I grew up on a farm when I was younger.  My mother’s family contains many farmers.  This has afforded me some interesting opportunities.  One of these was watching a calf being born.  Just hours after birth, the calf can stand on its own.  It’s a magical experience that shows you how something so small can grow and change in such a short time.  And I got to experience something similar on Thursday afternoon at Tech Field Day 5.

Druva is a new company that officially launched at TFD5.  Now, they weren’t a “brand new” company with a lot of dreams and talk.  Much like the calf above, they’ve found their legs and are standing on their own now.  They have taken an interesting approach to backup technology and used it to address a segment of the market which I honestly hadn’t thought of before.  And, I really like their name.  “Druva” is the name for Polaris, the North Star in Hindu mythology.  For centuries, people have depended on the North Star to guide them.  Yet it is a simple resource that is always there and available when needed.  These were the guidelines that helped Druva develop their offering.

Druva is attacking the endpoint backup market.  They believe that the hardest devices in your environment to keep safe are not the servers and SANs, but the user laptops and desktops and mobile devices.  There is a large amount of data contained on these devices that is rarely backed up in most cases and can lead to severe downtime in the event of a theft or a technical problem of some kind.  As well, more and more of this data is being squirreled away on iPads and iPhones, devices that are difficult to reliably backup from an enterprise admin perspective.

Druva is ready to prove what they say.  Their server/client software download is a mere 40MB.  In a world today where I can barely make 10-slide presentations smaller than that, Druva can protect my laptop from data loss in the event it gets thrown into the office lobster tank.  After installing the program on a server, you can configure lots of different options to create and import user accounts that represent the target devices that need to be backed up.  Once created, you send an email to the user to validate them and them download a client to their system to allow backups to begin.  Druva deduplicates the data before it’s ever sent from the client system based on the fact that 80-90% of the data contained on corporate workstations is MS Office and MS Outlook.  By knowing how to efficiently hash that data and deduplicate it, they can streamline the backup process allowing much less data to be sent over slow links and shorten the time the user is impacted by the backup window.

Druva’s live backup and restore demo was hampered not by Druva technical challenges but by connectivity issues.  Their laptop was connected to a Cradlepoint personal hotspot device brought along by Stephen Foskett and with all the other devices using guest wireless and the Cradlepoint, the connection was saturated.  It almost felt like being on dial-up again.  I was impressed to see the amount of data being sent over the link, a scant 63MB.  I don’t know how big the folder was originally, but if it was a standard document folder containing hundreds of MB of data, there was definitely proof the dedupe works.

We were able to perform a single file restore to one of Druva’s iPads they had brought along.  So, once again Apple saves the day.  All in all, I like this product and think it has some capabilites that are sorely missing from the backup solutions offered by some of their competitors.  And just like good tech people, the whiz kids at Druva aren’t resting on their laurels.  They were talking to us about branching out and finding new uses for this technology and new ways to think about backups for more than just endpoints.  I can’t wait to see how the grow and change in the coming months and I wish them the best of luck in their endeavors.

A funny note about Druva.  We were having issues before the presentation figuring out which Twitter account was their main one, @druva or @druvainc.  We talked with Jaspreet and he told us that once upon a time, the name of the company was actually “Druvaa”.  One of their customers remarked that if they were really in the business of data deduplication, why did they have two A’s in their name? So Druva deduped their own name.  That’s dedication, folks.

If you are interested in checking out Druva, head over to their website at http://www.druva.com/ and download their product to try out.  You can also follow them on Twitter as @druvainc.

Tech Field Day Disclaimer

Druva was a sponsor of Tech Field Day 5, and as such was partly responsible for my airfare and hotel accommodations.  Druva did not ask for nor were they promised any consideration in this review.  My opinions and analysis are my own.

