Cisco Live in Vegas this year was pretty awesome. I was there to set up and work the booth for Sigma Solutions. The objective changes a little each year, but this time it was to talk about our SolarWinds appliance, STATlight. This beast is loaded with drives, memory, Windows 2008 R2, SQL Server 2008 and of course hacks by Rob Schricker to make it tastier.

On Sunday EK and Greg set up the backdrop and signs while I made sure the server arrived in one piece. I fired it up, plugged it into a switch and matched up my NIC’s addressing with the server. In a few minutes, with Rob’s masterfully-written instructions, I had netflow running to the server. With that all sorted it was time to pack up and head to dinner.

Ivy met up with us and we all headed over to the buffet at the Bellagio. If you dig seafood, this buffet is amazing. Then again, it had to be for what it cost! I didn’t partake of the crab but the stuff I did have was pretty tasty. We had cabbed it down there but the consensus after dinner was we that we could all use a little exercise. So we hit the strip and started walking.

Monday things didn’t start until 4:30pm so we all had a chance to sleep in and relax for a bit. The SolarWinds partner brunch started at 11:30am so we all headed down there. They really took care of us—a multi-course meal, presentations, and of course, schwag. The shirt was a 2X so I brought it back for Ivy. If you’re a male geek then I know you feel me when I say she’s going to look mm-mm good in this shirt. =)

When the convention hall opened it was insane. The sheer volume of folks coming through the hall was amazing. I must have talked to 150 people in the first couple hours. I compared convention work to speed dating: talk to the person, make a connection, hand ‘em your card, move on to the next person. Anyone who knows me knows that I love to meet people so this was beyond sweet. I got to talk to engineers, developers, managers, integrators, marketing, you name it. Several folks had a specific need for our services too which was very cool. Especially sweet since some of them were in far-off places like South Africa. Heck yeah, my bags are packed.

Tuesday the hall didn’t open until 11am but most of the folks who were attending went right to lunch when they arrived. I think there were more NetVets the second day. They learned from previous years to go ahead and wait until the second day to hit the convention hall when it was less crowded. The trade-off was that I got to talk to each individual longer while the flow was lighter. I also had a couple customers that I’d only gotten to talk to on the phone come by and introduce themselves.

By the time Rob came to relieve me I was ready to hit the airport. My bags were packed and ready to go. I handed off the keys to the kingdom and by 5pm Ivy and I were in a cab headed for LAS. Jumping passed a couple delays to our flight we were safe & sound at home by 1am.

All in all it was a really good experience. I walked a lot, stood for a really long time, and got a solid dose of social interaction that’ll keep me going until my job next week which is, ironically, in Vegas.