Tuesday, May 19, 2015

Post Interop Las Vegas - 2015 - IPv6, SanDisk and Tech Field Day - What more could you want?

I had a great time in Las Vegas at Interop and was thrilled so many folks attended my IPv6 workshop. To top it off, my workshop made the top 8 list for this year, so may thanks to those that filled out the surveys and for the positive scores too. You can see all the other great workshop presenters and topics on the InformationWeek site. They also published the top 10 session for the regular Interop conference (I did not present a session this year, only the 4 hour workshop) and that can be found on the InformationWeek site also.

In addition to all the Interop activities, I also was able to participate in some Tech Field Day fun with my friends Stephen Foskett and Tom Hollingsworth. I sat in on an interesting SanDisk presentation that you can check out on YouTube. What was particularly enlightening for me was how the storage industry is being turned upside down right now, just in a totally different way than what is happening in networking. I think this is really impactful because those are two of the three major pillars on which virtualization and cloud sit atop. What long term effect this will have is debatable but SanDisk sure does seem to be thinking ahead about how companies can change how they leverage their storage. It is worth watching, especially since they take the time to explain things so even a network engineer like me can understand what the heck is going on.

There were also a few Tech Field Day Extras - specifically Roundtables about white box switches and my favorite topic, IPv6. You can check those out on the Tech Field Day website.

Overall, I was very happy with the time I invested in attending Interop. I saw so many friends and colleagues at the event. It really has a lot of fantastic industry people attending, speaking, sponsoring and working the expo floor. I would encourage you to add Interop to your conference list if it isn't on there already. Join me in Las Vegas next year for Interop, I plan on being there!
- Ed