Blog Reboot (maybe) and What’s Next

It has been almost a decade since I updated this blog. Perusing the previous blog posts, it is interesting to see evolution of my professional interests from Data storage and Clouds to FinTech and Startups. This blog appeared to had become an exploration of random ideas and interests while I was in between larger projects.

Start and End of PeerCube

My previous interest in crowdfunding and analyzing peer to peer lending data evolved into PeerCube, a startup helping retail lenders, and a few institutional lenders, make better lending decisions. While writing was on the wall for a while, once Lending Club decided to discontinue retail lending platform, there was no path forward for PeerCube to continue. As a bootstrapped startup focused on retail lenders and being very efficient with our limited resources, we also couldn't figure out a pivot to continue operations. Considering over the years, we were pitched several competitors for potential acquisition, we feel PeerCube did quite well. But, it was time for us to start next chapter in our lives.

Podcast 19: Anil Gupta of PeerCube on P2P Lending Analysis

During the existence of PeerCube, we captured and collected lot of lending data, specifically from Lending Club's primary and secondary platforms that we felt was relevant for broader consumer lending industry. There were also some good posts shared on PeerCube blog based on analysis of lending data, for example changes in FICO score during the life of loans and how it impacted the final outcome of the loans. Unfortunately, they all have lost any relevance now and are no longer available online.

What's Next

During the past few years, I have explored and learnt about several random areas, such as Autonomous driving, Satellite imaging, Text mining, Options trading, Web development, in addition to moving to Japan due to family reasons and learning Japanese. I continue to be interested in AI/ML/DS applications and data-intensive projects.

While I am not planning to restart this blog again, going forward I will use it as personal repository of my notes, most likely in unfinished, incomplete, and unpolished state.

Rebooting this Blog

It has been several years since I updated this blog. For last couple of years, I had been busy with Executive MBA program at University of Washington. My interests also had diverged from purely data storage to broader markets and technologies for data storage, data analytics, data mining, statistics and machine learning. In addition, I became interested in Micro-finance specifically peer-to-peer lending sites such as Prosper and Lending Club.

After deliberating whether to start a new blog for my new-found interests or reboot this blog, I decided on later. This blog was always about my random thought and not necessarily focusing on a specific topic so as interests change so does this blog.

Once again, I look forward to slowly become a regular poster on this blog. I look forward to welcoming returning and new readers.

Adaptec Advisors are Back!

Adaptec PR firm sent a note mentioning that Adaptec Storage Advisor's blog is back! Check it out.

I am also trying to get back to updating my blog after a long hiatus. Hopefully with some small and quick blog posts on regular basis, my writing habit will establish. In the mean time, enjoy the sights from my various trips.

How do you overcome writing drought?

Denver Visit, New Piñata & Scalability Videos

Week in Denver

I will be in Denver this week till Friday June 27th. Unfortunately, I will miss nPost Golf 2.0 event in Seattle.

Despite a busy work day schedule in Denver, I am looking forward to seeing some friends and colleagues also. If you are a fellow storage blogger or reader or working on a cool storage technology and located in Denver area, ping me and we can meet one evening during my visit.

New Piñata for EMC & IBM

Recently, a reader alerted me to new Data Domain blog Dedupe Matters written by Brian Biles. Welcome Brian to the world of Bloggers. Lets see how quickly EMC and IBM bloggers make you the new piñata like they did to HDS bloggers. ;-)

In any case, it’s a nice change from their rumored no blogging policy. Hopefully, blogging at Data Domain will go beyond people in Ivory Towers.

Video of Presentations from Google Scalability Conference

Google already uploaded the videos of presentations from last week's Google Scalability Conference. I also plan to discuss some of the presentation topics in further details as time permits.

Welcome Remarks by Brian Bershad



GIGA+ by Swapnil Patil



HPC with NetworkSpaces for R by David Hendersen



Chapel by Brad Chamberlain



SMP via Transactional Memory by Vijay Menon



Communicating Like Nemo by Jennifer Wong



Maidsafe by David Irvine



CARMEN by Paul Watson



Scalable Wikipedia by Thorsten Schuett

Heading to Google Scalability Conference

Like Robin Harris, I am also attending Google Scalability Conference in Seattle Friday and Saturday. Hopefully, I will see him at the event. All sessions at Google conference look good. Unfortunately, I will miss half of them as two tracks are running in parallel. I am looking forward to hearing about maidsafe, CARMEN, GIGA+, and Google Maps scale down.

