It has been a long summer this year - not in terms of the weather here in the UK that's for sure - but certainly in respect of getting all of our speakers' and sponsors' inputs into the agendas of the three conference programs. It seems that the psychology of having the events just one week later this year - 2nd and 3rd November rather than the last week in October - has made many folks think that there is an extra month to get things done!
Rant over for this blog, so let's get down to the serious side of things - what can you expect to choose from on the agenda this year?
Once again we have plenty of choice across the tracks - our keynote theatre will feature sessions from our platinum sponsors plus The451Group and a couple of guests such as Cisco and VMware. The 'Powering the Cloud' track looks at many aspects of the cloud computing model including security and legal aspects. Virtualization World goes from server to storage to desktop, on to I/O and all points in between and the Storage Technologies track covers dedupe, backup, archiving, pNFS, files systems, SSDs and more. Finally the Datacenter Technologies and Networking track examines all the latest FC and IP trends and developments as well as energy efficiency and integrated IT management.
Alongside the technology tracks we have our usual mix of customer/user-led presentations in both English and German languages and the theatres on the expo show-floor where there will be more vendor/supplier specific presentations on their latest products and solutions.
The online agenda - we think - has been improved this year to allow you to navigate it more easily and start to build your own personal plan for your visit - we've also tried to categorise the sessions so that we can suggest the sessions that are of more interest to you based on the information you have entered into your profile. Let us know if you think this has worked or if you have suggestions to improve it next year via the online feedback tab on the website.
Finally for this edition I've added the abstracts from the presentations of our conference partners and other independent speakers - there are many more on the web site so please take a look and start to plan your visit.
See you soon
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- G2000 Data Center Evolution:” How Organizational Structure, Technology Roadmaps and the Vendor Landscape are being changed by the Cloud, Virtualization & Converged Infrastructure. Presented by Ken Male, Founder, TheInfoPro.
TheInfoPro's founder, Ken Male, will present findings from thousands of one-on-one interviews with IT decision makers from Global 2000 companies and lay out how the IT Infrastructure is evolving toward the use of hybrid cloud architectures. The findings will span TheInfoPro’s research of the Storage, Servers, Networking, Information Security, & Cloud Computing markets and will detail the timing of implementation and competitive landscape for areas such as Internal & External Cloud, Converged Infrastructure, Unified Computing, Server & Storage Virtualization, Tiered Storage and Automated Provisioning. The session will detail the performance (ratings, spending, vulnerability) of the key technology providers for IT Infrastructure including: EMC, NetApp, Cisco, IBM, HP, Symantec, Brocade, VMware, Riverbed, Juniper, Red Hat, Microsoft and more.
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I/O Virtualization – The Next Virtualization Frontier. Presented by Dennis Martin, President, Demartek
Do you use the full bandwidth in all of your server adapters, network interface cards, RAID controllers all the time? Or do you only need peak bandwidth for these adapters some of the time? Would you like to make a rack full of servers use only the storage and network adapters that they actually need, rather than having to put expensive cards in every server? I/O virtualization is emerging as a great way to virtualize your underused adapters across your server infrastructure. In this session, we will define I/O virtualization and how it complements server virtualization. We will discuss extending the PCI-Express bus natively and within other transports such as Ethernet and InfiniBand, and new standards such as SR-IOV and MR-IOV. We will also discuss how I/O Virtualization compares to technologies such as Fibre Channel NPIV, DCB and FCoE. As is customary, Dennis will discuss results of his early lab testing with these technologies.
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Emerged and future storage technologies – the next decade. Presented by Josh Krischer, Josh Krischer & Associates
Emerged and future storage technologies – the next decade (45 min.), Storage is the most important item in the data centre. Storage hardware and software development pace is the fastest among all high-tech technologies. Cloud services and cloud storage are in cloud offer opportunity to reduce CapEx and OpEx) replacing conventional storage methods usage to a utility-type service model. This presentation covers all the trends in storage and points to technologies which are recommend watching, answering end-users’ curiosity on:
• What are the challenges of the storage users, how application will influence storage requirements?
