When we work in petabytes, we lose sight of what a million means in magnitude. The TechXchange floor of nearly a million square feet is inspiring. Inspiring in a way that the small contingent of IBM's Advanced Technology Group (ATG) left an impression on the three orders of magnitude difference in attendees.

It was a first time for most of us running labs in a wide open environment. The immediate visibility for anyone who raised their hand with a technical issue or guidance was an absolute win for this configuration. As the labs were all self-paced and documented (tip of the hat to Tech Zone for systems and additional manpower), the open environment, with the house mix playing on the distant speakers, was a pleasant break away from a closed room of click, scroll, tap tap, click click sounds.

We had a great representation with 11 lab sessions throughout the week led by ATG. Couple that with the other 5 tech talks, demos, and sessions and I say we had a pretty solid showing.

One FlashSystem Lab from basics to high-availability called for a repeat session due to waitlisted attendees. Same went for our integration lab of Copy Service's Manager and our enterprise DS8000. We did manage to go a bit deeper in ecosystem with our FlashSystem VMware plugin, which is much less than an hour of setup.

Speaking of VMs, Dan did a great job leading labs for our Defender platform educating how IBM effortlessly backs up VMs, containers, and OpenShift Virtualization VMs. We in block storage have it much easier as we simply provide the buckets for the apps, but kudos to Defender for making the plethora of application tie-ins just a different set of tabs in the interface.

Now there is no way I can blog about all of this and not bring in a little bit of bragging. We did a live Ransomware Threat Detection demo in a TechTalk surrounded by a full audience. These little FCM4s are impressive to see, but they are even more impressive to watch. This demo is also quite fun as the detection happens as fast as I can talk. In our live demo, we contained the attack 00:00:01:15 into the demo and calling for only 13GB of capacity to be melded with the latest snapshot. Yes, I purposefully listed that as days:hours:minutes:seconds as IBM is able to do that detection that quick, with zero performance cost, application agnostic, and operationally free. So many things to brag about here, minimizing that RPO with a sub-60s RTO is flat out amazing.

And of course, Byron's FlashSystem grid demo went well too. Seems the process of moving live workloads without application involvement is a fan favorite in FlashSystem nowadays.

Thanks again to the TechXchange team for having the ATG out there to continue aiding our account teams, business partners and our clients directly. On behalf of @Byron Grossnickle, @Dan Thompson, @John Shubeck, @Dan Zehnpfennig, and @Michael Herrera, we are all happy to continue this success and seeing each client as happy as the next 1,125,899,906,842,624.