Infoblox was our second presenter on Day 2 of Tech Field Day 5.  They came into the HP Executive Briefing Center and instead of firing up the overhead projector, they started pulling the whiteboard over to the center of the room.  Once they got started, the founder and CTO, Stu Bailey, informed us that they would have zero slides.  No slides? Yay!  Here’s someone that was paying attention to Force 10 from Net Field Day.  No slides, just a whiteboard and some really brilliant guys.

As I am sitting here typing this article, I’m listening to the audio of the presentation in the background.  I think Stu is probably a very brilliant guy, and starting a company is one of the most challenging things a person can do.  With that being said, I think Stu suffers from a problem I have from time to time: Resolution.  I often tell stories to people and I misjudge the resolution of the information I’m imparting.  My stories are utterly fascinating and I love giving out the little details and settings.  However, my audience is less impressed with my story.  They get distracted and lost waiting for me to wrap things up.  I get caught up in the minutia and forget to tell the story.  I freely admit that I have this problem, and I do my best to avoid it when I’m giving presentations.  As I listen to the audio of the session, I’m reminded of this.  I love history lessons more than anyone else in the world.  In fact, I have the History Channel on my favorites list.  However, in this kind of technical session with no slides to keep my focus, the firehose of the history of Infoblox is kind of overwhelming.  Whiteboarding works really well when you are putting topics out there that your audience is going to ask questions about so you can demonstrate and expand topics on the fly.  During a history lesson, many of the things that you are discussing are pretty much agreed upon by people, so you don’t have any real explanation to display.  I think some of the people started tuning out since the what of Infoblox was getting lost in the why of Infoblox.  Stu, if you want to help yourself for the next presentation, you need to hook your audience.  Give us the problem up front in a couple of minutes.  Let me try based on what I heard and saw:

In today’s world, network infrastructure is siloed and hard to manage.  The number of people required to be involved in new system deployments and change management makes it difficult to coordinate these activities.  In addition, the possibility exists that a misconfiguration or forgotten step could create downtime beyond expectations.  What Infoblox is trying to bring to the table is the ability to automate these processes so that the deployment and management of the network and its associated services can be streamlined.  Changes can be delegated to less skilled personnel so that the network is no longer entirely dependent on one person’s knowledge of a particular service or configuration.  Infoblox allows you to concentrate on making your network run optimally through standard repeatable processes.  Infoblox also allows you to see your network and service configurations at a glance.

Folks, that is Infoblox in a nutshell, at least as I see it.  Infoblox draws all of your DHCP and DNS servers together into an automated database that allows you to make changes across your network and it’s services instantly without the need to make the changes individually.  This would have been a great lead-in to the second part of the presentation, where we got to see how Infoblox works.  Based on discussions I had with my networking and systems brethren, it appears that Infoblox is attacking the aspect of a network that doesn’t have standardized procedures for implementation and change management.  In a mid-to-large size company, bringing a new DNS server online or implementing a branch office server are step-by-step processes that follow a detailed checklist.  Once all the checks are made, the change or implementation is complete.  Infoblox automates the checklist so that a few clicks can make those changes without the chance of missing a step.  Whether or not your environment needs that kind of oversight is a question you have to answer for yourself.  I can see applications where some or all of the features of Infoblox would be a godsend.  To be honest, I’d really like to see it in action before I pass total judgement on the software itself.  I just wish this message would have been put out there for us to digest as we investigated the whys of Infoblox.  A history lesson explaining the need for each piece of Infoblox should have been tied back to an overview similar to the one above, where each piece was introduced.  As the history of the individual pieces is revealed, they can be tied back to the relevant section of the overview. Think about it like a Chekov’s Gun for Presentations:  The DNS IPAM seen in section two, minute one should first be seen no later that section one, minute two.

After the Infoblox presentation, the next product on the block was NetMRI.  Now, I’ve heard of this product before.  However, the last time I heard about it, the association was with Netcordia and Terry Slattery, CCIE #1026.  As soon as I heard that Infoblox had purchased Netcordia and the NetMRI software, the sudden move of Terry to Chesapeake Netcraftsmen made a little more sense to me.  NetMRI is a great tool and appears to be the heart of the Infoblox offerings upon which things like IPAM for DNS/DHCP and the Infoblox Grid use to make the network changes.  Those familiar with NetMRI know that it allows you to collect statistics on your devices and monitor changes to the configurations of those devices.  By leveraging the NetMRI tools into the Grid product, Infoblox allows you to monitor and make changes to a wide variety of devices as needed.  This helps add more to their existing IPAM offerings.

