Conrey.org

It’s been a few weeks and the dust has (mostly) settled from this years open storage summit and I wanted to get my thoughts down on paper as a first year attendee.

overview

First off, if you’re interested in the rapidly changing world around open storage software solutions and/or ZFS based storage, you should try to go next year. seriously. Start thinking about this now. This year had three great tracks and solid keynotes around the evolving world of storage and the datacenter, and it all made for a great show.

event organization

As a regular vmworld attendee, my bar is set pretty high about scale and size. This conf is much MUCH smaller. I quickly made my way through registration, and wandered around the partner area. The “people herding” side of running an event always seems to be where it falls apart, but this event was well organized and ran smoothly.

Thumbing through the schedule one of the things that stuck me was that all of the tracks had solid presentations, for both days. Like vmworld, when I wasn’t sure, I just dropped in on the session that I’d have the most questions to ask at the end of the presentation, hoping that the videos will be made available after the fact (Hey Nexenta, they are going to be made available right?)

Lunch was handled efficiently, and the dining area was large separate room.

keynotes

Keynotes were well planned and Nexenta did a great job getting speakers lined up.

Billy Cox’s presentation around open compute platform and how it is already impacting datacenter design was interesting, and explained some things I really didn’t understand around open compute.

Jason Hoffman, CTO and a founder at Joyent may have given one of the best economics of cloud presentation that I’ve ever seen. Not because of some new idea, or unique data point, but by a seamless story that allowed for greater understanding using already easily understood concepts. Seriously. If you’ve get a time to listen to this guy, do so.

W.C. Preston’s presentation about the “state of the backup world” was great, and his explanation around why cloud is going to stick around struck home for reasons I hadn’t considered. Great speaker.

Evan Powell’s keynote around open storage and where the project is today really set the stage for the whole event, and helped get everyone ramped up.

That was just a few of them. All in all, an impressive lineup.

sessions

Out of all of the sessions that I sat through, I’ve got to say three of them stuck with me for different reasons.

How to Design Your Metro Cluster with NexentaStor – Andy Bennett & Roel De Fran

I wasn’t expecting what I got in this session. at all. ACTIVE / ACTIVE / ACTIVE metro cluster (yea that’s three way) up and running today on nexenta with vmware. HOLY FRAKING AWESOME.

Design Options for Integration of VMware View with Nexenta Storage – Dan Beveridge, VMware

Sitting through this really made a few lightbulbs go off. the premise of this is why ZFS makes a silly awesome VSA for VDI workloads. I’ll write up something about this here in the coming week or so, it really deserves it’s own blogpost.

How to Fine Tune NexentaStor for Performance – Richard Elling Nexenta

This was a closing presentation right before the summit ended. This was your typical “tuning” presentation, except for a few things:

1. it ran long…. like over an hour long.
2. no one got up and left. There were rears in chairs for the whole thing.

parties

You’d have been shocked if I hadn’t mentioned the parties right? Nexenta and sponsors threw a REALLY solid party at the Loft Bar and Bistro. While it wasn’t an official party around Open Storage Summit, some of the vmware folks in the area threw a #vBeers event on thursday night that was well attended and it was great seeing the nexenta team show up in force also. Thanks again to @KokopeIIi for organizing the silicon valley vbeers events.

closing thoughts

The three sessions highlighted above really solidified what I see going on in the open storage arena today:

Nexenta is driving real innovation. While it may seem easier to buy vBoxMart solutions, you can’t blanket dismiss the cost savings and performance of open technologies today.

Nexenta makes a strong partner play whether it’s delivering VDI storage value and performance or carrying production shared storage workloads.

Nexenta (and illumos) has a REALLY passionate and technically savvy audience….. and it’s growing. I’m looking forward to next year’s event, and I’m looking forward to seeing you there.

I’ll be adding some photos that I took later this week. look for them here.