Seattle Tech Field Day

I’m still getting caught up on events, so I thought I’d share with you a little about our participation in the 2010 Tech Field Day held in Seattle, WA. 

Back in the middle of July, Compellent had an opportunity to participate in Gestalt IT Tech Field Day.  As it says on their website, “This unique event brings together innovative IT product vendors and independent thought leaders, allowing them to get to know one another. It is a forum for engagement, education, hands-on experience, and feedback.”

Compellent was thrilled to be part of the experience as one of five sponsors for this event.  Others included F5, NEC, Veeam, and Nimble Storage, who used Tech Field Day as their official launch.

The event focused around these different vendors who had the opportunity to present their technologies to an esteemed panel of delegates.  The delegates, which comprised of technologists and bloggers, came from around the world.

The evening of July 15th included a reception and dinner at the Boeing Museum of Flight.  This was about the coolest thing I’ve seen.  I have a love for aviation, but to see where some of the first aircraft were built was simply amazing. 

The welcome reception was held in the “Red Barn”.  This is the original Boeing airplane factory.  The smell of the wood barn interior makes you feel like you were there.  Seeing the woodshop tools that were used to create the different components of the flying machine was pretty cool.

This was an opportunity for us to meet the other vendors in attendance, but more importantly to meet all of the delegates and learn more about them and what they do.  Liem Nguyen, the director of Corporate Communications for Compellent helped to coordinate Compellent’s sponsorship and involvement, and is seen below with Kirby Wadsworth, a marketing exec with F5 Networks.  You can’t tell from this picture, but Kirby was rockin’ some pretty sweet yellow slacks that night.

Most of the delegates in one form or another were involved in IT, but specifically this Tech Field Day was focused on virtualization.  So, the basis of what we talked about centered around our virtualized storage solution, but also the integration points with Hyper-V and VMware.

Bob Fine, Director of Product Marketing, Scott DesBles, Director of Technical Solutions, and myself tag-teamed to present the Compellent solution.  Bob and Scott provided the Compellent overview and a roadmap discussion which seemed to keep the panel engaged, and we also discussed Live Volume while demonstrating the Compellent Storage Center and its ease of use in addition to Enterprise Manager, the “single pane of glass” which can be used to manage multiple Storage Centers in your environment and the interface that enables the world-famous “6 clicks to replicate a volume’”. 

Check out Liem’s blog post about Tech Field Day with some exclusive interview footage of the delegates and shots from the Museum of Flight.

We had a blast meeting with the delegates and other vendors in Seattle.  We’d love the opportunity to do this again and continue to share the Compellent story.

Did I mention the view in Seattle?  For this last picture, I was amazed at how close the parking lot was to the runway at Boeing Field.  We were able to get some great photos and videos of the experience.  Here’s a nice shot of a cargo aircraft on approach with Mount Rainer in the distance.