Recently, several readers inquired whether I lost interest in blogging as I am posting very irregularly. Nothing can be further from the truth. I am still as excited about blogging as I was almost five years ago when I first delve into blogs. The lack of frequent updates is due to my attention being somewhere else (new dig, rig and gig). Will elaborate some other time.

BTW, checkout Storage Optimization blog by Carter George. His startup Ocarina got interesting story with their data footprint reduction technology. I am looking forward to learning more once I refocus on new exciting stuff in storage. Hopefully, Ocarina can change the KPCB's luck in storage space.

Design a Storage Solution for a Creative Media Firm

One thing, I enjoyed the most in last four years while writing this storage blog, is the interaction with professionals from diverse background discussing wide variety of issues. Time to time, I was approached by readers looking for new opportunities or to fill open positions in their organizations. No, I am not setting the stage for launching a classified service on my blog.

The reader communication that attract me most are the ones where I learn something new or I can extend help to others or introduce two people together. And, such contacts didn't stop despite my absence for past few months.

A product development executive at a creative media firm contacted me a month ago requesting advise on storage solution for his firm. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to communicate regularly after initial contact. In our last conversation, he agreed for me to post his initial email (redact identifying information) on my blog.

Can you advise on a suitable storage solution for him? What questions will you ask to get additional information? What suggestions will you make?

Dear Anil,

I was reading through storage solutions and came across your very informative blog. I am not sure if you can help me on this; we are looking to deploy a SAN solution in our company and since my knowledge on this topic is only building up now I am a bit shaky about going down this path.

Just a quick overview – we are a creative media company with about 40 users and growing fast, our work involves 3D visualization, video production and interactive media development targeting architecture and pharma companies. We are continually fighting a battle with our storage requirements, we have generally been adding a NAS box as we needed more and using the older NAS boxes for admin usage etc. Our main hiccup is storage and to a lesser degree speed. We don’t have any serious application servers, just workstations and render servers in our production pipeline. We are looking at the NS20 Celerra from EMC, but am a bit unsure of this path and it’s applicability in our environment.

Thanks

JD

Thanks for sticking around!

It has been quite a while since I last blogged. This summer had high-and-low stored for me at personal level. The summer started out great with family get together and celebration but ended with death in the family.

Blogging and Storage weren't something I though about much in last two months. As someone said, life goes on, it is time for me to move on from personal tragedy. Thank you everyone for inquiring about my absence from blogging and whereabouts. I hope to slowly ease back in to blogging again.

If you are reading this post, thanks for sticking around!

Just Say "Thanks for Feedback"

For almost a month, blogging and blog reading took a back seat to hosting friends and family from four different countries, playing golf and Wii (addictive!), rigors of the day job and enjoying the summertime.

I most probably will still be on blogging hiatus for few more weeks if not for the battle of the words among storage bloggers Robin Harris, Barry Burke, and others. I guess I got embroiled by making an observational comment on Robin's Blog post resulting in pen-lashing from Storagezilla.

Overall, I am very surprised with the emotional responses and the offense both bloggers and commentators are taking. Be nice, boys! There is some great feedback in these blog posts and comments for everyone to take home. Whether, like it or not, just saying thanks for the feedback, will go a long way.

After storage blogging for almost four years, I would be saying thanks for the feedback, if I was receiving such thoughts about my blog from someone. May be, I am not cut out for EMC DNA mutation. BTW, thanks Chuck for acknowledging the storage trenchtrolls.

This war of words also reminded me of an incident, I was involved in, about two years ago. At that time, Hu was a class act in responding to my criticism of his blogging. In retrospect, I was out-of-line. Despite this incident, I was invited and hosted at HDS Executive Briefing Center by Jeremiah, previously HDS community evangelist. For this very reason, I admire and have great respect for both Hu and Jeremiah.

