is shake my head! Fortunately there are those thrive off of it as well which makes it all worthwhile.
Anyway, great to hear you had a good time. Sounds like a blast.
Thanks for the comments Phil! I constantly find myself out of time and I don’t even watch TV but for a few hours a week with my kids. To your point, yes it is rejuvenating to be around others who love networking, virtualization, storage, etc. The main reason I go to a monthly user group meeting is to be around others who like doing this stuff. Twitter, of course, keeps me in touch with other IT pros on the days I don’t have user group meetings!
I’ve never liked the limitations of Twitter in terms of the 140chars and lack of threaded conversation, but following my datacomunications twitter list of all you guys is becoming quite entertaining and very informative! You’re right, it’s like a user group delivered right to your desktop.