The last few months have been insane. First, I rejoined SunGard Availability Services where I am leading an awesome technical team with the ongoing development of our Enterprise Cloud Service. Then I spent most of October studying for the EMC Information Storage and Management Exam. After I achieved the EMC Proven Professional certification, I decided to learn a little programming with Python. And now I’m co-organizing a technical meetup group in Philadelphia called PING Philly.
PING (platform infrastructure networking group) Philly is a new meetup group that covers a broad range of IT topics including: systems, storage, cloud, virtualization, storage, networking, programming, etc. You name it, we’ll talk about it. One of our objectives with this group is to meet new local people in tech. It doesn’t matter if you are a network guy (or gal) or if you write code all day long – we want you there. If you are local to the South NJ/Philadelphia area, I highly encourage you to sign up and attend our inaugural meeting on November 30th, 2011 in Center City Philadelphia.
Meetings will be held once a month and will (hopefully) be sponsored. This typically translates to there will be free pizza 
The meetings are scheduled to run about 2 hours, starting at 7PM. The format will include presentations, Q&A, general discussions, and lightning talks. After the meeting, we will most likely congregate at a local bar for some delicious beer and we’ll continue to network.
Since I’m a co-organizer, I’ll be giving a brief presentation on storage: choosing and sizing the right RAID group for your virtual workloads. I’ll cover topics such as RAID levels, write penalties, calculating the number of disks needed to build a RAID group based on IO requirements, and how to get your IO requirements…things like the. A lot of that stuff is still fresh in my head from all of the studying. I’ll also post the presentation to my site via slideshare after the 30th.
Again, if you are local to the Philadelphia area, please join the meetup and make an effort to come out. Oh and if you are interested in sponsoring a meeting, please drop me a line. We’d love to hear from vendors. Thanks!