Hi and welcome to my last post prior to the
opening of the three ‘Powering the Cloud’ conferences next week in Frankfurt .
Strangely this week sees something of a ‘lull’ in proceedings as most of the
work on the agenda is done and now it is just confirming speakers arrangements
and getting our hands on the final versions of their materials so we can get everything
pre-loaded over the weekend and on Monday so that we minimise al the
last-minute changes that speakers today always seem to want to do - famous last
words!
As part of my last blog I would like to
talk a little bit more about our agenda this year where we have adopted a new format for
part of our proceedings based on feedback received over the past two years for a
more focussed examination of the top issues on the agenda of IT professionals
like yourself. We are calling these our ‘Spotlight sessions’ and there
are nine of these running throughout the course of the conference program on
the 30th and 31st October. Each Spotlight session
runs for a full half-day (morning sessions from 09:30 to 13:00) /
afternoon sessions from 14:00 to 17:30) and is opened and chaired by a leading
independent analyst/commentator from Europe or north America. Each topic features a number of short 20-minute presentations from a
selection of our event sponsors, a 30-minute presentation from SNIA Europe and
is wrapped up with a 30-minute panel discussion where you can get your
questions answered or share your own views. We are encouraging you to
take in a full half-day session to get a broad view of the topic and
participate in the discussions - you can chose from the following nine sessions
over the two days.
Tuesday 30th October:
09:30 - 13:00
·
Big Data &
Analytics -Introduced & chaired by
Matthew Aslett, Research Manager, Data Management & Analytics, 451 Research
and featuring presentations from Amplidata, Oracle, Cloud Circle, LSI and the
SNIA
·
Next Generation
Data Protection - Introduced &
chaired by George Crump, President and Founder of Storage Switzerland and
featuring presentations from Quantum, Spectra Logic, Friedrich Miescher
Institute for Biomedical Research, Oracle and SNIA
·
Data Center
Networking - Introduced &
chaired by Benjamin Woo, MD, Neuralytix and featuring presentations from Intel,
Emulex, Brocade, Xsigo, Dell and the
FCIA
Tuesday 30th October:
14:00 - 17:30
·
The
Infrastructure Impact of Virtualization
- Introduced & chaired by Leah Schoeb, Senior Partner, Evaluator Group and
featuring presentations from DataCore Software, VMware, Riverbed, SolarWinds
and SNIA
·
Disaster Recovery
Techniques: How to protect your data -
Introduced & chaired by Josh Krischer, Founder & Principal Analyst,
Krischer & Associates and featuring presentations from citeq, Hitachi Data
Systems, Nimble Storage and SNIA
·
Cloud Storage and
Storage as a Service - Introduced &
chaired by Simon Robinson, Research Vice President – Storage, 451 Research and featuring
presentations from Scality, Actifio, Seagate, Synology and SNIA
Wednesday 31st
October: 09:30 - 13:00
·
Solid State
Storage and its Impact on the IT Environment
- Introduced & chaired by Randy Kerns, Senior Strategist, Evaluator
Group and featuring presentations from X-IO, Avere Systems, STEC, Viking
Technology and SNIA
·
The Big Squeeze –
the new wave of systems convergence -
Introduced & chaired by John Abbott, Founder & Chief Analyst, 451
Research and featuring presentations from NetApp, Methode, Virtual Instruments,
Dell and SNIA
·
Securing the
Cloud - Introduced & chaired by
Bernd Becker, Chairman of EuroCloud Deutschland_eco e.V. and Vice President
EuroCloud Europe and featuring presentations from Microsoft, Trend Micro,
SafeNet and SNIA
Please note that in the Spotlight sessions
there are no breaks in between presentations so if you do not wish to attend
for the full half-day you may miss the beginning or end of a particular
presentation. The other four or five
parallel tracks do have 5 or 10-minutes gaps between presentations to give you
time to move between rooms. As usual at
our events we will be doing our best to make sure the presentations (and
presenters) keep to time to allow you to make the most of your time with us.
What else should you watch out for?
We have a full program of Keynote Presentations
from our key sponsors all of who will have senior executive speakers sharing
their latest views of the market and the way forward as they currently see it
plus a sp[ecial closing keynote on the afternoon of the 31st from Microsoft.
As always you will find a full-day track
dedicated to your peers presenting case-studies and sharing their
experiences in deploying cloud,
virtualization and storage solutions from a variety of suppliers. The majority of these are from the German
market and will be presenting in local language (denoted by the ‘(D)’ on the
agenda) so please make sure you check the language that the presenter will be
using if you wish to attend any of these sessions.
We have some interesting panel discussions on
the afternoon of the 30th October in the Keynote Theatre chaired by
George Crump of Storage Switzerland and our new partners ExecEvent. The first is entitled ‘Hot Technologies in
Data Storage’ and the second ‘Tape Technology and Trends’, while on the 31st
October at 11:20 we have a great debate lined up entitled ‘Object Storage for
Big Data’. This session will be chaired by Robin Harri,s aka ‘StorageMojo,’ and
will feature speakers from Amplidata, Aspera, Intel and Quantum. Expect some
lively debate among the participants in all these panel debates and the
audience, so if you have any burning issues or questions you need answering
then get along and get them answered.
On the morning of Wednesday 31st
October in the Show-floor theatre you can meet members of the Fibre Channel
Industry Association (FCIA) for an hour-long set of presentations entitled
‘Industry leading vendors talk about latest Data Center advancements’. Along
with the FCIA there will be presentations from member companies Amphenol,
Emulex, NetApp and QLogic.
We are pleased to welcome our regular
partners SANBoard and Guide Share Europe (GSE) who are hosting an 80-minute
workshop on Tuesday 30th October at 14:00 on ‘Performance Management
von Storage Area Networks’ plus BITKOM, who once again are hosting their
‘Anwenderforum’ as an integral part of the program. Taking place in the conference room Spektrum
1 on Wednesday 31st October the full title this year is
BITKOM-Anwenderforum IT-Infrastruktur. 'IT Appliances – Konzepte und
Anwendungen' (please note that all these sessions will also be hosted in German
language).
So I hope
you can find something here and in the full agenda (check it out online at http://poweringthecloud.com/full-agenda
) or download a set of PDF versions at http://poweringthecloud.com/visitor/agenda).
Safe travel to Frankfurt and we look
forward to seeing you there.
