I decided to stay relatively off the grid during my various holiday recharge periods that closed out 2015, and it’s time to jump back into the ring and type up some content once again! To kick things off, I wanted to promote two great events being run by good friends and community titans: Enrico Signoretti’s TECH.unplugged Austin and Stephen Foskett’s Tech Field Day 10. Both are happening in Austin during the month of February!

Let’s dive right in …

TECH.unplugged Austin

This one day conference includes a veritable Who’s Who of prominent tech bloggers delivering a number of snazzy independent-focused sessions that revolve around modern IT challenges. For example, Datanauts guest Nigel Poulton will be talking about containers, Chris Evans will have some insightful words to share on All Flash Arrays (AFAs) – here’s a recording we did together at an HP Discover event, and I’m certain that Tom Hollingsworth will crank his snark to eleven with a focus on Software Defined Networking (SDN). Additionally, there are ten sponsors signed up to educate and promote their products and solutions.

If you’re in the Austin area on February 2nd, Register for the Event and head on over to the Omni Hotel Austin at Southpark. While you’re there, I suggest stopping by Kerbey Lane Cafe, Home Slice Pizza, and Torchy’s Tacos – three of my local favorites. 🙂

Towards the end of the day, gather with the bloggers and Tech Field Day delegates for a #StorageBeers meetup!

Tech Field Day 10

Stephen Foskett, master peanut brittle chef, is bringing the legendary Tech Field Day back for it’s umpteenth event in the beautiful Austin area with Tech Field Day 10 during February 3rd thru 5th. I say beautiful because it’s sunny and delightful this time of year in Texas, rather than hot and muggy as with the summer months. Also, congratulations to their team on breaking the 1.6 million viewer mark in their sixth year of operation! 🙂

I’m really stoked to be presenting on behalf of my company, Rubrik, making this my 11th Field Day event (I don’t count VFD5 since I was only there as a video file) and the first one I’ve participated in as a vendor representative. Knowing how deeply technical and knowledable the audience is, I’m excited to see where the conversation goes and unveil some rather interesting developments since Rubrik’s first showing back in June of 2015. I also plan to bring a huge assortment of random and unique objects for Justin Warren just to make his disclosure post even longer and stranger than normal. Seriously – his disclosure posts are legendary; he documents the size, type, color, and shape of his free donuts. 🙂

Even if you’re not in the Austin area, the good folks at PrimeImage Media stream the entire event live and then Tom Hollingsworth and Stephen Foskett post all of the sessions to their YouTube and Vimeo accounts extremely quickly. There’s a treasure trove of content stored in their video vaults, and I’ve watched many of them after-the-fact, even when I participated as a delegate.

Hope to see ya’ll there!