In my previous newsletter, I wrote about how we’re changing our approach to events and conferences. I covered how we could aim to build better customer relationships with in-person interactions, the design of our booth, and how we might sift through many potential areas of focus to get what we want from events or conferences. These things are especially important considering the significant expenses involved with bringing a team to a conference.
The release of this newsletter comes at an opportune time, having recently returned from May’s Red Hat Summit in Boston. That being the case, I will use this newsletter to reflect on our successes and areas where we can still improve regarding events and conferences.
First up, we took the opportunity of the conference to launch some new graphics and booth design. While the booth design and graphics did draw positive attention, we failed to put anything on the center of the graphic, which led to a lot of people just staring at the new logo and asking, “So, what do you guys do?” This is a mistake on my part. I should have caught it during the final review. Lesson learned. On a positive note though, our shirts were almost all gone on day 1. We had to hold some back for the 2nd day of the show, so we weren’t empty handed. True to my previous statement about swag and the importance of quality, we had several people come up and comment on previous swag they still had from years past and how well it has held up! The track record continues.
The general theme of the speakers and advertising of the conference was of course around AI and all the fun marketing that comes with that. They did mention AI on the command line, which in my mind seems like something the security team might frown upon. Who knows what they are doing with that command line data that’s sent to someone else’s servers somewhere.
At the booth on the other hand, our most frequently heard topic was around OpenShift and KubeVirt. It appears that the recent doings of VMWare/Broadcom have sent people to the hills looking for alternatives. Of course, we’re more than happy to assist them. Coming from a closed source, proprietary world, filled with asinine price increases, our open source offering is pretty attractive. For those not on VMWare, I learned that fail over and fail back of virtual machines in KubeVirt is not a great experience when using other technologies. I was happy to share with these people that because we replicate the whole block device, via DRBD, we don’t have these issues. Replicating devices, failing over and back is what we’ve been doing for the past 25 plus years.
While not strictly a fail over and fail back scenario, an article on the LINBIT blog, “Using LINSTOR in Kubernetes to Create & Manage Persistent Storage for KubeVirt VMs”, does highlight a related benefit of using DRBD replicated storage to back KubeVirt VMs: supporting live migration. I can imagine the team will explore fail over and fail back in KubeVirt with a specific focus in future content, because they were recurring topics we heard at the conference booth.
Having been with the company for nearly 17 years now, one thing I’ve come to expect is the unexpected. This also applies to conferences. I will say that in years past Red Hat Summit has been on point with scheduling and execution. This year was a bit of a mess though. Initially, the conference was slated to be in Orlando, then it mysteriously changed to Boston – no big deal because we hadn’t bought flights yet. However, when we purchased our flights for the new location, we did that around the fact that the expo hall was scheduled for Tuesday through Thursday. This got changed to Monday to Wednesday and notification was not sent. Additionally the expo hall hours were flexible at random times. On the main day, Tuesday, the floor was scheduled to open at 10:30AM, the event staff wouldn’t let the sponsors in until that time. At least until the keynote got out at 9:30AM, then thousands of attendees poured in, without anyone at their booth. Thankfully, I noticed this and was able to grab my lead sales rep, jump in the crowd, and get to the booth. Being able to adapt to situations like that is extremely important, especially when dealing with events of this size.
Despite the bumps in the road, Red Hat Summit has always been a wonderful opportunity to connect with users and customers, whether they are existing or potential. It also gives us an opportunity to get real-time feedback and ideas from attendees. One topic that came up at the conference was how most vendors aren’t homelab friendly. We strive to not be one of those companies and to this end, we have a PPA and public repositories for testing or getting started with our software. In the coming weeks, be on the lookout for a blog related to LINBIT and homelabs as we try to tell that story better.
