First Steps on the Agenda Road

I'm pleased to report that our agenda is starting to take shape and we have confirmed our first speakers and started to compose the keynote program. Before I get into that detail I'm pleased to welcome a number of new sponsors on board since my last blog - a good mix of returning supporters and a number of brand-new faces to the events, most notably Huawei who join us in their own right this year as a Platinum Sponsor. Overall we are ahead of where we were this time last year (itself a record year) in terms of the number of confirmed sponsors which include the following names:

Platinum Sponsors:
DataCore - Dell - Fujitsu - HP - Huawei - IBM - Oracle

Gold Sponsors:
Dell/Compellent - Hitachi Data Systems - Juniper - Quantum

Silver+ Sponsors:
Acronis - Avere - Bocada - BlueArc - Bull - CommVault - Emulex - F5 - Falconstor - Fast LTA - Flexiant - HMK - Methode - NetApp - NETGEAR - QLogic - Riverbed - Scality - Silver Peak - Stordis - Syncsort - Texas Memory Systems - Veeam - Viking Modular Solutions - Virtual Instruments

Last year we totalled over 70 participating suppliers amd we are on track to match and hopefully exceed that this time around.

As I hope you are aware our agenda is made up of three key elements - content from the events' co-owners SNIA, content from the event sponsors and an element from external speakers who submit papers for inclusion in the program. So now let me share with you some of our confirmed independent speakers from that process:

• Emerging and future storage technologies – the next decade. Presented by Josh Krischer.
• Storage in a Virtual World. Presented by Randy Kearns of the Evaluator Group.
• Solving the I/O Bottlenecks in NextGen Data Centres & Cloud Computing. Presented by IMEX Research.
• Data-intensive Storage Services on Clouds: Limitations, Challenges and Enablers. Presented by Vision Cloud.
• Beyond the CRC - How energy legislation will affect the Data Centre. Presented by Andrew Jones, Alquist.
• How Should You Deploy Solid State Storage? Presented by George Crump, Storage Switzerland.
• Overview of the European data centre market. Presented by Digital reality Trust.
• Data Center Transformation - Cisco's Virtualization and Cloud Journey. Presented by John Manville, VP of IT Network and Data Centre Services

In the next few weeks we'll look at the SNIA content for 2011 and some highlights from our sponsors.

Finally for this edition let's look at some of the other organisations we are working with to bring increased independent conference content to the 2011 program. Heading that list is The 451 Group who will be contributing conference content and working with us on our pre-event research program, so watch out for you chance to participate in that soon. Once again we are pleased to host BIKTOM as a key contributor to our agenda and DEMARTEK will return again with an enhanced presence this year. I'll share more with you over the coming weeks on these and our other partnerslike GSE, SANboard, ECO, The Data Centre Alliance, The Green Grid and others.

If you are about to head off on your summer vacation I wish you well - but don't forget to register for the conferecences before you go!!

Blog soon.