I just returned from the Gartner Data Center conference in Vegas and wanted to convey some of the highlights of the event.  This was my first time attending a Gartner conference, and I found it pretty refreshing as they do take an agnostic approach to all of their sessions unlike a typical vendor sponsored event like VMWorld, EMC World, Cisco Live, etc.  Most of the sessions I attended were around cloud and software defined technologies.  Below, I’ll bullet out what I consider to be highlights from a few of the sessions.

  I took the plunge over this past week and decided I would check out the Windows 8 customer preview.  Now one would think that I would simply spin it up in a VM given my background in the virtualization space but that would have been way too easy.   No, I wanted to see it on bare metal so I blitzed my primary work laptop and went about installing natively.  First impression during the install process…  Holy **it, this is crazy FAST!  Yes, I have an SSD drive and I was installing from a USB 3.0 external hard drive but still; WOW the core install was done in less than 5 minutes from start to finish.  Installing Windows 7 Enterprise via the exact same method was more like 20 min, so far so good.

I wrote this post on a flight back from Colorado (hence the title). It seemed only fitting that, being up above the clouds myself, I should write my next Journey to the Cloud blog post. I started thinking back a couple of weeks ago, when GreenPages held its annual Technology Summit in Portsmouth, NH.  The event consisted of two and a half days of keynote and breakout sessions delivered by a combination of our top vendor/manufacturer partners and our own solution architects.  The event attendees included delegates from our top 70 customers and ranged from C level executives to IT management.  Probably no surprise to any of you, but the theme of the event this year centered on cloud technologies.  I was inspired to write this blog post based on some of the keynote sessions and feedback from attendees.