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.

14th July - First Agenda Highlights

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!