If they really want to kill the market with this, they really need to drive home the need of IPAM and network configuration management to their customers.  Most people are going to look at this and say, “Why do I need it?  I can do everything with Windows tools or Excel spreadsheets.”  That is the historical kind of thinking that has allowed networks to spiral out of control to the point where the need complex management tools to keep them running at peak efficiency.  I’m sure Terry saw this when he created NetMRI and made it his mission to get this kind of thing put into the network devices.  By adding this product to their portfolio, Infoblox needs to drive home the need for ALL devices to be managed and documented.  If they can do that, I think they’re going to find their message much more succinct and the value and lot easier to present.  I think you guys have a great product that is needed.  You just have to let me know why I need it, not just why you made it.

If you’d like to learn more about the offerings from Infoblox, head over to their website at http://www.infoblox.com.  You can also follow them on Twitter as @infoblox.

Tech Field Day Disclaimer

Infoblox was a sponsor of Tech Field Day 5, and as such they were reponsible for a portion of my airfare and hotel accommodations.  They did not ask for nor were they promised any kind of consideration in the writing of this article.  Any and all of the opinions and analysis expressed herein are mine and mine alone.

Day 2 of Tech Field Day was powered by Starbucks.  Starting off at the hotel with a visit to the Starbucks counter was a no-brainer, but upon arrival the wonderful HP Executive Briefing Center in Cupertino, CA, the Holy Grail of caffeine addicts was discovered – a self-serve Starbucks espresso machine.  As such, many fabulous Dirty Chai drinks were consumed during the day, which may have led to my perking up and asking more questions during day 2.  Maybe that, or we finally got to the networking part that I knew a little more about.  I’m still blaming the Dirty Chai, though.

Netex was first on deck.  And they nailed it.  Not necessarily their message, but their presentation.  They kept their message short.  They had a hands-on example that kept us awake first thing in the morning.  They tempted us with beer.  They didn’t talk longer than they needed to and left plenty of time for questions.  And they still got done early.  Spot on, guys.  I’ll go on record as saying that it’s not necessary to fill your entire presentation with talking.  You need to leave some time for questions that might come up during the presentation as well as questions at the end after you’ve delivered your message.  The reason there are time constraints on presentations is to keep people from rambling on forever.  I don’t mind staying five or ten minutes extra so long as the reason for the overtime was due to a lot of good questions.  At the same time, only leaving two or three minutes at the end of a two hour slide deck due to constant chattering isn’t going to make any friends.

Netex revolves around a product called HyperIP.  HyperIP is a virtual machine that does something rather interesting.  It attempts to fix the TCP message window / global synchronization issue by avoiding it.  For those not familiar, TCP like to increase the window size as data begins transmitting so as to use the link in the most efficient manner.  However, eventually TCP will saturate the reciever with data and the reciever will ask the sender to back off.  TCP does this by backing down halfway, then ramping up again as the sender catches up with the data stream.  Imagine reading me a list of numbers over the phone.  You may start out by reading groups of 3 numerals, then as I get comfortable you may move to groups of 5 then 6, constantly increasing the amount of numerals per group.  Eventually, I’m not going to be able to remember all the numerals in each group, so I’m going to ask you to stop and go back to groups with smaller numerals.  In TCP we try to fix issues like this with things such as Weighted Random Early Detection (WRED).  WRED tries to avoid forcing the sender to back off totally by instead dropping less critical packets in the stream and making these be retransmitted later.  As such, the TCP window size can be kept as large as possible for as long as possible to allow the maximum amount to data to be transmitted in the most efficient way possible for a given link.  It should be noted that WRED only works on TCP due to the ability of TCP to retransmit lost packets due to TCP acknowledgements.  UDP can’t use WRED since these packets would be lost and never retransmitted (more on this in a minute).

HyperIP acts as a gateway for your server devices.  Instead of your backup server pointing to the WAN router, it points to the HyperIP VM.  The HyperIP VM then terminates the TCP stream and “caches” the data.  It contacts another HyperIP VM at the destination site and negotiates the most efficient window size.  It then transmits the data between sites using large UDP packets.  The analogy they used was that instead of transporting individual bottles of beer, the bottles were packaged into”kegs” and transported more efficiently.  When I asked how the HyperIP VMs dealt with packet loss since UDP is not tolerant of packet loss.  I was informed that the HyperIP system kept track of the UDP packets on both sides in a kind of lookup table, so it one was missed it could be retransmitted.  Once the UDP packets arrive on the other side of the WAN link, they are transmitted via TCP to the destination server.