Our first session at Tech Field Day 5 was a trip the Symantec campus to hear about some interesting backup solutions from both NetBackup and BackupExec.  I’ve been an on-and-off user of BackupExec for many years now, dating back to version 8 running on Netware boxes and it was still a Veritas product.  However, things have changed significantly today when it comes to backing up devices.  Thanks to Symantec, I have a much clearer picture now of what that entails.

We started out the day by hearing from one of Symantec’s NetBackup product specialists, George Winter.  He described how their product allowed them to do some amazing things, especially in the VMware arena.  You can imagine that my ears perked up at this point, as VMware is something that I’m becoming increasingly attached to from both the network and the server end.  I’ve never had the pleasure of using VMware Consolidated Backup, but from the cheers in the room when we were told that NetBackup instead uses the new VMware storage API calls, allowing a NetBackup appliance to get the information it needs to backup VMware guests without the need for the “agent” software program that has typically been needed in the past.  This is nice for me, since I don’t have to go through the trouble of installing agents on each guest as I bring them online.  I can just tell NetBackup to go out and backup the whole server, or a selected subset of guests chosen by groups.  NetBackup is even smart enough to know that if I add a guest to a folder that is currently being backed up that I probably want the new host backed up as well, so it adds the host automatically.   There was a great live demo of the ease of use in setting up the system and selecting backup options.  Demos are always great for engin…I mean Network Rock Stars because we can see things in action and generate questions based on options we can see in the live client and now some canned flash demo that glosses over the knobs and switches.

After the first session, we were graced by the presence of Enrique Salem, the CEO of Symantec.  He took some time out of his busy schedule to talk to us about the vision of Symantec and some of the emerging opportunities he sees for his company in the next year.  He appears to be a driven guy and dedicated to his principles.  So dedicated in fact that he not only gave us his e-mail address, but his cell number as well.  In front of a live video audience, no less!  Men with this kind of dedication earn big points with me because they aren’t afraid to talk to their customers and partners about their products.

A quick break paved the way for the BackupExec team to step up and start talking about the word that would quickly become the underlying theme to Tech Field Day 5 – dedupe.  For those of you network folks that may not completely understand dedupe, it is the process of removing similar data from a backup stream by use of hashing values in order to reduce the amount of data being transmitted, especially over slow WAN links.  Every time I think about it, it reminds of the basic method in which programs like WinRAR and WinZIP use to compress files.  If you really want to know more about data deduplication, you should head over to Curtis Preston’s Backup Central website.  Curtis is now my go-to person when I have a backup question, and he should be yours as well.

We learned more about how Symantec can use dedupe to reduce bandwidth consumption and tame processor utilization, which are ideas that appeal to me greatly.  BackupExec appears to be positioned more toward the SMB/small enterprise end of the market when it comes to backup software.  This is the realm that I play in more than anything else, so this product speaks to me.  There are a lot of options for backing up the VMware hosts that are found in the NetBackup product line, yet scaled down to allow SMB admins to easily use them to quickly backup and restore data.  They even have the capability of performing single file restoration to guest VMs even though the only thing backed up was the VMDK disk files.  Quite interesting if you ask me, as most of the restore requests I receive are for a single Word document, not a whole server.

Overall, I was very happy with what I heard from Symantec.  Their products appear to fully embrace the new landscape of server virtualization and the challenges that it presents to legacy backup solutions.  My own experience with Symantec in the past has varied from use to use, but this presentation went a long way to repairing some of my hard feelings about their solutions, especially in the BackupExec arena.  I’ll definitely be taking another look at them soon.

You can get more information from http://www.symantec.com or follow them on Twitter as @backupexec and @netbackup.

Tech Field Day Disclaimer

Symantec was a sponsor of Tech Field Day 5, and as such was partly responsible for my airfare and hotel accommodations.  In addition, they provided me with a very delicious hot breakfast and some “swag” that included a steel water bottle, t-shirt, notepad and pen set, and a 2GB Symantec-branded USB drive that contained copies of the presentation we were given.  At no time did they ask for or receive any kind of consideration in the writing of this review.

