Thursday 21 July 2011, SNIA BlogFest2: The Embiggening

It’s on again!

Last November, the Australian arm of the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), organised the very first BlogFest in Sydney, Australia.

Based loosely on the TechFieldDay format started by Steve Foskett (@sfoskett) in the US, it’s a day where a bunch of technology bloggers jump on a bus and trek around Sydney to chat with various technology vendors about their company, their products, their strategy, and anything else that comes up in conversation. Last year we had EMC, IBM, HDS and NetApp kindly volunteer to be the guinea pigs for the inaugural event.

The event was generally hailed as a success, so much so that it’s on again. We have a bigger complement of bloggers this time around, which is great to see. I’m privileged enough to be invited back for a second go.

The Vendors

The vendors who have volunteered to subject themselves to unstructured and free-flowing scrutiny this time are:

  • HP
  • Dell
  • Symantec
  • Dimension Data

A very big thankyou to these vendors in advance. It’s a bit of a risk to put yourselves out there for this event, given the (relative) lack of control you have over the marketing message. Hopefully you’ve learned from what happened last year and will embrace the day for what it is.

The Bloggers

This year we have some old hands, and some new entrants. First, the newcomers:

  • Leo Raikhman
  • Chris Wintle
  • Sachin Chahal

And the repeat offenders:

Sadly Preston DeGuise (@backupbear) is unable to join in again this year. He will be missed.

Onwards!

I look forward to meeting the new bloggers, and reconnecting with the folks from last time.

It looks like I’m the first to propose a hashtag this year, so I’m going with #sniafest2 unless informed otherwise.

And a big thanks to Paul Talbut for putting the event together again. His tireless efforts in the background made last year the success it was, and no doubt this year will be even better.

There are rumours of vBeers or StorageBeers of some sort after the official proceedings. I’ll keep you posted via Twitter as to how that develops.

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