Supercomputing was a blast! I got in late on Monday, just in time for the official opening of the show. They made a real party out of it – there were minibars spread all around the show floor, and a marching band going up and down the aisles.
At the iXsystems booth, we had an eyecatching video running on a TV and lots of FreeBSD Daemon Horns to give out, so we had quite a few visitors, even on the first day. We also had a FreeNAS Mini with read and write caches to show off what ZFS can achieve with a surprisingly small footprint (tens of thousands of IOPS!), and a TrueNAS demo chassis to show off the modular hardware of TrueNAS, and provide a visual for anyone interested in enterprise-class storage.
On Tuesday, we really got into the swing of things. Lots of people came by, curious about FreeNAS, the daemon horns, or why we were talking about how FreeNAS is “Free as in Beer”. Turns out it was because we were giving away free beer! The brew was Abita Amber, an awesome local beer. We got to talk to a huge crowd about FreeNAS, open source licensing, ZFS storage, and FreeBSD development.
On Wednesday, we continued with the beer, but also added in T-shirts for people who knew iX or FreeNAS already, or expressed a particular interest in FreeNAS. Several people came by just to thank us for developing FreeNAS, so we got to encourage them to keep spreading the word.
Thursday was a lot slower, but that also meant we got to have a few in-depth conversations that weren’t possible when the booth was busier. Overall the show was a lot of fun. The food (and New Orleans in general) was great. We had a great group of attendees and also a great lineup from iX – Thomas, Andrew, Marty, and I largely covered specific products, hardware details, technology questions, and development/future plans questions respectively. Here’s hoping next year in Austin will match up or be even better!
Ben Milman
Technical Marketing Specialist
