Its been a long week… here’s a wrap up review.

Sunday was the first OpenSolaris Storage Summit. There were two keynote presentations, I did the morning keynote on the topic of Cloud Computing (what it is, how it relates to storage, etc) and the afternoon (moved to be after mine actually) was Mike Shapiro talking about ZFS Hybrid storage and the new era of Solid State Drives (SSD). Assorted other talks included updates on various projects, teasers for SDC discussions, and I even (being frustrated that there were no actual demos) did a 10 minute lightning session in which I demo’ed both arc_summary and Filebench.

In the evening there was an excellent reception during which a great many discussions unfolded and fun was had. I think it was a spectacular event and I hope there will be many more in the future. A big thanks goes out to Jeff Cheeney, Mark Carlson, Lynn Rohrer, and the rest of the crew who put this event together.

Monday morning SDC kicked off. The event was pretty action packed. There was a lot of great information from some world class speakers. Sun’s rise to dominance in storage was evident in the conference proceedings. While NetApp had some great presentations, they focused on current issues of performance tuning, corruption analysis, etc… whereas Sun’s presentations were focused on enhansements and new technology including ZFS, iSCSI Encryption (really just a benefit of ZFS Crypto), the iSER (RDMA iSCSI) project, FileBench, NFSv4.1, DTrace’ing IO, etc, etc, etc.

As with most conferences, the most exciting part is meeting new colleagues, sharing ideas, and talking with the subject-matter experts themselves. I was honored to meet and spend time with Mark Carlson, Bob Snively (a personal hero), Spencer Shepler, Michael Eisler, Steve Johnson, as well as friends such as Jeff Bonwick, Bill Moore, Mike Shapiro, Darren Moffat, Dominic Kay, and Peter Dunlap.

A special thanks to Sun for providing me with a conference pass for SDC, a conference I otherwise could not afford to attend.