Tech Field Day delegates are a rough bunch when it comes to presenters.  There is a reputation that precedes us when we walk into a briefing center.  I’m surprised they haven’t started confiscating our empty water bottles when we walk in so as to not provide us ammunition to express displeasure.  In fact, our displeasure with the same old presentation comes from the fact that it’s been seen a thousand times.  We want something that appeals to us as delegates for a technical event.  I wanted to put together some ideas for those who might be considering standing up in front of a Tech Field Day.

1. “Analyst” is a four letter word.  The almost-universal Tech Field Day revulsion to the name “Gartner” is probably the most legendary part of presenting.  If the “G” word gets mentioned, groans and hisses are lobbed toward the front of the room, and in some cases they may be followed by bottles, shoes, and chairs.  Other analyst quotes are also likely to generate some noise amongst the masses.  We get tired of hearing about this kind of fluff every day.  My ire with anaylysts is the fact they charge exorbitant amounts of money to tell you common sense things.  I can see the utility of providing head-to-head information on some products, but to be honest I don’t think Gartner has any better idea about private cloud strategy than I do.  Keep the analyst quotes out of your presentation.  Instead, focus on what your product does and why you love it so much.  Think about this scenario.  Your neighbor walks up and complements you on the new picket fence you’ve installed in your yard.  Are you going to thank them and talk about how it was back-breaking work and discuss the reason you used pressure treated pine over oak?  Or are you going to provide your neighbor with a report from the homeowners association detailing how your fence is high in “appeal” and moderate in “privacy” in the HOA “Super Triangle”?  Make your excitement about your product sound organic and we’ll believe it.  Watch the TFD 5 video from Jaspreet Singh of Druva and you’ll realize he loves his product and believes in it.  He doesn’t need to give you analyst quotes about it.

2.  Pencils have a point.  You should too.  Ever notice that most television shows have a pre-credit sequence today? A little vignette designed to grab your attention and pull you in to make you watch the ensuing 42 minutes of program and 18 minutes of commercials.  Know what they call this little segment in the industry?  The Hook.  It’s designed to draw you in and keep you focused on the show.  Likewise, if you want to keep the attention of a group of tech nerds in a room surrounded with distractions, you need a hook.  In most cases, the hook can be as simple as telling us up front what you’re striving for.  You need to get our attention.  Then you need to keep it.  When I give presentations, I try to do something in the first few minutes during my intro that makes my audience want to listen to me.  To me, the worst thing in the world is a pair of eyes wandering all over the place or focused intently on a computer screen.  At that point, I’ve lost you as a presenter.  TFD delegates like small slide decks for a the same reason they like to have the fat trimmed away on a good steak.  When all the fat is gone, the only thing left is the meat.  On your slide deck, when the fat of pointless exposition is gone, on the meat of the point or purpose is left.  Pick a point or a theme to your whole presentation and try to link back to it for each slide.  I put together a presentation one time for proper networking standards that referenced building a house.  Each slide had house imagery on it and I tried to come back to the that message before moving to the next slide. I reinforced my point in a way that hopefully resonated with my audience.  I’ve already said that should I be invited back for another Field Day, I’m going to make a sign labeled The Point and put it on the desk in front of me.  When I think a presenter is getting lost and is missing the point of the message, I’m going to make them stop and walk over to touch the sign.  That way, they are physically and mentally “Getting to the Point”.

3.  Keep the audience engaged. This kind of dovetails with number 2 above, but you need to find something to keep the attention of your audience.  Most people do this with a demo at Tech Field Day.  But two presenters went above and beyond for me.  Drobo asked a delegate to come up and pull a drive out of one of their demo units while we watched the screens to prove the unit would do what it said it would.  Could the presenter have done this?  Sure.  However, by picking on one of us, he got our attention.  Sure, we heckled Sean and had a good time with it.  We were also focused on what was happening in front of us.  The next day, the Netex “TCP as Beer” example was another way to get everyone in the room engaged.  By passing beer down the table to simulate TCP packets, we not only each had to handle the beer, but keep our buddies engaged as well.  I’m not suggesting that you stoop to the level of making us all do jumping jacks but don’t rely on only your slide deck.  Do keep in mind that many people watch the presentations being streamed over live video, so if you can find something to keep the home audience engaged as well, you’ll have gone a long way to winning the battle for the attention of Tech Field Day.

