In case you haven’t heard Storage Field Day 12 is this week and I’m excited to announce that I’ll be attending this year’s event as an esteemed delegate. If you’re new to Stephen Foskett’s  (@SFoskett)  “Tech Field Day” events, they are described as “events that bring together innovative IT product vendors and independent thought leaders to share information and opinions in a presentation and discussion format. Independent bloggers, speakers, freelance writers, and podcasters have a public presence that has immense influence on the ways that products and companies are perceived and by IT practitioners. Our Field Day is an opportunity for tech companies and independent writers to meet, update and discuss products and form new communications.”

Basically Stephen and his talented team bring together a group of rotating tech startups and established industry big boys for several days of product and vision presentations that are live streamed in beautiful HD to the whole world, all the while being challenged, grilled, and questioned by a group of independent community experts called the TFD Delegates. These presentations are not to be missed and are truly a unique way for tech companies to spread their message and be challenged by the community in real time.

Storage Field Day 12 has an amazing line up up presenters, check out this list:

The schedule of presentations is as follows (All times US PST)

Wednesday, March 8	10:00 – 12:00	StarWind Presents at Storage Field Day 12
Wednesday, March 8	13:00 – 15:00	Elastifile Presents at Storage Field Day 12
Wednesday, March 8	16:00 – 18:00	Excelero Presents at Storage Field Day 12
Thursday, March 9	08:00 – 10:00	Nimble Storage Presents at Storage Field Day 12
Thursday, March 9	11:00 – 13:00	NetApp Presents at Storage Field Day 12
Thursday, March 9	14:00 – 16:00	Datera Presents at Storage Field Day 12
Friday, March 10	09:00 – 10:00	SNIA Presents at Storage Field Day 12
Friday, March 10	10:30 – 12:30	Intel Presents at Storage Field Day 12

In addition to our amazing presenter, we have some major brain power on the delegate panel who have some serious storage chops to their resumes. The delegates are:

	Arjan Timmerman	@ArjanTim
	Software is the new Hardware, or wait, Hardware loves the new Software, or whatever…
	Chan Ekanayake	@S_Chan_Ek
	Chan Ekanayake is the Lead Architect & Practice manager of the Hybrid Cloud practice at Insight UK, specialized in Public & Private Cloud, Datacentre Virtualization and Enterprise Storage (SAN) with over 14 years of hands on IT consultancy experience in the field.
	Chin-Fah Heoh	@StorageGaga
	Passionate storage technology enthusiast who enjoys the learning as much as the sharing.
	Dan Frith	@PenguinPunk
	I like punk rock and storage arrays.
	Dave Henry	@DaveMHenry
	IT Jack-of-all-trades, gadget geek, currently engaged in a job search
	Glenn Dekhayser	@GDekhayser
	20+ year IT/Storage/Network/Security Veteran.
	Howard Marks	@DeepStorageNet
	Storage Analyst Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary
	Jon Klaus	@JonKlaus
	Storage, back-up and server virtualization consultant based in the southern part of the Netherlands.
	Mark May	@CincyStorage
	Storage expert, unix curmudgeon, IT nerd, and sporadic blogger
	Matthew Leib	@MBLeib
	Long time engineer, and presales architect specializing in Storage, VIrtualization and Orchestrations in the cloud.
	Ray Lucchesi	@RayLucchesi
	Ray Lucchesi is president of Silverton Consulting, blogs at RayOnStorage.com, co-hosts GreyBeardsOnStorage.com podcast and has worked in data storage for over 30 years mostly in marketing and engineering new disk and tape automation products

Once again, thank you to Stephen Foskett and his team for putting together such a wonderful event and inviting me to participate in my first full #TFD #SFD event. I’m looking forward to a great week, making many new friends, and getting my mind blown by some seriously smart people. Be on the lookout for many new blog posts and twitter battles this week!