Powering the Cloud

Crazy time!!

2011-10-14T09:56:00.000-07:00

Four weeks out from the conferences is what I have come to refer to as the 'crazy time' - it is the period when speakers and sponsors wake up to the fact that their session is looming fast and that they have deadlines to meet (set by we heartless conference organisers).

While each individual looks at their one (or in some cases two or three) pieces we have to look at around some 130 conference sessions crammed into two days and if all our speakers wanted to make changes up to the last minute we would never produce a coherent online agenda let alone meet our print deadlines for the conference guide and other materials......

Rant over.

The agenda is - I believe - pretty much complete - aside form awaiting inputs from two sponsors for their sessions (no names no pack drill) - take a look and see for yourself at http://poweringthecloud.com/full-agenda.

As it is late on a Friday I am keeping this blog short and sharp and will simply add here the choice of SNIA presentations (tutorials) available to you this year.

- Interoperable Cloud Storage with the CDMI Standard

- Deploying Public, Private & Hybrid Storage Clouds

- Enterprise Architecture and the Cloud

- The Business Case for the Cloud

- Cloud Storage Security

- Virtualization - Who, What Why, When?

- The Effective use of Virtualization

- Storage Optimization for Virtual Desktops

- Innovative Application Recovery

- Storage Considerations for Virtual Servers

- Introduction to Data Protection: Backup to Tape, Disk and Beyond

- Advanced Deduplication Concepts

- PCIe SSD Storage Solution

- The File Systems Evolution

- Storage Performance Management

- Benefits of Solid State in Enterprise Storage Systems

- pnFS & NFSv4.2: A File system for Grid, Virtualization & Database

- What are the storage security best practices that will help you with
compliance with regulations like PCI-DSS and the EU Privacy Directive?

- Data Center Evolution and Network Convergence

- Fibre Channel Driving Storage Innovation, Speed and Convergence

- Solving the I/O Bottlenecks in NextGen Data Centers & Cloud Computing

- Five Ways to Lower Datacenter Carbon Footprint

- The Confusion Arising from Converged Multi Hop Topologies etc

- The Role of WAN Optimisation in Cloud Infrastructures

Speak soon.

Time to take your pick

2011-09-29T22:37:00.001-07:00

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

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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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First Steps on the Agenda Road

2011-07-12T06:25:00.000-07:00

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.

Providing the Power

2011-06-21T06:39:00.000-07:00

Hello and welcome to my 2011 blog coming from behind the scenes as we prepare for the 8^th edition of SNW EUROPE and the 3^rd editions of VIRTUALIZATION WORLD and DATACENTER TECHNOLOGIES, this year being marketed together under our exciting new theme ‘ Powering the Cloud’.

The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed that our dates have slipped a week this year from the usual last week in October to the first week in November – it’s a long story as to why but we’ll be ‘back to normal’ in 2012. It was a tough decision to map our events around the public holidays on 1^st November and having the right facilities for the 2,000 attendees and 70 sponsors but being in Congress Frankfurt on the 2^nd and 3^rd November makes it best for all concerned we hope.

Our sponsor line-up is once again looking very strong – already confirmed returning Platinum partners are Dell, Fujitsu, HP, Oracle and we are delighted to welcome DataCore to the highest level of partnership. At Gold level we are pleased to welcome back Compellent, Hitachi Data Systems, Juniper and Quantum and we have a wide variety of Silver sponsors including new faces Avere, Bocada, EUROstor, Flexient, Methode, NETGEAR, SHD, Silver Peak, Veeam and Viking Modular Solutions who we welcome to our events for the first time.

We’ll take a closer look at all the sponsors next time but in the meantime I will be a bit lazy and share with you our latest press release.

Blog with you again soon!

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FRANKFURT POWERS THE CLOUD IN NOVEMBER

WITH SNW EUROPE, VIRTUALIZATION WORLD AND DATACENTER TECHNOLOGIES

London, 15 June 2011 -- Following their resounding success in 2010, SNIA Europe and Angel Business Communications today announced the return of their triumvirate of conferences under the new theme “Powering the Cloud”. SNW Europe, Datacenter Technologies and Virtualization World will be held at Congress Frankfurt on 2^nd and 3^rd November 2011 and will once again offer a wide range of educational content reflecting the latest trends and developments in the industry as well as a comprehensive expo floor featuring the leading IT vendors operating in key markets including data security, storage and protection, desktop, server, storage and network virtualisation, and data centre architectures and technologies. Now in its third year, the “three in one” event promises to be bigger and better than ever.

