I will be at Data Field Day 1

May 12, 2015 John Obeto

When sharks stop swimming, they die.

For humans, the same is true, only with us, it concerns learning: if you stop learning, you die.

Well, maybe not literally, but intellectually. Once you are intellectually dead, you cease to become human.

So as to preserve my pea brain from that fate, I try to keep learning.

One of the learning resources I am privileged to be invited to oftentimes are the Gestalt IT Tech Field Day series, this time, the inaugural Data Field Day, to be held in San Francisco, California.

Storage here. Storage there. Storage everywhere!
We all know about the explosion in the amount of storage we have immediate access to.

I still remember owning a Timex-Sinclair with 2K of RAM. Or my first hard drive for my IBM PC. 20 megs seemed like infinity.

Today, Office 365 gifts you with 1 terabyte of storage per user just for signing up!

All that data
We have mountains of data.

I can assure you, that is nothing compared to the deluge of data that is about to hit us from all the datapoints coming online as the Internet of Things or #IoT, takes hold.

That conversation between your teaspoon and your kettle with your refrigerator as moderator and your trash compactor as interlocutor is going to deliver lots of data.

What are we going to do with all that data?

Saving it is worse than useless if we do not i) make sense of it, ii) make it actionable, and iii) use the data to improve both the product and the outcomes of the intelligence built into the device, and finally iv) use that data to derive predictions for future events and/or products.

When I learned through the grapevine that Tech Field Day might be holding a Data event, I immediately wanted to be part of it.

Why?

Because of the learning thing I alluded to earlier.

I have found Tech Field Day events to be insightful, the presenters knowledgeable, and resultantly, the knowledge gleaned from those events are immediately actionable, as feedback from not only my readership, but I, myself, can attest to.

Gestalt IT Data Field Day 1
Tomorrow morning, I am off to the cultural heart of Silly Valley, ‘Frisco*, for Data Field Day 1.

The following three companies, listed in alphabetical order, will be presenting:

Cloudera Which aims to provide the speed, scale, and centralized management needed to create enterprise hubs
Hedvig They have a distributed storage platform that utilized commodity hardware to provide elastic block, file, and object storage.
SanDisk Their FlashSoft software reduces I/O latencies in Microsoft Windows Server and other server environments by enabling server-side SSDs.

As usual, the delegates are subject matter gurus, and I look forward to being part of the dialog.

This will be fun!

* It’s a SoCal thing: I cannot bring myself to call it my it’s proper name, San ‘Frisco. Especially since in SoCal, we know it really tweaks their noses!

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