TechReady9 Day 1 Wrap-up

TechReady is always motivating and day one of TechReady 9 was no different as thousands of folks from Microsoft’s field organization (Consulting, Support, Sales, etc) take over the Washington State Conference & Trade Center in Seattle. The day one keynote was headlined by Microsoft’s COO Kevin Turner who reviewed last year’s challenging environment and our successes then pumped up the crowd for FY10. Despite the tough economy its a pretty exciting time at Microsoft with the huge wave of products coming to market over the next 12 months.

After the keynote I attended the general session for System Center. This was very interesting, but  unfortunately most of it hasn’t been announced yet so I can’t detail it. The general themes of user centricity, virtualization, and modeling that were discussed at MMS are core to where System Center is going. The new System Center Service Manager product coming to market next year is also going to be very important. I look forward to the more detailed sessions on these topics this week. 

Next I attended the Microsoft Services general session. This was more internally focused on our Services organization and business topics so wouldn’t be of much interest to readers.

In the afternoon I attended a double session, 3 hours total on Hyper-V and advanced storage scenarios. This was an excellent session with several presenters from the product group and some of my colleagues in Microsoft Consulting Services. They covered storage improvements in R2 across iSCSI, FibreChannel, Cluster Shared Volumes, etc. A good bit of time was spent on MPIO which provides multipathing and highly available storage connectivity. Some new whitepapers on that will be published in the next couple weeks which I’ll link to as they become available.

Finally, in the afternoon I attended another System Center session which I can’t really give any details about.

As with every TechReady, particularly for an infrastructure architect like myself and most readers of this blog interested in a range of technologies, at each timeslot there are at least 3 – 5 sessions I want to attend. Fortunately all of these are being recorded so I can view the other ones over time. Looking forward to Day 2!