Almost there

I am told that the art of blogging is to keep your communications regular and interesting - but I am afraid dear reader that while (I hope) my posts have been somewhat of interest to you - they certainly have not been regular for the past few weeks!! As always, you start with the best intentions, but the build-up of work over the past month has seen that little window that keeps popping up saying 'SNW blog post' from my outlook calendar getting snoozed longer and longer.

Until now !!

So the team has finally put to bed the conference guide, the signage, the feedback forms, the show-daily brochures, the final stand layouts, the catering plans, the meeting room schedules, the press invitations and travel support plans and of course the continual registering of delegates - and a whole lot more - and with less than two weeks to go everything is in place and looking (dare I say it) good.

From our side - i.e. the agenda content speaker program - my colleague Sue Parish (without whom this woudl not be possible!) and I have had all the usual last-minute changes and adjustments and unfortunately a couple of speakers who in the end, despite their own best efforts, just could not make it. But we have another wide range of topics and sessions across all the aspects of the events that (we hope) are important to you in your IT environment.

Here are the numbers - we have 130 sessions scheduled across our three conferences and we are operating across NINE tracks at most times of the event, so our conference team will need to be well drilled and we will be relying on our speakers to observe their time slots to keep everything in sync.

If you add in the sessions being hosted in Frankfurt by our conference partners like BITKOM, SANBoard, GSE, IDC, Cloud Storm and The Cloud Storage Initiative, there are almost 150 individual sessions and speakers.

Our work continues over the next 10 days as we review the content of the speakers' presentations to try to ensure that the integrity of the main conference sessions are maintained, with our focus being on educational value to you, our delegates.

We have two tracks this year in the 'Show Floor Presentation Suites' where we are more relaxed and the speakers there will talk more directly about what their organisation does and how it can help you.

With over 70 companies participating in the exhibition this year we have set another new record - and with 30 organisations sponsoring one of the events for the first time we have more 'first-timers' than we had total sponsors at the first SNW Europe in Frankfurt in 2004 - a tribute to the event's success.

Finally to you - our delegates - registrations are tracking at over 10% up over 2009 which itself was record year, so we hope that you will be with us in Frankfurt - you still have time to recommend a friend or colleague to register and invest in what we believe is one of the top conferences on IT servers, storage, virtualization and datacenter technologies in Europe today.

I look forward to meeting many of you there !!

The September rush starts now

Now is the time in our preparations where an awful lot happens in a very short space of time. We get a rush of new sponsors confirming their packages and some upgrading to higher levels as their budgets for the rest of the year get confirmed. At the same time a lot happens on the conference agenda which has been around 85% complete for most of August, but with many people now coming back from their vacations and making final plans there are often a number of changes and adjustments and the providing of outstanding inputs that we have been waiting for, for several weeks. Some sponsors seem much better than others but of course I would not dare to mention any names here, but every year one or two seem to take forever to decide what they are going to present and even longer to tell us who will be presenting!

In a moment you will see the increasingly strong line up of customer speakers that we have scheduled for this year – as you’ll guess from my earlier comments, this is by no means complete as we are expecting around another six or seven to be confirmed in the coming couple of weeks,

But before we look at those I’d like to extend a welcome to the 24 new companies supporting the events this year – taking our number of confirmed participating companies to well over 60 for the first time our history. Juniper Networks and Novell are two of the new Gold-level sponsors while other new names at this year’s conferences and exhibition include ADN, Akorri, Amplidata, Arkeia Software, Asigra, Blade Network Technologies, Coraid, Druva, Fast LTA, GreenBytes, IntelliMagic, Peer Software, Point Software, Red Hat, Samsung, Spectra Logic, Stordis, Trend Micro, Virtensys and Virtual Instruments. We look forward to the beginning of a long and success relationship with these companies as we do with so many of our sponsors that have been with us for many years.

So as promised before I sign off for this edition here is a selection of our confirmed customer speakers:

‘Implementation, Architecture & Cost-effectiveness of a Storage Cloud at a Hospital’
Presented by Martin Scholl, Global Infinpool

‘Managing Large Data Sets with MAID Technology and HSM’
Presented by Dean Flanders, Novartis, Friedrich-Miescher-Institut

‘Effectively Managing and Protecting VMware with Deduplication Storage’
Presented by Guy Chapman, SunGard Financial Systems

‘Data Deduplication Solution Provides IFB with Complete ROI in Only Four Weeks’
Presented by Graeme Gordon, Operations Director, Internet for Business.

‘Data Protection of a Virtual Environment in Iskratel group.’
Presented by Tone Kavcic, Group IT Director, Iskratel

German language sessions:

‘Eine maßgeschneiderte Speicherlösung für High-Performance-Datenbanken auf Unix’.
Referent Jürgen Roos, Senior Infrastructure Engineer, Commerzbank AG.

