I am once again humbled and honored to accept an invitation to my favorite industry event – Network Field Day (now in its fourth iteration).  Network Field Day 4 (NFD4) will be coming to you from San Jose October 10-12th.  The delegate lineup has a bunch of new faces that I’m excited to catch up with and/or meet for the first time:

	Anthony Burke	@Pandom_
	Bob Plankers	@Plankers
	Brad Casemore	@BradCasemore
	Brent Salisbury	@NetworkStatic
	Colin McNamara	@ColinMcNamara
	Greg Ferro	@EtherealMind
	Michael McNamara	@mfMcNamara
	Paul Stewart	@PacketU

This is a great crew with a lot to say and I’m anxious to see them unleashed on our assembled sponsors:

Brocade – I’m betting that VCS is going to be up on the block this time around.  We got a chance to play with it a while back and we had a blast.  With the annoucements that you’ve made around Brocade Tech Day, I’d like to hear more about the VCS strategy and how it will dovetail into your other product lines.  I’d also like to hear more about the ADX and how you plan on terminating VXLAN tunnels in hardware.  Please be sure that you can talk about these in decent depth.  Being told over and over again that something is NDA when it shouldn’t be a huge mystery is a bit disconcerting.  Also, if Jon Hudson isn’t presenting, at least have him show up for a few minutes to say hello.  We love that guy.During Wireless Field Day 3, Gregor Vučajnk (@GregorVucajnk) had a great blog post about attending that had something that I’m going to borrow for this NFD outing.  He called out each of the participating sponsors and gave them a short overview of what he wanted to see from each of them.  I loved the idea, as it gives a bit more direction to the people making the decisions about presentation content.

Cisco Borderless – Please, please, oh please tell me what Borderless really means.  Even if it’s just “everything but data center and collaboration”.  I really want to know how you’re pulling all these product lines together to create synergy.  Otherwise, it’s still just going to be the routing BU, switching BU, and so on.  We had a great time listening to the last presentation about ASA CX and Wireshark on the Cat 4500.  More of that good stuff, even if it means you have to shave your presentation down a bit to accommodate.  Remember, we ask lots of questions.

Juniper – Firstly, I want a bit of talk about Ivan’s post exploring all the gooey details around QFabric.  I understand that in this case it may be a bit like the magician telling how the trick is done, but this is the kind of thing that fascinates me.  I’m also sure there’s going to be discussion around SDN and the Juniper approach to it.  The presentation at NFD2 was so great I want to see you keeping up the good work.

OpenGear – Hello there.  I know nothing about you beyond the cursory Google search.  It looks like you’ve got some interesting technology that could be of great use to network professionals.  Case studies and anecdotes about using a 3G console failover to prevent global chaos would be awesome.  Also, allowing us the opportunity to poke around on a box for a few minutes would rock.  I want to think about how I can use your product to make my life less miserable when it comes to offline console access.

Spirent – Hello again to you.  I didn’t know anything about Spirent last time, but now I see them everywhere I look.  Spirent is like the Good Housekeeping seal for network gear.  Lets dive deeper into things.  I know you’re squeamish about showing off GUIs and things like that, but we nerd out on those things.  Also, I want to talk about how you plan on building testing rigs to handle all the coming 100GigE traffic.  Show me how Spirent is going to keep up the Ginger Rogers mystique that I’ve associated with it.

Statseeker – Network Performance Management and monitoring can be a bit of a dry subject, but doing it with an accent from the Land Down Under could be a bit of a treat.  After your recent Packet Pushers episode, I want to drill down more into how you go about keeping all the monitoring data.  I’ve seen what overwhelming an NMS with data can do, and while it was a pretty light show, I want to prevent it from happening again.  I don’t expect you to bring one of your famous Minis to give away to the delegates, but don’t underestimate the power of bribery via Tim Tam.

Tech Field Day – Audience Participation

For those of you that like to follow along with the Tech Field Day delegates from the comfort of your office chair or recliner, you are more than welcome.  I’ve even seen people talking about taking the day off from work or making sure they aren’t on a remote site.  We will be streaming each of the presentations live at http://techfieldday.com.  Note that this stream does use uStream, so we aren’t optimized for mobile devices just yet.  We’re working on it, though.  We will also be spending a lot of time on Twitter discussing the presentations and questions about them.  Just make sure to use the hashtag #NFD4 and you can be a part of the discussion.  I love seeing discussion and commentary from all the people watching online.  I always make sure to keep my Twitter client at the forefront so I can ask questions from the home audience when they arise.  That way, I’m truly a delegate representing people and giving them a say in what shapes the events.

If you’d like to learn a little more about Tech Field Day, you can head over to http://techfieldday.com and read up on things.  You can also apply to be a delegate at this link.  I look forward to seeing you online and hearing from you at this Tech Field Day event.

Standard Tech Field Day Sponsor Disclaimer

Tech Field Day is a massive undertaking that involves the coordination of many moving parts.  It’s not unlike trying to herd cats with a helicopter.  One of the most important pieces is the sponsors.  Each of the presenting companies is responsible for paying a portion of the travel and lodging costs for the delegates.  This means they have some skin in the game.  What this does NOT mean is that they get to have a say in what we do.  No Tech Field Day delegate is every forced to write about the event due to sponsor demands. If a delegate chooses to write about anything they see at Tech Field Day, there are no restrictions about what can be said.  Sometimes this does lead to negative discussion.  That is entirely up to the delegate.  Independence means no restrictions.  At times, some Tech Field Day sponsors have provided no-cost evaluation equipment to the delegates.  This is provided solely at the discretion of the sponsor and is never a requirement.  This evaluation equipment is also not a contingency of writing a review, be it positive or negative.