The vmware TSX didn't start till Tuesday  (had a nice weekend with the wife in cannes though untill I reversed the brand new audi A3 hire car in to a green metal post. Turns out that they don't sell Tcut in france but nail varnsih remover is a god send). Also when the little man turns green at a pedestrian crossing in france it doesn't actually mean that it is clear to cross.

 But I did make some notes for Monday.

I went for dinner with the product manager for magerius (one of our distis) in Germany.

Magerius have a remote training facility that we can use to deliver onsite training to customers. Something we can't do at the moment due to the amount of hardware required.

Magerius are a German company.(this should obviously count against them)

Magerius have an online quoting system in the UK now to give instant quotes including margin to their resellers. 

I was chatting with this German guy and just saying how I felt San virtualisation wasn't necessary as vmware does it at the front end when the lead technical guy for equallogic walked buy and took me apart. (where is Steve Dawes when you need him).

Equallogic do iscsi only sans where you pay one price only for the hardware and all the software including snapshotting and multipathing comes free. It does sata sas and scsi. Can aggregate the storage and the networking. 10gb over ethernet coming soon. One management interface, you can carve up the storage on the fly. Any luns are spread across all the spindals. Looks really good.

Anyway got to go now since the consolidated backup lab is starting now. I got here early (first time ever) and am sitting in the front row. Bound to have some complete geek sitting next to me.