‘Einführung einer Speichervirtualisierung am Flughafen Stuttgart. Erhöhung der Administrationstätigkeit durch Zentralisierung’
Referent Marsha Hellwig , Projektentwicklung IT-Systemarchitektur Flughafen Stuttgart.

‘Nahezu unlimitiert erweiterbare, hochverfügbare Speichersysteme für den Einsatz in datenintensiven Forschungsumgebungen’.
Referent Frank Neidl, Head of Information Technology IMK-IFU.

‘Datensicherung mit ETERNUS CS in der WWK Lebensversi-cherung a.G’
Referent Werner Rothleitner, Technologiearchitekt, Herbert Weber, GL RZ-Betrieb.

Full details are online available online at www.snweurope.net/agenda.php.

Over 25 Industry Association Sessions to Choose From

For this edition I thought we would take a look at the SNIA presentations and tutorials planned for the 2010 events. As regular visitors will know, the SNIA content gives our conferences a certain advantage over other events, as they guarantee a broad industry, and vendor-independent view of a range of important standards, trends and technologies. These presentations are developed by members of the association along with inputs from end-users and industry analysts and consultants, and the content is reviewed by a group of industry peers to ensure that no bias or individual opinion come through.

The format of our conferences this year has a series of tracks, each opened and closed by carefully selected SNIA presentations. In addition to the SNIA content we also have sessions submitted and presented by the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) along with a panel debate on the topic of Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), which continues to attract a lot of attention. The panel session will take place on Wednesday 27th October at 2:00 pm in the keynote theatre.

I have summarised the associations’ sessions in the table below – you can review the full agenda online at www.snweurope.net/agenda_full.php

Track	Title
Data Protection	Backup to Tape, Disk and Beyond
Data Protection	Contemporary Data Protection
Data Protection	Understanding Data Deduplication
Data Protection	Long-term Preservation of Digital Information
Cloud Computing	Interoperable Cloud Storage with the CDMI Standard
Cloud Computing	Building the Business Case for Clouds
Cloud Computing	Deploying Public, Private, and Hybrid Cloud Environments
Virtualization	Storage Virtualization - What, Why, When, Where, How?
Virtualization	Storage Consideration for Virtual Servers
Virtualization	PCI Express Impact on Storage Architectures and Future Data Centers
Virtualization	Trends in Application Recovery
Virtualization	Your storage infrastructure going green? Virtualization can make it greener
Datacenters	Data Center Transformation - Beyond the Hype
Datacenters	pNFS, Parallel Storage for GRID Virtualization and Database Computing
Datacenters	Active Archive: Data Protection for the Modern Data Center
Networking	(FCIA) Ethernet Storage: Next Generation Storage Unification Engine
Networking	(FCIA) Enhancements to Fibre Channel
Networking	Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)
Networking	Understanding High Availability in the SAN
Networking	Panel Debate: FCoE The Arrival of the new data center
Storage Management	Storage Management Best Practices and Tips
Storage Management	The File Systems Evolution
Storage Management	Tiered File System - without Tiers
Storage Management	Implementing and managing storage virtualization
Storage Technology	Benefits of Solid State Storage in Enterprise Systems
Storage Technology	The benefit of Storage over Ethernet in Scalable Computing Environment.
Storage Technology	Accelerating Applications and File Systems with Solid State Storage

I hope that you will agree that this is a very comprehensive choice of sessions, addressing many of the key issues on the IT agenda today. Remember that the SNIA presentations are only one quarter of our full agenda, with the remainder coming from your peers through a series of in-depth case-studies and a wide range of hot-topics and vendor updates delivered by members of the industry.

Once registered, you will be able to create your own schedule for the event from the online agenda in order to make the most of your time in Frankfurt. I and the entire team look forward to seeing you there.

30th July - New Platinum Sponsors Confirmed

As the saying goes ‘I love it when a plan comes together’ and we are now at the point where our agenda is really taking shape and we are down to the last few t’s to cross and i’s to dot.

I am happy to report that our platinum sponsor line up now includes Dell, Fujitsu and IBM who have recently confirmed their participation, joining EMC, Huawei Symantec, HP, Oracle and Symantec, as our highest-level partners for 2010.

Altogether we have 46 confirmed sponsors so far and expect to see that number continue to rise well above the 50-mark as we move towards the end of the summer and companies firm up their plans for the second half of the year.

What is even more encouraging is that our delegate registration numbers are also up on this time last year, so we are confident that we will have more attendees than in 2009, which itself was a record. So if you are reading this and have yet to sign up for the 2010 edition, watch out for the special offers for free advance registration in your inbox or in one of your favourite publications very soon.

My featured keynote presentation for this edition of the blog is ‘Enabling the Information-Centric Enterprise’ that will be delivered by Sean Derrington, Director of Enterprise Product Management at Symantec. In this talk Sean will discuss the shift from physical to virtual that continues to alter the IT landscape. Sean points to the fact that as IT organisations undertake new and innovative ways to deliver elastic, dynamic, and highly-available applications, they require an information-centric approach, and ultimately the device and system become irrelevant. This session promises to help delegates understand best practices and the implications that cloud computing has on security, data protection, and storage management strategies. This 40-minute keynote will run on Tuesday 26th October at 09:50.