My offer to storage bloggers, readers, industry insiders and outsiders remains same. If you ever visit Seattle area, get in touch. I will love to pick your brain over a beer/coffee/lunch/dinner. I will do the same when I am in your town, just send me your contact info.

Of course, any feedback through comments, email and phone is always welcome too.

Wikibon, The Improvements Needed

As I mentioned previously, Wikibon project is very interesting and schedule permitting, I plan to monitor its progress. I see the value of collective intelligence and bringing down the barriers in market research and industry analysis segment. If the approach succeeds, it will revolutionize this industry, the way Wikipedia did to Encyclopedia business.

The intent of this post is not to dismiss the initiative as another hype of social networking era. All new experiments go through a phase of trial-and-error before finding their footing and niche. I feel Wikibon is currently in that early phase where Dave and his team are trying various things to see what sticks, what not and what will make them realize their vision.

The objective of this post is to help them during this early phase by making two very specific suggestions for improvements.

Lead with Content

Overall, Wikibon started with a good web presence. Only design suggestion will be to lead the presence with content and cleaner interface otherwise it just take away the community and participatory feel of the initiative. Some annoyances:

• Too many choices and information crammed in to home page.


• Unnecessary and excessive use of text boxes, fonts with different colors and sizes and slide style boxes and graphics.

As Chris Evans commented and I agree that to gain any type of mindshare, Wikibon need to highlight the content not the people.

Do you really need Wiki format?

It is great to see 340 articles on variety of topics already posted on Wikibon. Most articles seem to be "independent" in nature, written by individual authors containing only their opinion with very little scope to modify content by others. I found content to be more fitting for blog format instead of wiki.

This is a typical challenge in most wiki projects. Is the topic and content conducive to modifications by others? If content is more conducive to be commented by readers instead of modification then it is more fitting in a blog format. I am sure you will also be able to see the content that is likely to be modified and added with new information and the content that is likely to receive comments.

Compare the Wikipedia Backup page with following Wikibon pages for Backup articles. It doesn’t take long to identify pages that are more likely to be modified or content added by someone other than the original author/creator.

Implementing fail proof backup and recovery
Backup and recovery options
Backup and recovery techniques
Sizing up backup and recovery options
Data de-duplication and the low-end backup/restore choice

Checkout the storage market prediction trading feature at Wikibon. It is an excellent feature that has potential to leverage the power and knowledge of the community.

Time permitting, I may review Wikibon further.

Wikibon, An experiment in Collective Intelligence

Few weeks ago, David Vellante contacted me about his new project, Wikibon and invited me to attend Peer Incite research meetings. Wikibon is a project where he is trying to harvest and share the collective intelligence of IT community for market research, industry analysis and insights. Having previously founded the storage research group at IDC, it was no surprise that Dave picked enterprise storage as the first industry segment to target with Wikibon project.

What piqued my interest?

Considering industry analyst world being a walled garden with entry only allowed to chosen few who can pay hefty entrance fee, Wikibon is an interesting experiment. Any cracks in garden walls are a welcoming change for Average Joe like me. But my interest in Wikibon extend beyond just an open source experiment in IT market research. I am more excited about the harvesting and sharing collective intelligence aspects of this 'public' experiment.

How beneficial will it be for an organization to make decisions based on this collective intelligence instead of listening to chosen few with loudest voice or political connections? Unfortunately, considering the competitive advantage such approach offers, few organizations who experimented with collective intelligence internally willing to share and discuss their methods and findings publicly. I believe that blogs and wikis are not just external facing marketing communication tools for enterprises. They also make excellent methods for harvesting the collective intelligence of everyone with in an organization especially those operating in knowledge-intensive industry.

Unfortunately, Dave couldn't make me get up early enough in the morning to attend a meeting at 9:00am ET (6:00am on my coast), later turned out to be just a typo and time zone confusion. Finally, this morning I attended the Peer Incite research meeting on Data De-duplication topic. Even though, this topic doesn't excite me anymore [More in a later post. I have moved on to other exciting and new topics.], the affiliation of vocal participants and dynamics among the participants was interesting to observe.