• What will be the most-critical storage strategies and technologies for storage infrastructures till 2020?
• What are the major emerging techniques for storage subsystems and connectivity?
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Storage in a Virtual World. Presented by Randy Kerns, Evaluator Group
Implementing a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environment or server virtualization have serious implications for the storage systems used. The requirements for storage are affected and the storage systems need to be evaluated based on a different set of considerations. This session will explain the implications of virtualized environments on storage and what attributes of a storage system are important to meet the virtualized environment requirements.
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Cloud Computing is the future – for sure – but secure! Presented by Bernd Becker, Chairman of EuroCloud Deutschland_eco e.V. and Vice President EuroCloud Europe
No business without trust: This is also valid for Cloud Services. EuroCloud is focussing to develop customers confidence in cloud services, both, from a legal and compliance perspective as from the data protection perspective on a European wide basis. Our EuroCloud Star Audit Certification scheme covers all relevant aspects to identify trustful providers. Cloud customers are able to find orientation when selecting cloud services for their operation.
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Beyond the CRC - How energy legislation will affect the Data Centre. Presented by Andrew Jones, Alquist Consulting Ltd
The new UK Government have made drastic changes to the UK’s CRC Energy Efficiency legislation. Originally all revenue raised was returned as incentives to the participants. The government is now keeping all the money leaving business with an extra tax burden of £1 Billion. Coincidentally a shortage of UK electricity generation capacity whilst demand is increasing will combine to increase electricity costs further. The taxation and increased prices will force all Data Centres to monitor and reduce their energy consumption. The presentation will look at the current energy legislation, show the ‘Energy Generation Gap’ that will occur in 2015 and show techniques that can be used to monitor and reduce energy consumption in the data centre.
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Supporting virtual desktops: the back-end infrastructure. Presented by John Abbott, Founder & Chief Analyst, The 451 Group
As larger virtual desktop infrastructure installations come into production, the challenges of building a scalable, robust and affordable back-end infrastructure to support them become more evident. But recent developments in the storage and converged systems sector have seen greater levels of support and integration with VDI environments. What are the options today, and what are the pros and cons of the various approaches?
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Unified Storage Networking. Presented by Dennis Martin, President, Demartek
With all the recent discussion about unified storage networking, is it really possible to converge LAN and SAN infrastructures? Why would you want to do this? Does Windows support this? What are the ramifications for the infrastructures you already have in place such as Ethernet, Fibre Channel and iSCSI? What does it look like to run Ethernet, iSCSI and Fibre Channel together at 10Gbit/sec? Are you planning a new data center? This session will cover existing technologies that are available now including the key protocols and standards such as Data Center Bridging (DCB), also known as Enhanced Ethernet, and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) that will make the unified data center work, the advantages and disadvantages of having an integrated network, and how currently installed storage networks will be affected. DCB and FCoE will be compared to iSCSI. Considerations for future cabling infrastructure will also be discussed. In addition, Dennis will include some of the results from his unified network testing with DCB, FCoE and iSCSI in the Demartek lab.
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Data-intensive Storage Services on Clouds: Limitations, Challenges and Enablers. Presented by Michael Jaeger, Vision Cloud
The emergence of cloud offerings has made feasible the delivery of computational services that provide access to virtualized resources. However, current approaches do not tackle key issues related to cloud storage, which are of importance given the enormous amount of data being produced in today’s digital environment (e.g. by smart phones, sensors, or user generated content). The EU-funded VISION Cloud project is developing a storage cloud infrastructure to meet these issues. VISION Cloud addresses the challenges of data-intensive storage services through raising the abstraction level of storage, enabling data mobility across providers, allowing content-centric access, providing secure computation close to storage, and deploying new data-oriented mechanisms for QoS and security guarantees.
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