4.  We have a pulse.  Be sure to check it.  The funny thing about putting a group of technical people into a room during a presentation with communication devices is that we communicate.  We use Twitter to express our opinions about things.  By using appropriate hashtagging, we can let our audience know about things we like or dislike in real time.  During TFD 5, I experimented with an IRC channel for a different picture of things.  I got almost exactly what I expected – a Mystery Science Theater 3000 style of commentary.  For those in the chat room, we were able to express opinions without being restricted to 120-ish characters.  For the delegates in the room, we could express feelings without the need to interrupt the presenters.  Even some our more joking Twitter posts paid off eventually.  Sean Clark remarked that bacon was good.  Jeff Fry was a huge fan of chocolate-covered espresso beans.  When we got to the Thursday presentation by Xangati, we found bacon and chocolate waiting for us.  Even during the presentation, Xangati had a couple of people in the room keeping an eye on Twitter and answering our feedback in real time.  It was kind of surreal to have a second conversation going on in cyberspace even as we were talking in the room, much like the director’s commentary on a DVD.  If you as a presenter really want to get what we’re thinking, you should set up two projectors in the room.  One is for the use of your slide deck and for the delegates to see.  The other is projecting a Twitter feed or TweetDeck search for #TechFieldDay so you can see our feedback as we give it.  That way, you can see what’s working for you as a presenter, or in the worst case scenario, you can see when you’re losing us and need to get back on track.  I’m not saying that kind of presentation would be easy.  But for those with lots of slides, or those going for a more conversational approach, it can give you an idea of what we’re talking about without asking us.

5. If you’re going to skydive without a parachute, you better know how to fly.  At Net Field Day, Force 10 mezmerized the delegates by giving a presentation with just a dry erase marker.  No slides, no projector, no Powerpoint.  Just a whiteboard and a well of technical knowledge a mile deep.  If you’re going to give a presentation with just a whiteboard, you better be ready to keep your audience focused.  You also don’t have much room for error or pacing issues when you have nothing to keep you on track.  I’ve seen slide-less presentations and classes done before.  Narbik Kocharians is almost mythical with his ability to teach a 5-day CCIE prep class with zero Powerpoint.  Wanna know his secret?  He knows his stuff.  He studies everything over and over again.  He can answer questions off the top of his head.  He does his homework.  Think of a presentation just like carving a statue out of marble.  The basic outline is easy to come up with.  But the fine work of making a hand or a face can take days to complete.  The same is true of a presentation.  Throwing together 50 slides about a topic is easy (more or less).  But shaving those down to 25 takes twice as long.  And shaving that down further to 12 slides takes four times as long.  Why?  Because you have to know what you’re talking about the less you rely on visual aids.  You have to have the discipline to focus on the topic at hand and not get dragged off into tangents.  You have to be able to be a lightning rod for the attention of the audience so they don’t drift into solitaire.  I’ll admit, it would be very difficult for me to go totally slide free about something, even my recent IPv6 presentation that I knew backwards and forwards.  Because you don’t have the slides to guide the conversation and direct the focus of your audience, you run the risk of going off script quickly.  And you want your whiteboard presentation to sound more like a live episode of ER and less like Whose Line Is It Anyway.  Don’t just give a slideless presentation just to try and impress the delegates.  Impress us with your knowledge and product first, and your presentation method second.

