In a little more than one week I’ll be getting on a plane to head to Berlin for NetApp Insight EMEA 2014. I’ve never been to Europe, other than to the UK (does that *really* count as Europe?), so I’m quite looking forward to the experience. While I don’t expect to have a lot of time to sightsee, I definitely plan on exploring the city as much as I can. After all, how can one visit your ancestral homeland & not at least take a peek around?

This year the conference is being held November 17th – 20th at CityCube Berlin, and it marks the first conference for our European customers (following the first US conference for customers last week in Las Vegas). I expect to feel just as much energy and excitement from them as we did from the customers who attended Insight US in Las Vegas last week.

Whether you’re a customer, partner, or NetApp employee there will be a ton of opportunities to learn and things to do at Insight:

• 22 Hand-on Labs
• 7 on-site NetApp technical certification exams
  • NS0-145 NetApp Certified Storage Associate (NCSA)
  • NS0-170 FlexPod Design
  • NS0-155 NetApp Certified Data Administrator (NCDA) for Data ONTAP 7-Mode
  • NS0-159 NetApp Certified Data Administrator (NCDA) for clustered Data ONTAP
  •  Ns0-502 NetAp Certified Implementation Engineer – SAN for Data ONTAP 7-Mode
  • Ns0-504 NetAp Certified Implementation Engineer – SAN for clustered Data ONTAP
  • Ns0-510 NetAp Certified Implementation Engineer – Backup and Recovery
• NetApp University Get Certified Prep Sessions – to help you prepare to take a NetApp certification exam
• Insight Central – a solutions exchange populated with over 50 partner booths, NetApp booths, Media Hub, and more
• Hundreds of Breakout Sessions
• Plus General Sessions, networking events, parties, and more

I’m lucky enough to attend the conference because I have a couple sessions of my own to present:

• II-3-2000 – OpenStack for the Enterprise: FlexPod with Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform
  • Wednesday, Nov 19, 11:15 AM – 12:15 PM in M7 – Level 3
  • Thursday, Nov 20, 1:30 PM – 2:30 PM in M5 – Level 3

• II-2-1931 – NetApp and Cisco Validated Designs for Service Providers and Large Enterprises
  • Wednesday, Nov 19, 8:30 AM – 9:30 AM in R13 – Level 3
  • Wednesday, Nov 19, 1:45 PM – 2:45 PM in M6 – Level 3

If you haven’t registered for Insight yet, or haven’t scheduled all of your sessions yet, there’s still time! Go here and get registered: https://netappinsight2014emea.activeevents.com/portal/newreg.ww

You can also get more information on the main website: http://www.netappinsight.com.

Whether you’re attending in person or not, be sure to follow the Twitter hashtag #NTAPinsight: we blew up the feed pretty well last week for the US conference and we’re going to do the same for Europe!

If you are attending Insight, please say hello – I’m looking forward to meeting many of you either at my sessions or at other points throughout the conference!