Today was the first time I really had a session gap and time to wander about the expo floor. I had a chance to talk to some vendors. I took the opportunity to take a few photos with a fab little Nikon Coolpix S9500 that I borrowed from the office.
In the Surface section was a Windows sponsored “NASCAR” stock car. It was a cracking looking machine. A few people tried to rock it … there was no give in the suspension. I doubt it’s a comfy street machine 
Inside, you can see that this is not quite a family machine, and the stereo system and bluetooth appear to be additional extras.
DataOn are one of the big players in the Storage Spaces story of Windows Server 2012/R2. They have certified JBODs for Storage Spaces. This week they launched two Cluster-in-a-Box (CiB) appliances.
The first takes 70 drives. See those loops at the front/bottom? Those are easily removable backplanes – that makes all disk-related maintenance easy. At the back are 2 blade servers, with IPMI BMCs and 2 * SFP+ iWARP NICs. They’re dual E5 CPU powered with onboard RAID1 drives.
There’s also a CiB the SME. It takes 12 drives. There are 2 blades with IPMI and E5 CPUs, with 1 GbE networking.
I also saw the new Dell PowerEdge VRTX CiB. It comes with 2 blades by default, with 2 blade slots free. I was told it does PCI RAID instead of Storage Spaces. You can see that it takes 12 drives.
I also talked to the folks at F5. They clarified their strategy for an NVGRE gateway. The new software device is for their virtual Big-IP appliance. Their long term strategy is to include the NVGRE gateway in an update to the physical Big-IP load balancer. Why? Because combining NVGRE with the NLB allows them to intelligently do load balancing for VMs in VM Networks.
You know what disappointed me with the Expo floor? The lack of swag. Why should I talk to any sponsor if they don’t have something to make me talk to them. And what the hell am I meant to wear in the office now? My MMS 2012 t-shirts are starting to fall apart!!!
I wrapped up the afternoon by hanging outside the Channel 9 studio while Mark Minasi was being interviewed by MSFT’s Joey Snow. And I was chuffed that Mark gave me a plug.
