XCES and DataON was a gold sponsor at Experts Live Netherlands in June.
Experts Live is the biggest Microsoft community event in BeNeLux, with over 1000 attendees. It held its inaugural event in 2009, and now hosts 7 international events, reaching over 5000 people.
This event featured two keynotes and more than forty breakout sessions from well-known speakers and Microsoft MVPs. Topics included data center management, security, Azure, System Center, automation, AI, BI, and virtualization.
Our day was packed with attending breakout sessions and presenting our first-time session on the possibilities of Windows Server software-defined storage. We introduced several Microsoft & DataON solutions and shared our experiences and best-practices with designing and configuring Windows Server solutions. Our session also included a live demonstration of Storage Spaces Direct on a DataON S2D-5212i with their exclusive DataON MUST infrastructure visibility, management and monitoring tool for Window Server 2106. MUST is a standalone software tool but is also available as a plug-in to Windows Admin Center to give you added capabilities such as disk mapping and call-home services.
In other breakout sessions, Jan-Tore Pedersen had a great presentation on the new Windows Amin Center (WAC). Jan-Tore highlighted the powerful features of WAC as well as all of the added features since its April release. He also demonstrated how to best utilize WAC and DataON MUST in your day-to-day operations.
Microsoft MVP Carsten Rachfahl’s session on Storage Spaces Direct shared his field notes from deploying Storage Spaces Direct over the past two years. He walked the audience through hardware configurations, firmware updates and core network configurations. It was an action-packed session with real-life examples and lots of usable information.
At our booth we showcased the DataON S2D-5212i, running Windows Admin Center with the DataON MUST plug-in. This two-node hyper-converged infrastructure is built to optimize the full stack of Storage Spaces Direct. It leverages the latest Intel Xeon Scalable processors with Intel C620 chipsets and all-flash Intel Optane or NVMe SSDs to achieve over 3.2M IOPS in a 4-node cluster.
We had a great day and we met a lot of inspiring IT heroes. Check out our highlight video to experience the atmosphere of Experts Live!