Back in April, Joyent sponsored and ran a highly successful conference all about DTrace. Which got us thinking that it was time to do the same for another of our favorite technologies, ZFS.

As it happened, the same great venue was available at a time when we knew lots of people would be in San Francisco. So we're holding illumos and ZFS Days next week. This two-day event will be your opportunity to catch up on the illumos family (including, of course, Joyent's SmartOS ) and ZFS, and hear what's new and what's coming in this powerful family of technologies. This is not a pay-for-play event where you get stuck listening to marketing pitches: just good, solid technology talks by the top minds who are actually building the software. Don't believe me? Have a look at this speaker list.

For those not familiar, illumos is the open source fork of OpenSolaris, and is the parent kernel to Joyent's own SmartOS, as well as several other distributions. You'll get a chance to hear from the illumos project's founder and its community manager, as well as companies that have built their businesses on illumos, and people who are using and developing it in everything from home servers to massive cloud deployments.

On ZFS Day, you'll hear from the people who are continuing the open source development of ZFS on many operating systems, and taking it further than it's ever gone before.

Oh, and did we mention: you get all this for free? Thanks to our sponsors you can attend both days free of charge, and we'll also be live streaming it for those who can't be here in person. But please do register so we know how many to buy beer for!

In addition, on Monday evening, October 1st, we'll be holding the 2nd Annual Solaris Family reunion, at the same venue. Last year's party was a fun get-together of old Solaris hands and new friends, we expect this year to be similar - with the addition of those who realized too late what they missed last year. ;-)

And, last but not least, there will be a hackathon, too! This was a big success at last year's Open Storage Summit, and this year will be held Wednesday, Oct 3rd, at Joyent's offices.

Dates & Registration

• illumos Day: Monday, October 1st, 2012, 9am - 5pm
• 2nd Annual Solaris Family Reunion: Monday, October 1st, 2012, 6pm-10pm
• ZFS Day: Tuesday, October 2nd, 2012, 9am - 5pm
• illumos / ZFS Hackathon: Wednesday, October 3rd, 2012, 10am - 6pm

CostYour kind attention. (In other words: FREE!)

VenueChildren's Creativity Museum (Theater)221 Fourth St., corner of Howard (behind the carousel)
San Francisco, CA 94103
(415) 820-3320

If you can't be in San Francisco in person, both days will be live video streamed; sign up to get access to the stream.

More information and registration: zfsday.com