So, what is my impression and feedback on Wikibon project, community web presence and Peer Incite meeting?

As mentioned before, Wikibon project definitely has piqued my interest irrespective of reasons aligning with Dave's vision or not. I am planning to monitor its progress, share my opinions, and participate and report as time permits.

[Too late in the night] I will try to continue my feedback on this project in another post.

Blogging Hiatus

Last couple of weeks, I was absent from any blogging due to back-to-back trips to Anchorage and Princeton. Unlike Storagezilla going off the grid, my blogging hiatus was unintentional and due to the demands of the day job and personal life. The highlights of trips were experiencing the scenic beauty of Alaska for the first time, opportunity to play 18 holes at Bunker Hill Golf Course, visiting Princeton University and talking to couple of very smart people.

Note to the readers: Blog posts will be sporadic from June through August due to demands of few other personal initiatives.

What else left to say?

Readers Sentiment on Storage Blogging

Mark wrote a retort to ex-bloggers who quit because of lack of readers, as I mentioned in my previous blog post after talking to few ex-bloggers at SNW.

In my opinion, most storage ex-bloggers tried to write for somebody else rather than for themselves. What they failed to do was to treat the readers, however few, as peers and build relationship. They just wanted to sell or show off something to their readers.

I firmly believe page hits, clicks, links and the number of readers don't count for much. What matters most is the level of interaction with readers, not only online through blog comments but also offline through emails, phone calls and face to face encounters. Differences of opinion doesn't matter, take solace in the fact that at least readers felt comfortable enough to share their opinions and express differences.

Even though directed at companies, The Cluetrain Manifesto gives advise that every storage blogger should heed:

Can you put yourself out there: say what you think in your voice, present who you really are, show what you really care about? Do you have any genuine passion to share? Can you deal with such honesty? Such exposure?

The reader sentiment, in my small sampling at SNW, about storage bloggers was very consistent. The readers expressed liking storage bloggers with personality and have one or more qualities of being opinionated, straight-shooters, analytical, passionate and even somewhat of nut-case. The blog readers in storage industry and in end-user storage community subscribe to most known storage blogs but they related to very few of them.

Actually, no corporate storage blog made the grade on building relationship with the readers, especially the readers from end-user community. The reasons for skepticism were quite varied like only covering topics aligned with the interest of their companies to when do these supposedly busy executives find time to write blog posts. Most readers wouldn't be able to differentiate most blog posts from the company marketing collateral if both were presented in same format. Some even assumed that topics and majority of content for corporate storage blogs may be generated by ghostwriters and marketing groups.

The data storage professionals who work in end-user environment also felt uncomfortable blogging about storage. The reluctance was particularly strong with ones who are involved in evaluation and design of storage solutions. They felt that the topics of interest to them like architecture, design, performance and problems are typically protected by vendors confidentiality agreement as well as fear of potential reprisal from storage vendors and their own management. My suggestion to end-users was to blog anonymously, as guest writer on other storage blogs or just feed the sources they trust, whether analysts, journalists or bloggers doesn't matter.

Hearing end-users at SNW unsolicited praising IBRIX, Isilon, 3Par, Gear6, and Acopia while thrashing products like SVC from established vendors, my advise to storage startups is to start blogging and also facilitate end-users to blog that are testing and using your product.

SNW Day Two 10:00am - Bloggers Evening Recap

SNW Day One was really busy from early morning to late in the night. For me, the highlight of SNW Day One was the Bloggers Evening. The turn out at the evening was better than expected.

I sent out a reminder early afternoon to meet outside the hotel lobby bar at 6:00pm. Bruce Moxon, Blake Golliher, Clark Hodge, Claude Lorenson, SW Worth (both starting a Microsoft Stoarge blog) and myself initially met outside the lobby bar. We talked for half-an-hour standing outside the bar about blogging and storage.

Blogging concerns expressed during discussions were about making sure the information posted on the blog doesn't run afoul with employers as well as respecting the NDAs and confidential information of employer and suppliers. As we had a mix of storage bloggers representing vendors, services and end user, the blogging concerns were very varied. Past couple of days, I met quite a few ex-bloggers who were quickly discouraged not by their employers or any external entities but from absence of readers resulting in loss of blogging enthusiasm.

