Breathing Data

The GestaltIT Tech Field Day event just wrapped up and it was a very interesting event. Stephen Foskett and Claire Chaplais did a phenomenal job at keeping the wheels on the bus. I realized that the attendees were just as critical as making the event a success above and beyond the vendors. I learned so much from others who either knew more or had different perspectives. The genesis of this list comes from the question I asked myself and other attendees constantly which was, “What can we do to get deeper than a standard technical presentation or trade show booth demo.”

1. Ask yourself what you want out of it – Remember, some of your attendees have never heard of you but many know some of your pitch already. Figure out what you want to get out of the event ahead of time and ask yourself if attendees will walk away talking about your presentations the way you wanted them to.

2. Cover the basics and then get into the weeds – We love the weeds. Some of us do anyway. It shows us you know what you’re talking about. It separates you from your competition. Tell us your strengths and weaknesses. We are more effective when we are armed with more information.

3. Bring your best people - You want to bring your best and brightest because there will be people (like me) who will grind into the details. 3Par and Ocarina brought their rockstars and it was apparent to each and every attendee. They knew their stuff and didn’t push questions aside.

4. Think and re-think your demo or hands-on labs - Some of the ones we experienced were great but others weren’t effective. Demos and labs that cover the basics *aren’t* always the best. People who are following the event will say, “I could’ve done that. Show me something new and different.” Remember, some of us love the CLI and others could care less. Make sure your activity will keep people engaged. Data Robotics did this very well but a big reason is because their technology is *different*. They understood how to deliver an experience much like Steve Jobs and Apple does. Their CEO even did a whiteboard of their technology and he got into the weeds.

5. There is never enough time - Almost all the vendors were a bit over schedule. Don’t try to cram too much in if it won’t fit or get a bigger timeslot. Many vendors had this happen but kudos to them for rolling right through.

Remember that you will get both good and bad feedback but being in tune with your audience is what matters. The rules above are not a guaranteed recipe for successful but they’ll give you a good start. They are universal and apply whenever you are pitching anything, not just during a Tech Field Day event. Stephen will be posting the videos of the sessions, watch them and learn from what worked and what didn’t.

I was invited as an “influencer” to attend the 2009 Microsoft Professional Developer’s Conference by Brian Prince.  This is my first PDC and I’m absolutely stoked to be here.  The event is important because it is the official launch of Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform.

In case you don’t know what Azure is, here’s a description from Microsoft’s web site:

The Windows Azure platform offers an intuitive, reliable and powerful platform for the creation of web applications and services.

The Windows Azure platform is comprised of Windows Azure: an operating system as a service; SQL Azure: a fully relational database in the cloud; and .NET Services: consumable web-based services that provide both secure connectivity and federated access control for applications.

Currently in Community Technology Preview (CTP), the services are free to evaluate through January 2010. We will begin charging customers on February 1st, 2010.

I’m excited to be a part of such a big event for Microsoft. One thing that seems to be consistent is that this is not your dad’s Microsoft. Their cloud group started with twenty engineers and has ramped up over the last couple of years.

Like I’ve done in the past, here’s a “What I want out of PDC09″ list. If there’s something you would like out of PDC, feel free to leave a comment or e-mail me.

1. Get the latest updates on the Azure stack
2. Understand the limitations and where different services are best used
3. See how Azure addresses challenges like deployment, scaling, security and private cloud integration
4. Understand how Microsoft is making their software cloud-aware
5. Talk to more people using Azure and see examples of how they are using it

Much of it is cloud-focused because I spend a bit of my time running Indy Cloud Users and involved with CloudCamp. It has been awhile since I’ve spent time with developers so I’m sure I will be learning a lot. I’ve been impressed with the dynamic nature of the company and individuals like Brian who deliver the message about what Microsoft is doing.

The GestaltIT Tech Field Day is upon us… Stephen Foskett has put together an amazing event. The GestaltIT authors and other peers coming together to listen to the interesting things that some vendors are doing.  It’ll be held out in Silicon Valley from November 12th-13th.

Why is this important?  Because it will give attendees some good hands-on experiences with the products and not just marketcture slides.

We’ll all be blogging about the event and also tweeting with the #techfieldday hash tag on twitter.

Here are the sponsors:

Supporting sponsors for portions of the event:

Here’s the official blurb from the GestaltIT.com site.

Today, we are pleased to demonstrate an expanded vision by announcing the first-ever Gestalt IT event, Tech Field Day! We will be bringing many of our own authors as well as other like-minded folks to Silicon Valley on November 12 and 13, 2009 for a live, in-person event. We have invited some of the most interesting and innovative companies to sponsor the event, presenting their technology and products.

This is not a trade show, a junket, or an analyst day. Rather, the participating sponsors will be engaging the attendees, inviting feedback, and fostering open communication. We were inspired by HP’s series of Tech Days and wanted to broaden the concept, bringing in more products and a broader range of technologies. We also liked the idea of creating and managing a similar event as an independent third party.

It’s official… Data deduplication has been added to ZFS (read the link if you’re new to data deduplication). Hats off to Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore who did a ton of the work in addition to Mark Maybee, Matt Ahrens, Adam Leventhal, George Wilson and the entire ZFS team.  The implementation is a synchronous block-level one which deduplicates data immediately as it is written.  This is analogous as to how DataDomain does it in their dedupe appliances.

What’s interesting about this is now dedupe will be available for *free* unless Oracle does something stupid.  Sun’s implementation is complimentary to the already-existing filesystem compression.  I’m not sure how much of an issue this is yet but the current iteration can not take advantage of SHA256 acceleration in the SPARC Niagara2 CPUs but eventually we should see hardware acceleration implemented.

When will it be available? It should be available in the Opensolaris dev branches in the next couple of weeks as code was just committed to be part of snv_128.  General available in Solaris 10 will take a bit longer until the next update happens.

For OpenSolaris, you change your repository and switch to the development branches – should be available to public in about 3-3.5 weeks time.  Plenty of instructions on how to do this on the net and in this list.  — James Lever on the zfs-discuss mailing list

How do I use it? If you haven’t built an Opensolaris box before, you should start looking at this great blog post here.  I wouldn’t get things rolling until dedupe is in the public release tree.

Ah, finally, the part you’ve really been waiting for.

If you have a storage pool named ‘tank’ and you want to use dedup, just type this:

zfs set dedup=on tank

That’s it.

Like all zfs properties, the ‘dedup’ property follows the usual rules for ZFS dataset property inheritance. Thus, even though deduplication has pool-wide scope, you can opt in or opt out on a per-dataset basis.

– Jeff Bonwick http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/en_US/entry/zfs_dedup#comments

What does this mean to me? Depends.  For people who like to tinker, you can build your own NAS or iSCSI server with dedupe *and* compression turned on.  Modern CPUs keep increasing in speed and can handle this.  This is huge.  Now, should you abandon considering commercial dedupe appliances that are shipping today?  Not if you want a solution for production as this won’t be officially supported until it’s rolled into the next Solaris update.  For commercial dedupe technology vendors, this is another mark on the scorecard for the commoditization of dedupe.

What things do I need to be aware of? The bugs need to be worked out of this early on so apply standard caution.  READ JEFF’s BLOG POST FIRST!!! There is a verification feature, use it if you’re either worried about your data or using fletcher-4 as a hashing algorithm to speed up dedupe performance (zfs set dedup=verify tank or zfs set dedup=fletcher4,verify tank).

How do I stay up to date on ZFS in general? Subscribe to the zfs-discuss mailing list (also in forum format).  It can be high volume but it is worth it if you want to stay on top of all things zfs.