Finally for this edition we are delighted this year to have a representative of Google on our agenda, with Philipp Karmires, Manager of Enterprise Accounts, presenting ‘The Future is (in) the Cloud at 10:55 on Tuesday 26^th October in the cloud technologies track that will also feature these presentations

• SNIA - The Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI): The Storage Standard’
• 3PAR – What's Wrong with All-in-One? Why Best-of-Breed is Best for the Cloud
• Acronis – Cloud Based Data Protection for SMBs
• HDS – Best Practices for Moving into the Cloud
• HP – Build a Mission Critical Cloud!?
• Trend Micro - Cloud Security Caution: Risks your provider covers, ignores & introduces - what you can do about it!

That is it for this time - check back again for more news and updates as the full agenda goes live very soon.

14th July - First Agenda Highlights

Welcome to my second edition of our conference blog - I am pleased to say that the program is starting to take shape and for my next few blogs I will be concentrating on some of the sessions you can attend in Frankfurt over the two days of our ‘Power of 3’ events.

To start off, I am delighted to confirm the participation of Mike Shapiro, VP of storage development at Oracle, one of the Platinum sponsors of this year’s events. Mike will be presenting a paper entitled ‘New unified storage technology can cut your IT costs in half’ where he will discuss how to consolidate storage, reduce costs, and increase performance in modern data center environments. This 40-minute keynote session is scheduled to run on Tuesday 26th October at 10:55.

A regular contributor to the SNW Europe program is ex-Gartner analyst Josh Krischer, known to many of you across Europe for his strong views on storage-related technologies. This year Josh will be presenting a paper entitled ‘Clustered storage vs. monolithic and modular subsystems’ scheduled for 09:50 on Wednesday 27th October. In this session Josh compares the major disk storage technologies and highlights the pros and cons of each design alongside his views on the various suppliers’ strengths and weaknesses.

Finally for this instalment I’d like to put in a plug for our partner SNIA Europe who will be hosting its ‘Storage User Round Table’ on Thursday 27th October from 09:00 until 10:30. This roundtable is a dynamic and interactive session where a select group of storage end users can learn from and share experiences with their peers on how the latest storage technologies can help achieve their business targets and make their storage infrastructure more effective and more efficient. The main topics for discussion will be Cloud Storage, Data Protection, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and Solid State Storage. The roundtable will give an idea of how other companies address these challenges. SNIA Europe will share best practices and will identify experiences that will help to avoid the pitfalls of innovations. This session will be moderated by SNIA Europe executives who will be eager to collect and communicate your feedback on the issues discussed to give you a chance to influence the direction of the association’s major initiatives. If you are an IT storage end-user who would like to share their views or someone who wants to be a part of such an initiative, be sure to put yourself forward via the registration page for consideration.

That’s it for this time – if you are about to head off on holiday I wish you a pleasant time – for those of you stuck in the office for the summer I hope your air conditioning is working well and that you can make the most of your weekends!

28th June 2010, WELCOME TO OUR ‘POWER OF 3’ BLOG

Hi and welcome to the ‘Power of 3’ blog written by yours truly, Paul Trowbridge, the conference director for the three co-located events at Congress Frankfurt. As we ramp up towards SNW Europe, Datacenter Technologies and Virtualization World 2010, I plan to bring you news each week of what is going on behind the scenes as well as a summary of the latest developments with regard to who we have presenting in the three conferences and of course what they will be covering. June is a crucial month in our planning cycle as we lay down the key foundations of the events and a lot of sponsors confirm their participation, so both the logistics group and the sales team are hard at work to get contracts in place with suppliers and sponsors alike.

On the conference side we have closed our regular ‘call-for-papers’ which this year has attracted over 70 submissions that we have started going through to match up with the conference themes we have in place. For those of you who attended last year the 2010 program will be an evolution of the 2009 agenda with a single keynote theatre that will feature senior executives from our Platinum sponsors and other leading industry figures.

In terms of the conference themes, this last week we have been working with SNIA Europe to define the main track topics for 2010 and I can share those with you now. The SNW Europe program on 26^th October will focus on Data Protection and Business Continuity in one track and Cloud Services in the other. On day two (27^th October) the themes will be Storage Management in track one and Storage Technologies such as Solid State Storage, in track two. Over in the Datacenter Technologies conference program we will spend day one looking at general datacenter issues and day two focussing on networking developments, while in Virtualization World the focus this year will also include desktop virtualization as well as server and storage virtualization issues and developments.

I hope you will check this blog regularly for a snap-shot of the progress we are making and the development of our conference programs – also, don’t forget that you can follow us on Twitter (http://twitter.com/snweurope2010) for all the latest news.