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!

28th June 2010, WELCOME TO OUR ‘POWER OF 3’ BLOG

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.