Unfortunately, we missed Marc Farley as I didn't get a chance to check email before Bloggers Evening and he had replied to my reminder mentioning being delayed for few minutes.

In the end, Bruce, Blake, Clark and myself went out for dinner to a nearby Italian restaurant. We had spirited discussion mostly about storage and blogging. We talked about how posts from opinionated and analytical bloggers make for a better read than people who just want to write nice things, marketing spiel or creating a very polished post. We also got in to discussion about our favorite upcoming storage companies, favorite conferences and events, favorite technologies and how changing storage landscape may impact few existing storage players.

Afterward, Blake and I also got in to discussion at hotel bar about social networking and its migration in to enterprise, our careers, interests, storage landscape and what's next for us.

Overall, Bloggers Evening turned out to be a great get-together. I echo the statement expressed by Bruce and others.

When is the next bloggers get-together?

I hope next Bloggers Evening is sooner than later.

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.

SNW Day Zero 6:50pm

Storage can't compete with Aircraft Carrier

I arrived in sunny San Diego at 3:00pm to attend Storage Networking World Spring 2007. On my way from airport to Manchester Grand Hyatt hotel, the site of SNW, I passed by lots of boats and a huge Aircraft Carrier. And I couldn't resist the allure of aircraft carrier which overshadowed anything storage had to offer. So the first thing I did after checking in to hotel was to take a walk to fascinating USS Midway and the USS San Diego monument.



SNW before the Opening

After enjoying the sunny Aircraft Carrier, I checked out the different locations where SNW events will be held and took a peek in the expo hall before opening day. Looks so quiet but I am sure tomorrow, we wouldn’t be saying same.



Microsoft Water

While navigating around the huge equipments crates of various vendors, I ran in to none other than Darrell Kleckley and the Microsoft Storage team. I first met him when he was on SNIA Education Committee and now he is a Technical Evangelist at Microsoft.

I hope Microsoft sent cases of Windows Vista water to SNW. If Donald Trump can sell water then why not Bill Gates too! And if you listen to Paul Graham, water may be the next market Microsoft needs, to make itself feared again.


Bachelorette Party

It is just my luck that I get to stay in the room right across a bachelorette party room.

Can we meet at SNW?

Sunday 4/15 noon, Leaving Seattle for San Diego.
Monday 4/16 evening, At Bloggers Evening.
Tuesday 4/17 from 10:00am to 7:00pm, In one-on-one meetings.
Wednesday 4/18 evening, Leave San Diego and return to Seattle.

Rest of the schedule is wide open. And, I would like to meet as many of my blog readers as possible.

If you are going to be at SNW and your schedule permits, let's meet. Just send me an email or call me with day, time and location where you would like to meet.

Bloggers in Demand at SNW

Clarification: Bloggers Evening is Monday, April 16th at 6:00PM in Hotel Lobby. The JPR Cocktail event is Tuesday and totally separate from Bloggers Evening. I just wanted to clarify this as several people inquired.

I am amazed at the amount of attention being bestowed to storage bloggers at SNW by vendors, analysts and PR firms. I have received numerous emails and phone calls since my first post in which I mentioned plans to attend SNW as Storage Blogger.

Do you maintain a storage blog and would like to cover SNW events as blogger? Please send me an email or get in touch with Bill Winn at Topaz Partners who is managing media credentials for storage bloggers.

Several storage industry executives who presently don't blog requested to attend the Bloggers Evening. Clark Hodge and I discussed the issue of non-bloggers attending Bloggers Evening. We have decided to open up the Bloggers Evening to everyone.

Scott Kline from JPR Communications wrote a comment to my previous post and also sent me an email with official invitation for all Bloggers to JPR Cocktail Party.

I also want to have all of the Bloggers and associates of the Bloggers join us for cocktails and appetizers on Tuesday night from 7-9pm at the main lobby bar. I have attached the official invitation for you and whomever else wants to have some free drinks and food with all of the editors, analysts and companies.

