I’ve barely unpacked from Networking Field Day 11 last week in Santa Clara (more on that next week), and now we are looking forward to hosting the Field Day folks once again for Tech Field Day 10, taking place this week in the Austin area. On Thursday, the whole crew (Tom Hollingsworth, Stephen Foskett, and 12 delegates) will make their way up to the Dell campus(es) to hear presentations on a variety of topics. Tech Field Days are especially fun for Dell since the topic area is essentially open, and Dell has such a huge range of solutions to choose from for discussion and demonstration.
For those of you not familiar with Field Days, take a moment now to check out their website. Then come on back over to the blog to find out what we’ve got planned for Thursday. Here’s a look at this year’s plan:
Lab Tours
Most of Thursday’s agenda will be live streamed, but we will kick off the morning with an off-camera tour of the Engineered Solutions Lab at our Parmer campus. Here, delegates will get a chance to see the inner workings of our HPC and cloud solutions lab, and will hear directly from engineers on some of the advancements Dell has made over the past year.
After Parmer, we’ll hop in the bus and head up I-35 to Round Rock for the rest of the (live streamed) morning.
Hyper-Converged Breakfast Tacos
Tacodeli breakfast tacos by Flickr user Krista
We’ve had a lot of great opportunities to showcase our XC Series solution, but it’s yet to be demonstrated at a Field Day, so we’ll be bringing it out for some show-and-tell. Our partnership with Nutanix is a major component of what makes the XC Series successful, but also of vital importance to this SDS solution is the engineering that’s gone into the Dell hardware. Tune in at around 9 AM Central Time when the team will demonstrate some of their thinking and engineering to kick off our session in Round Rock. Bonus: there will be breakfast tacos in the room. Everything’s better with bacon.
Systems Management
Next up, we’ll hear from the Systems Management team about some of the goodness that lies in the heart of the award-winning management tools that live on our PowerEdge servers. Rumor has it we’ll have a PowerEdge VRTX in the room, too.
Extreme Scale Infrastructure
Adorable, right?
To round out our time together, Stephen Rousset from the Extreme Scale Infrastructure team will talk the delegates through a number of highlights going on in that organization, including our newly-announced Datacenter Scalable Solutions, the G5 rack, and Dell’s unique Modular Data Center. This segment features a Lego server with moving parts *and* adorable light-up models, so I’m pretty excited about it.
Welcome, Delegates…and the Internet
One of the reasons we love Field Days so much is it gives us a chance to reconnect with bloggers and podcasters that are well known to us, and also gives us a chance to meet delegates with whom we might be less familiar. Not only is there a great group of people in the room, Field Days are unique and fun because of the large viewership online, and the lively discussion that often takes place on Twitter. Here’s the list of this year’s Tech Field Day delegates:
If you’re on the above list, and you’re new to Dell, welcome! We’re excited to have you on campus. Please be sure to let me know if you have any follow-up questions after the session is over. And if you’re watching the live stream, be sure to also join the conversation on Twitter at #TFD10. Our portion is Thursday morning, but the whole event begins on Wednesday, and the hashtag is already active.
Wait, what’s TECHunplugged?
One more thing: there’s another event taking place in Austin this week known as TECHunplugged. This is the U.S. debut of a technology conference focused on cloud and IT infrastructure that typically takes place in Europe, run by Enrico Signoretti of Juku. To quote the site, “The ultimate goal of TECHunplugged Conference is to bring quality information to IT decision makers by bringing them together with independent influencers and industry vendors, to engage, debate and be informed through open discussions on topics such as IT infrastructure, virtualization, cloud computing and storage.” All of the Field Day delegates will be there, along with a lot of folks involved in the tech scene here in Central Texas. While Dell is not participating officially, I’ll be on site, and look forward to attending some great panels. If you’re curious, join that conversation on Twitter too!