The current use case to me seems to be for backup traffic or other large, bursty types of communication.  Netex admitted that this technology won’t do much for smaller conversations, such as HTTP traffic.  It also only affects TCP, UDP, and ICMP, so more esoteric protocols are out (sorry AppleTalk users).  I’m having an issue with the way HyperIP actually does it’s job.  It seems to me like they are re-inventing the wheel and trying to accomplish something that Network Cool Guys can accomplish with proper QoS design.  In fact, the traffic patterns shown in the presentation after the application of HyperIP look an awfully lot like the traffic patterns after you apply WRED to a WAN link.  HyperIP does have the ability to add some compression to the data stream, so there is the opportunity to reduce the amount of data being sent.  For those that might be using some basic QoS on slow links already and might be thinking about implementing a HyperIP setup, be sure you are classifying your VoIP traffic as finely as possible by using DSCP marking at the source or marking it by protocol / port.  I’d hate to see your priority queue fill up with HyperIP kegs and starve out the CEO’s conference call.

I can see a use case for HyperIP in situations where your company doesn’t have a QoS-focused technical person but has a lot of depth in the server admin area.  Matthew Norwood even called it “QoS for the Less Fortunate”.  I’m not saying that it’s not a fine product or that it doens’t have it’s uses.  I’m just saying that it can’t do anything for me that I can’t do already from the CLI.  But, try it out yourself if your curious.  There should be a 30-day free trial available by the end of February.  Just remember that you’re going to need to buy your VMs in pairs to make the work properly.

If you are interested in learning more about Netex and their HyperIP offering, head over to their website at http://www.netex.com.  You can also follow them on Twitter as @HyperIP

Tech Field Day Disclaimer

Netex was a sponsor of Tech Field Day 5, and as such was partly responsible for my airfare and hotel accommodations.  In addition, they provided a 1 GB USB drive containing information about their product, as well as a bottle opener.  They also may or may not have allowed us the use of their practical example, which consisted of an ice chest filled with cold Corona beer.  I can neither confirm or deny that these beers were consumed by the pool at the hotel after the end of Tech Field Day, day 2.  Netex neither asked for nor were they granted any consideration for this article.  The opinions and analysis expressed herein are mine and mine alone.

Monitoring of key devices in your network is a very big business.  Knowing what’s going on with your devices can keep you in the loop when troubles start to happen.  Almost as important, though, it event correlation.  Taking data from multiple sources and presenting it in such as way as to see how the minor events leading up to a problem can have an important impact is critical in larger infrastructures.  Many companies have software designed for this purpose, and one of them was kind enough to present to us at Tech Field Day 5.

Xangati is focused on virtualization and their software acts as a dashboard the collects information from various different sources in your network, from ESX boxes to network interfaces.  It presents this information to you in an easy-to-read format, the oft-used “single pane of glass” metaphor.  One neat thing that their software allows you to do is go back in time to see the events taking place right up to the point where your VMs went belly up, for instance.  This DVR-like functionality is very helpful when you find yourself in a situation where no one problem was the root cause of your issue, but instead you find yourself succumbing to the weight of multiple minor issues, the “Death by 1,000 Cuts” syndrome.  With Xangati, you can replay a mountain of data to find the root cause of your issue without needing to sift through endless router logs or VMware alerts.  One pane of glass means one source of easy-to-digest information.

For the moment, Xangati appears to be focused on providing their services in a report-only mode.  At a roundtable afterwards, though, Sean Clark brought up the point that this could be viewed as a great framework for allowing some kind of automated DRS-type solution that draws on the firehose of information gathered by the current Xangati tool.  Is this something that might lead them to being a target ripe for acquisition?  Or is this a capability that might be developed in house at some point?  I can’t say for sure, but I know that getting good information about what’s going on in your network is the first step in being proactive about troubleshooting.  And based on what I’ve seen of Xangati’s tools, I think they’ve got the right idea to get the information to you when you need it the most.  I’m sure I’m going to take a second look at this product as time allows.

If you’d like to hear more about what Xangati has to offer, you can check them out at http://www.xangati.com or follow them on Twitter as @xangatipress.

Tech Field Day Disclaimer

Xangati was a sponsor of Tech Field Day 5, and as such was partly responsible for my airfare and hotel accommodations.  In addition, they were the sponsor of our Thursday night meal and trip to the Computer History Museum.  At no time did they ask for or receive any consideration in the writing of this article.  The opinions and analysis expressed herein are mine and mine alone.

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.