I hope these tips will be useful not only to presenters for Tech Field Day, but for technical presenters in general.  We aren’t the usual group of marketing drones or unwashed masses.  We do our homework and we bring lots of questions to the table.  We aren’t impressed by slide transitions or rankings.  We want to see the gears and knobs and switches.  We want to see it work or see it break in real time.  Keeping all that in mind will put you ahead of the game when you step on the floor for your turn with the Tech Field Day delegates.  It should also help you avoid any flying water bottles.

Day 2

The inclusion of a self-serve machine for making an on-demand Dirty Chai is instantly successful.

Using beer as an analogy for TCP transmission is nice.  If you don’t mind near 100% packet loss.

The History of Network Protocols isn’t nearly as exciting as you might believe.

Setting up an IRC channel was easier than I thought.  Controlling it is an entirely different matter.

Some people don’t like IPv6.  Some people really like NAT.  These people should be rounded up and forced to eat lunch with me so I can prove them wrong.

Deduping the word “dedupe” from Tech Field Day 5 might have trimmed 4 hours from the total presentation time.

Standards are good.  Unless they are bad.  Then they can still be good, but only if you aren’t bad.

Jay Mellman is really tall.  And coming from me, that’s high praise.

Don’t let your kids succumb to George Lucas Syndrome.

Even 10-year-olds need to go on a date every once in a while.

Even a van full of the Tech Field Day Gold Support Team can’t make some people see reason.

Hotels don’t frown on you bringing your own beer to the pool at 9:00 p.m.

I can be entertaining and funny so long as everyone else is highly intoxicated.

Tech Field Day 5 has come to a close.  I have gained a lot from my experience here, while at the same time realizing I have much more to learn.  Seeing my online friends in reality was as fun as I imagined, and meeting new friends was great as well (yes, even Curtis Preston).  I have a healthy respect for Stephen Foskett and his crew and the wonderful job that they do putting together each Tech Field Day.  The coordination that allows us to seamlessly move from one briefing to another so easily takes a crack team to pull off.

In the coming days, I will have many more words to write about the sponsors of TFD 5.  While they did pay to fly me to California and gave me a place to catch a combat nap between sessions, I am in no way beholden to them.  I plan on giving my fair and honest opinion about the things I’ve seen.  I hope that my readers will find my condensation and appraisals to be useful and maybe even a little insightful.

In the end, I have found this experience to be quite unique.  I look forward to the day when I might be able to attend another TFD and gain even more knowledge that I can share with my friends and colleagues.  Who knows what I might learn next time?  I might even bring a belt.

Don’t be late in the morning.  Claire will find you and drag you to the van.

Symantec knows how to cook breakfast.  And they even remember the Diet Dr. Pepper.

Streaming video is frowned upon by almost every cell phone provider.

I’m not the only person that sweats during presentations.

CEOs are very forthcoming with their cell phone numbers.

Drobo means business.  And lots of frosting.

Skype should be disabled during presentations.

Storage companies that dedupe their own names are very meta.

Even a deduped backup is enough to make a Mi-Fi crawl.

Bacon and chocolate-covered coffee beans are the best. bribes. evar.

Charles Babbage built the first computer in slightly more time than it took to talk about it (and I have it on video).

The lack of a console port on the Babbage Difference Engine made me cry a little.

Lady Gaga hates bad restores.

And, the Tech Field Day crew knows how to keep my brain working overtime.

There were a lot a great presentations today with tons of good information that I’m still trying to digest.  Great companies, great stories, and a realization that I’m still very green when it comes to some of the rabbit holes of backup and virtualization.  I promise to give each presenter their due in time, with appropriate information and opinions on each.

Tomorrow should be an interesting day with some more networking-focused companies.  If you’d like to see the live stream of our event, head over to the Gestalt IT website for Tech Field Day 5 (http://gestaltit.com/field-day/tfd5/) and watch along with us.  If you have any questions you’d like answered during the presentation, don’t hesitate to shout them out on Twitter with the #TechFieldDay hashtag.  I promise I’ll do my best to keep up and ask away.