Another week, another successful tradeshow for iXsystems. Dru and Kris recently attended Linuxcon 2013 in New Orleans where they represented the FreeBSD Project with a booth and passed out schwag. This was our first appearance at this show and Dru and Kris were kind enough to share their experience with us. The evening booth crawl brought many people to the expo hall. Each vendor had a professional looking booth area with a printed banner behind a glow bar. As Dru and Kris manned the booth, a couple of Yahoo! employees came by to chat about FreeBSD. Several people also recognized Kris from the BSDNow show and came over to say hi.
There were some interesting conversations with the people who stopped by. One attendee from Puerto Rico told Dru that his company provides services to all of the schools in the country and that all of their servers run FreeBSD. “One of the best comments came from a Linux sysadmin who told us that the biggest problem with FreeBSD was that once you got it installed, you just forgot about it because it’s so reliable. He suggested that we come up with a periodic script to email the admin that yes, everything is still running perfectly,” Kris recounted.
There was a lot of interest in FreeNAS and the Life Preserver and Boot Manager utilities in the upcoming PC-BSD 9.2. Although this was a Linux-focused show, many attendees were curious about what ZFS on BSD could do for them. ZFS boot-environments was generally a very popular topic. Dru attended the OpenZFS presentation, where they announced its launch, and said that the room was packed with people. The audience was primarily made up of ZFS users who asked many questions about the new features, especially with regard to improved write performance. As we announced earlier this week, iXsystems is involved with and a supporter of the initiative. During the talk, the speaker mentioned FreeNAS, and the T-shirts for the initiative were well-received and had our logos on the back.
Dru and Kris were both impressed with how well-organized and professional the show was. There were many talks to choose from and the general consensus is that the organizers did a great job. Many thanks to Dru and Kris for taking the time to let us know how it went. Stay tuned for several other tradeshow reports over the next couple of months as we enter our busy fall tradeshow season!
Annie Zhang
Marketing Assistant