“Cloud computing is the new wave of IT architecture impacting almost every size and type of organisation today and is a natural evolution of the widespread adoption of virtualisation, service-oriented architectures and utility computing,” said Paul Trowbridge, marketing director for the three events. “We believe there is no better place to gain an understanding of how to take advantage of this exciting new area and meet with so many high-calibre companies whose technologies are innovating data centres worldwide.”

To improve the visitor experience and enable delegates to maximise their participation, the organisers have launched a new website (www.poweringthecloud.com) that offers a wide range of interactive, content-rich features. These will include the possibility to match individual interests with the sponsors’ offerings in order to find the most appropriate solution and prioritise and plan personal schedules accordingly.

The organisers have also announced a new partnership with leading analyst firm The 451 Group, who will be contributing to all three conference agendas. Storage research director Simon Robinson stated “The emergence of virtualisation and cloud-based IT-as-a-Service models offer many tremendous benefits. CIOs and IT managers know this, but what they need is help to get there. In particular, our research shows that modernising the storage infrastructure is an essential part of this journey. We are delighted to be part of the SNW Europe programme this year, and look forward to sharing our perspectives on how IT and storage stakeholders can embrace this next-generation model with confidence.”

Already confirmed for the conference keynote program is John Manville, Cisco VP of IT Network and Data Center Services, who will be presenting ”Data Center Transformation – Cisco’s Virtualisation and Cloud Journey” which will look at Cisco’s IT strategy for strengthening its competitive advantage by demonstrating the value of the “Network as the Platform.”

The comprehensive conference programme will also include case studies and a vast array of SNIA tutorials covering server, storage, network and application virtualisation, cloud-based architectures, data deduplication, data security, tiered storage, FCoE and solid state storage. The three events are aimed at a broad spectrum of end user IT professionals involved in data management, data storage, business continuity, server provisioning and application delivery and support, as well as IT resellers, consultants and distributors focusing on these technologies.

The organisers are again pleased to welcome BITKOM, the voice of the information technology, telecommunications, and new media industry in Germany as a conference partner for the fifth consecutive year. Also returning to the event in 2011 will be Demartek, an independent testing house who focuses on real-world, hands-on industry analysis and lab validation testing of server, network, storage and security technologies, for the small and medium business (SMB) environment and large enterprises. Other organisations participating in the wide and varied agenda will be The Data Centre Alliance, a professional association of leaders from across the data centre industry focused on promoting best practices and innovative technologies, and The Green Grid.

In addition to the vendors who return to the conference year after year, the organisers expect to welcome many new sponsors in 2011 and are confident of matching last year’s record of over 70 sponsoring vendors.

“We’ve had great success with SNW Europe. This is one of the premier storage events in Europe to reach customers and partners, and we’ve been very happy with the ROI we’ve seen from our participation. For 2010 alone we are estimating a 50-fold return on our investment. It is definitely a worthwhile sponsorship opportunity for HP and one that reinforces our leadership position in the storage industry”, said Shannah Thompson, EMEA Marketing Manager, Storage, HP Europe, Middle East & Africa.

“Most enterprise organisations are not benefiting from the cost efficiency of virtualised and private cloud environments for business-critical applications such as SAP, Oracle and Exchange. The organisers have done a great job of bundling all the relevant topics within one event. We are looking forward to demonstrating to a wide audience how proactive monitoring of the SAN is critical for setting SLAs and successful, risk free, data centre growth,” said Chris James, Marketing Director EMEA at Virtual Instruments.

SNW Europe, together with Datacenter Technologies and Virtualization World, set new records in 2010 with over 1,750 unique visitors from over 20 countries, an increase of 15% on the 2009 figures. Over 70% of the attendees were end-users, resellers, systems integrators or members of the international press, blogger and analyst community.

Almost there

2010-10-15T00:25:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-31T07:53:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-13T06:20:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-02T07:59:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-14T00:13:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-29T06:24:00.000-07:00

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.