We are well into the fall tradeshow season. This new recap comes from our second-to-last conference of the year, the 27th Large Installation System Administration Conference (LISA ‘13) in Washington, DC. This year, we sent Matt F, Josh, and Dru. Afterwards, they were kind enough to share their thoughts on the event. We generally have two booths at LISA: the iXsystems booth and the FreeBSD booth. This year, the two booths were side by side which allowed each booth to support the other.
On the first day of the expo, Brad Davis from the FreeBSD Project stopped by the FreeBSD booth to help answer questions and talk about FreeBSD. Dru noted that most people were already familiar with and using FreeNAS. The new ZFS management features in PC-BSD 9.2, such as the Boot Manager, customized pool creation during installation, and automating snapshots/replication using Life Preserver, were also big hits with attendees.
“It was nice to see many familiar faces (most LISA attendees come every year) and to meet some new people.” said Dru.
Over at the iXsystems booth, Matt and Josh talked to customers and showed off a FreeNAS Mini demo. Most people were interested in the FreeNAS interface and weren’t even aware that we sponsor the development of the software. Matt met in person with several clients that we’ve worked with in the past for the first time at the show. Most people who stopped by the iX booth were interested in FreeNAS and TrueNAS, the enterprise version of FreeNAS, and Matt was only happy to talk about the software and the benefits of each.
When asked about noteworthy aspects of the show, Dru remembered that there was a lot of interest in the upcoming NYCBSDCon in February and the yet-to-be-formally-announced FreeBSD Journal which will be launching in January. Matt commented that he thought the conference floor was as busy as ever, highlighted the creativity of some of the booth set-ups, and said that the show was very much worth our time. Overall, all of our employees came back with the feeling that the show went well.
A big thank you to Matt, Josh, and Dru for letting us know how things went at LISA. Stay tuned for an update of our final tradeshow of the year: Supercomputing 2013, where we’ll be showcasing FreeNAS and giving out Free Beer!
Annie Zhang
Marketing Assistant
