We are attending vendor conferences so you don’t have to

This week on White Space, we delve into the murky world of major vendor conferences.

Tanwen has attended Dell EMC World in Las Vegas – the first shared event since the two technology giants joined forces. There were server announcements, storage announcements, entertainment from David Blaine and Gwen Stefani, and a portable ‘technology kit’ for the Red Cross made by American data center specialist viLogics - to be deployed in disaster scenarios.

Meanwhile Max went to Boston for another summit with OpenStack. The open source cloud framework is coming along nicely, and is even adding new consumption models - like the Remotely Managed Private Cloud category.

Another highlight was the meeting with the ‘once and future king’ Mark Shuttleworth, who’s about to resume his duties as the CEO of Canonical – look out for an in-depth interview in the upcoming issue of the magazine.

Sebastian has traveled down a mineshaft in Norway, to witness the opening of what could become the largest data center in Europe. The Lefdal Mine project is supported by Rittal and IBM, with the first containers – full of servers - already placed.

Peter has been manning the trenches at the office, covering Apple’s pledge to spend $1 billion on infrastructure in Reno – however we are more interested in the company’s IT equipment warehouse, and the surrounding tax situation.

In other news:

Also, turns out Max really likes his conference shirts.