About the VeeamON First-Hand Conference - Not Everything That Was in Vegas Remains in Vegas

From 6 to 8 October, the first international conference on data backup and data protection in virtual environments - VeeamON ( Habré announcement ) was held in Las Vegas (USA), which gathered about 1,200 guests from more than 50 countries.

Looking ahead, I will say that the first experience was very successful and it is already 100% known that VeeamON will become an annual event.

This year, the conference announced the release of two new products, one of which was already known to the audience of GT and Habr Veeam Availability Suite v8 . The second novelty is "explosive" in nature - this is Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE , a free tool for backing up data from physical machines - laptops and desktops - based on Windows.
')
What else will be remembered for the first conference for administrators of virtual infrastructures? While the memories are fresh, and the jet-lag does not let go (the 11-hour time difference is still not a joke), I will give you a reportage from the scene and try to convey the atmosphere of the event.

Follow the White Rabbit!

I apologize in advance for the quality of the photos in this post - most of them are shot on camera in the phone and not suitable for glossy covers. A beautiful photo report can be viewed in the group on Facebook .

Three days of the conference in the chic Cosmopolitan Hotel are best described by the buzz, the modern English word - several floors of the hotel looked like a beehive with green bees. Guests and organizers with all sorts of attributes of green color scurried through the corridors, flowed from conference rooms to the exhibition complex, gathered in the halls with cups of coffee, talked, shared impressions, exchanged experiences, and made business contacts.



“Follow me” - with such signs, we, people-signs, met VeeamON guests in the lobby of the Cosmopolitan hotel in order to simplify navigation and speed up their movement to the hall where the session was held. In total, more than 55 technical and business sessions took place, and some of them were held twice - the halls could not accommodate everyone. Many presentations were held in collaboration with Veeam customers, who shared practical experiences with the audience on data recovery and backup infrastructure organization based on Veeam solutions. In my opinion, such an emphasis on practice and real-life stories became a qualitative difference in VeeamON sessions. By the way, restoring a data center in less than 15 minutes is not just beautiful words from our site, but a real result, which one of the customers cited as an example, speaking at a session on replication strategies and automatic transfer to backup copies of data.



Starting from the first day, in parallel with the sessions in the main hall, it was possible to observe focused people at the monitors - these were the participants of the “titan battle” of LabWarz competing by solving the proposed scenarios of tasks for the implementation and use of Veeam products on the end-user side. The winner, Ideen Jahanshahi from the USA, was solemnly awarded the title of “The Best Veeam Engineer in the World” and presented a well-deserved reward of $ 10,000 (I wonder if he went to the casino later?)



With difficulty, waking up after the super-mega-party Veeam ("work hard, party hard", if you know what I mean), hosted in one of the nightclubs of Vegas ...



... Early in the morning, with a group of survivors of the most persistent and curious, we grabbed cups of coffee and went on a tour to Coalt's Cheyenne , a modern data center that provides server rental services (co-location) and located almost in the desert. The contrast in comparison with the usual average Russian server was amazing: seven levels of access to the data center, perfect pharmacy cleanliness, cool N + 2 HVAC ventilation and air conditioning and power up to 6.7 kW per 1 sq. M. However, I do not know how the rest of the tourists, and I was most impressed by the generator. A cube is built under the open sky, there is a door in the cube, there is no ceiling - the sun is shining. On the platform in the center of the cube is a large metal container; open the door - there is something gigantic, complex, green and 7.5 MW. It was not possible to refrain from asking the data center owner: “Is this a time machine?”
I was strictly forbidden to photograph there — I am posting the only photographs that the severe censorship missed:



For dessert, all the guests and participants of VeeamON were given a brilliant performance by the charismatic Alexis Ohanian , co-founder of reddit . The story of the rapid development of reddit from an unknown startup to one of the most popular sites on the Internet involuntarily caused an association with the story of Veeam, which for 8 years has gone from three desktops to a billion-dollar company.



Instead of concluding, I will say that no photos or stories can still convey the main thing that VeeamON will remember - the warm atmosphere of the event and the openness of people to communicate. Outside of this story, there will be a huge amount of interesting conversations between partners, customers, Veeam employees - conference participants, as well as jokes, exchanging opinions and discussing hundreds of topics from organizing a Hyper-V infrastructure to the optimal blackjack strategy for building a data center in your company.