I spent a few hours at Storage Networking World’s Expo today, chatting up vendors, checking out freebies, asking companies to describe themselves in three words or less.
Pretty much enjoying myself like the rest of the few hundred attendees, though most seem to have come for the buffet lunch, which wasn’t bad.
Copan, named after the Honduran ruins in which perfectly preserved “persistent” relics were discovered in the 1880s, offered visitors green squeegee balls.
F5, whose name stands for the ‘force 5’ hurricane power level, had red balls and t shirts.
Symantec doled out one of the neatest goodies — a network ethernet cable in a hard protective case.
Thecus — which is latin for storage — was the only vendor to have a little bendable doll named “T Girl” depicting a curvy nurse carrying a tiny replica of the vendor’s NAS box in one hand and a screwdriver in another.
You’d think the powerhouses would have the best toys and trinkets, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. AMD gave away luggage tags, Fujitsu had little flashlights though it was raffling off a $100 Visa gift certificate.
Compellent had a compelling raffle — a $250 Best Buy certificate, while 7-year-old InMage just had pens. Three-year-old DiscoveryBox had chocolates (macadamia) and colorful leis..not bad for its first time at the show.
Gresham, named for its parent company in England, had an iPod raffle going, while Xsigo (named for what, I have no clue, and neither did people near the booth) had a Wii raffle going, and decent looking mints. They did have some of the friendliest representatives at the show so they do get points for that.
NetApp had nothing, zip, nada, while IBM gave a little bit of “storage” in the form of a canvas bag to attendees.
QLogic, which describes itself as simple storage infrastructure, was raffling off a Mac Air laptop. Couldn’t find out how it got the company got its name however.
As the Dell boys pointed out their company is ‘green’ given its green canvas totes on hand.
EMC2 was raffling off an iPod. I did finally find out why there’s a ‘2’ in the name — it’s a take off of Einstein’s brilliant theory. Did you know the EMC referred to the first letter of the three original founder’s last names? I didn’t, and the booth people couldn’t seem to name the founders.
Quantum, which means unit of measurement, had an iPhone raffle and fun foam missile guns and darts which booth people admitted shooting over at DataDomain staffers.
Tomorrow I’ll have a few more to add to the list.
And while nothing quirky or wild was happening , though several people did mention Xiotech’s “booth buddies” — curvey, leggy, blond helpers..many seemed to enjoy the magician the vendor brought in to entertain.
The big question of the day though was why NEC didn’t have anything about Hydra at the Expo.
A call into their marketing connection went unreturned.
