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.