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It is hard to believe but BrainShare 20TEN is nearly over. With just one day to go we have precious little time to get that last little bit of knowledge from this year’s conference.

Today’s highlight was certainly the IT Tech Talk event that has now replaced Meet the Experts. Even with the name change there was unprecedented access to the experts and much of the technology that they have prepared for us.

Throughout the day I took every opportunity to see what new and interesting things I could discover and I found two that really stood out. My plan was simple, scout things out then come back with lots of questions later during the IT Tech Talk. The first discovery was actually quite a surprise. Situated at the end of a row, as though they were added at the last moment, was a group of QA Testers that had put together a really cool tool for basically operating and managing a small private cloud that, in their case, is used in a lab environment. What a great idea that really would have application in so many places that were immediately obvious. Not only could this be used by a QA or Development team for a testing lab but it could even be used by any reseller or internal IT team to test and evaluate new products and solutions. I even think there may be applications in the enterprise, possibly even coupled with SUSE Studio.

What really excited me was the level of innovation that was coming from a QA team that was building something just to meet a business need. Proof, yet again, that there is immense talent within the walls of Novell!

PlateSpin was my other discovery. While it is not entirely new this is one product that I have been very interested in since being acquired by Novell a couple of years ago. I had forgotten that they support a wide variety of platforms so it is not absolutely necessary to be a Novell shop to benefit from this technology. I had also wrongfully assumed that it was really only for the enterprise, primarily for use in large datacenters where it could be used to reduce resource consumption or even manage demand. I was clearly mistaken. In small and large environments PlateSpin, even a single server, can facilitate server migrations, even if they are not yet virtualized. Probably the most interesting use case is in managing mission critical workloads (really any workload) to such a degree that they can be scaled, moved to another server to allow for hardware maintenance, or even in the event of a disaster such a workload could be moved to another location. This product is so powerful that I have just scratched the surface.

As BrainShare 20TEN winds up the IT Tech Talk event was the perfect opportunity get just a little bit more information and to build relationships with both the experts and the other attendees.

Disclaimer: As with everything else at Cool Solutions, this content is definitely not supported by Novell (so don't even think of calling Support if you try something and it blows up).

It was contributed by a community member and is published "as is." It seems to have worked for at least one person, and might work for you. But please be sure to test, test, test before you do anything drastic with it.