Bloggers Evening at SNW

Response exceeding Expectations

Response to my call for organizing an evening with Bloggers at SNW has exceeded my expectations. Mario Apicella aptly summed up my feeling about this initiative.

Only two years ago you could have counted storage bloggers without taking your socks off and now we can put together a small crowd.

Initially, I thought this evening may turn out to be party of one or two. But after a week of responses, I wish we should have tried organizing bloggers evening earlier.

In addition to last blog post, Say Hello at SNW, I reached out to storage bloggers through comments on their blog and email messages. I will continue to reach out to more bloggers next week. If you don't hear from me, it may just indicate that I am not aware of your blog. Please don't assume that you are not invited, just send me an email, leave a comment or pick up the phone and call me. All bloggers are welcome to Bloggers evening.

Thank you Storagezilla, Tony Pearson, Josh Maher, and Mario Apicella for spreading the word through post on your blogs.

A Party of Six

As of Saturday night, Bloggers evening is no longer a party of one but SIX. Following bloggers have expressed interest in attending Bloggers evening.

Clark Hodge, Storageswitched! Blog
Claude Lorenson, starting a storage blog at Microsoft
Marc Farley, Equallogic Blog
Tony Pearson, IBM Inside System Storage Blog
Jon Toigo, Drunken Data Blog

Even few bloggers, who are not attending Bloggers evening, mentioned the reason being absent all together at SNW. They also have very encouraging words for Bloggers evening.

"I'm afraid I can't make it to this SNW. … I love the idea of a bloggers get-together." Dave Hitz, Netapp

"it's a great idea but I am not going to SNW this time and this is one more reason to regret it :>)" Mario Apicella, Infoworld

"It is a great idea and thanks for the invitation!" Mike Linnett, Zerowait

When and Where

I am not familiar with SNW host Hotel, surrounding area and attendees interest in evening events at SNW. I am tentatively proposing we meet Monday, April 16th at 6:00PM in the lobby of Hotel Manchester Grand Hyatt and head out to a bar/restaurant at hotel or a location close by. Any alternate suggestions are very welcome.

Agenda

There is no specific agenda for Bloggers evening. Most likely, our discussion will revolve around storage blogging and data storage industry. If you would like to discuss any specific topic, please leave a comment, send me a message or just raise your topic at Bloggers evening.

Neither Fee Nor Free

There is no fee for attending Bloggers Evening, just bring your passion for blogging and data storage. But do bring your credit card, cash, food stamps, guns or any other method you use to pay for your own drinks and food. Unfortunately, there is no financial sponsor to cover the cost at Bloggers Evening.

Even though, Jeremiah will not be at Bloggers Evening, he has offered to buy us some drinks. Thank you! for the offer, Jeremiah. Anyone from PodTech is welcome to join us at Bloggers Evening. Anybody else who wants us to get drunk and stuffed, you are welcome to join us and pick up the tab.

Say Hello at SNW

I am planning to attend Storage Networking World (SNW), April 16 - 19, 2007 in San Diego. I will be there as storage blogger and plan to blog often about interesting stuff from the conference floor, thanks to SNW organizers. Hopefully, I will meet lots of people from my favorite storage startups Cleversafe, Storewiz and InPhase, other storage vendors and users.



I am looking forward to seeing fellow storage bloggers, familiar faces from the past and some strangers who will become familiar in the future. If you will be at SNW and want to get together, leave a comment, send an email, call 206-390-4580 and give me a date and time when you would like to meet.

An Evening with Bloggers

I also would like to bring together all bloggers attending SNW for one evening. Please get in touch with me, if:

• You are a blogger attending SNW and want to meet face-to-face with fellow bloggers.


• You are interested in helping with organizing a bloggers evening at SNW.


• You are interested in discussions with bloggers.

Suggestions for SNW Attendees

Unlike fellow bloggers, Jeremiah Owyang, Chuck Hollis, Dave Hitz, and Hu Yoshida, I attend very few conferences during a year and like to leverage such opportunities to the maximum.

What were your experiences at SNW in the past? What looks interesting this year? What suggestions would you offer to SNW attendees?

Use comments below to share your thoughts.