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.

Providing the Power

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

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

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

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

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

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!