Tuesday at the Gartner Data Center Conference

I just survived day one at the Gartner Data Center Conference, and I'm taking a small break before booth duty at the Cassatt booth. This is my first year at the conference, and I'm joining a veteran crew of Cassatt folks-- or alumni as Gartner calls them. This year, the conference is held in the MGM Grand Conference Center, which is a 10-minute walk from the MGM Grand hotel. There are nearly 2,000 attendees at the event, but the crowd is quite different from the Java One crowd I used to hang with. There are quite a few "suits" in the audience, and the sessions are quite different from Java One sessions and BOF's (Birds of a Feather-- an informal tech talk usually held in the evening).

I attended several sessions today:

• Keynote: The Future of Infrastructure and Operations by Tom Bittman (VP Distinguished Analyst, Gartner)
• Keynote: The Gartner Infrastructure and Operations Maturity Model by Donna Scott and Jay Pultz (both are VP Distinguished Analysts, Gartner)
• Keynote: It's Your Ship! by Michael Abrashoff (author and former Navy Commander)
• Certain and Uncertain Futures of Server Technology by Carl Claunch (VP Distinguished Analyst, Gartner) and John Enck (Research VP, Gartner)
• A vendor session by Greg Ratcliff, Manager, Liebert Monitoring)
• Two vendor sessions by Ivan Passos (Director of Product Management, Avocent): one on their new VM support in DS View 3 and the other on their MergePoint appliance

Later tonight, I'll post some entries with my notes from these different talks. I've got to don my green Cassatt bowling shirt and get ready for booth duty. There will be a small contingent of us in the booth, flanking an MCC that has the latest Cassatt Active Response software. Let's hope we wow the crowd! It is Vegas after all.