SNW Day One 9:00am

SNIA introduces new Executive Director

Last night, I attended SNIA event at SNW to introduce SNIA's new Executive Director Leo Leger. I got to meet some new faces and some old.

It was great to run into an old acquaintance, Laurence Whittaker from my days at Toronto Storage Networking User Group (TSNUG). He is as usual very active with SNIA End User Council. We didn't get to talk about the EUC strategy planning over the weekend as he got dragged of by Wendy. Hopefully, I will run in to him again during the show and get some information on EUC plans for the next year.

I talked to Leo Leger, the new SNIA Executive Director. The talk was quick and short kind of reminded me of being at speed networking event! I also sat down with Arun and others from Patni Computers. They seem to be active in providing software services to storage companies.

I also met Scott Kipp from office of CTO at Brocade/McDATA. He wrote several books including Fibre Channel Advances and Broadband Entertainment: Digital Audio, Video and Gaming in Your Home. He shared challenges and discouraging results from his past attempts at blogging. He is again planning to start a blog. I invited him to Bloggers Evening and talked to other bloggers about their experiences and feedback on his challenges. Unfortunately, he is not able to join us for Bloggers Evening due to conflict with SNW Speakers Dinner.

The highlight of the evening was talking to Vincent Franceschini. Even though, he doesn't post regularly, I always enjoyed reading Vincent's blog as he focuses on emerging technologies at HDS. Personally being interested in technologies ready to cross the chasm from research to industry, we had lively discussion on the challenges and opportunities of Grid Storage and Service-oriented Architecture. It was surprising that he had thoughts on the role of memory prediction in grid storage.

Talking to Vincent felt like sitting in a room brainstorming ideas. He is definitely passionate and opinionated about emerging technologies, the traits I admire personally. He mentioned enjoying blogging but also explained time constraints with current responsibilities both at HDS and SNIA as well the challenges of talking about future trends and emerging technologies that may be construed as pie-in-the-sky by some. Hopefully, he will take me up on my offer to work with him on blogging about emerging technologies as well as with Grid Storage initiatives.

SNW Solutions Lab

Last night, I also walked around SNW Solutions Lab where people were working hard to make everything operate properly. It reminded me of my involvement with SNIA SNW Interoperability Lab six years ago. I never got to see the fruits of the labor that time but from the planning chaos of 2001, this Solutions Lab seems lot more organized.