vRetreat January 2017 - Silverstone UK

I was lucky enough to be invited to the inaugural vRetreat event held at the Porsche experience centre at Silverstone UK. The vRetreat events aim to gather industry experts with industry vendors to discuss the technicalities of their products combined with a bit of fun for us all! The first sponsors of vRetreat were Cohesity, Zerto and Veeam. 

Bloggers present at this inaugural event were, Rynardt Spies, David Owen, Simon Gallagher, Amit Panchal, Michael Poore and I. We were also joined by Joe Baguley (VMware CTO), Darren Swift (Zerto Principal SE EMEA), Ezat Dayeh (Senior SE Cohestity) and Michael Cade (Veeam -Technical Evangelist), vRetreat is the brainchild of Patrick Redknap. 

The Porsche Experience Centre is a purpose built facility alongside the Bristol F1 Grand Prix circuit Silverstone. It was designed to allow attendees to test the handling of Porsche's cars but to also gain valuable driving skills. The emphasise of the circuits is very much handling and control of the car and not all out speed. 

The day was split into two halves with the first half being a deep dive technical presentations and discussions with the sponsors. I intend to follow up with some specific information regarding Cohesity and Zerto but there were some common themes across the day. Whilst all vendors presenting had an offering that could be used in your data centre they also had offerings or functionality that would also work in or with the public cloud in some way. 

Zerto spoke about their ability to replicate virtual machines to both AWS and Azure along with other trusted cloud providers. More information can be found here http://www.zerto.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/ZVR-5.0-Microsoft-Azure-Overview.pdf

Veeam spoke about their Azure restoration functionality and the ability to backup Office 365 email to a Veeam repository. More information can be found here https://www.veeam.com/cloud-direct-restore-azure.html

Cohesity talked about a number of cloud orientated features allowing you to almost tier data to the cloud where appropriate alongside using the cloud for DR replication. More information can be found here http://cohesity.com/solutions/cloud-integration/  

The hybrid cloud era is definitely upon us!

Please see my video montage of the day below and also the doodle I completed on the day. Watch this space for more information from Zerto and Cohesity coming soon. 

The second half of the day was all about the cars, I personally had a session in the Porsche Caymen S and 911 Targa. My instructor gave me tuition on everything from handling to power delivery and breaking as well controlling the car in skid conditions! I think we all came away wanting a Porsche! Thankfully they didnt sell them their or I think we may have all come away out of pocket!!!