Speakers

Brien Posey Freelance Writer and Independent Analyst, BrienPosey.com

Brien Posey is an eight-time Microsoft MVP with two decades of IT experience. Prior to becoming a freelance technical writer, Brien served as CIO for a national chain of hospitals and healthcare facilities. He has also worked as a network administrator for some of the nation’s largest insurance companies and for the Department of Defense at Fort Knox where he assisted the military with numerous disaster recovery scenarios.

Since going freelance in 2001, he has become a prolific technical author, routinely contributing content to SearchDataBackup.com and SearchStorage.com. In addition to the many thousands of articles that he has written, Brien has authored numerous books on a wide variety of IT topics. Brien has architected backup solutions for an international clientele and has even assisted Microsoft with their System Center Data Protection Manager initiatives.

Dennis Martin Founder and President, Demartek

Dennis Martin is the founder and President of Demartek www.demartek.com, a computer industry analyst organization with its own on-site test lab. Demartek focuses on lab validation testing and performance testing of storage and related hardware and software products. Dennis has been working in the information technology industry since 1980, primarily involved in software development and project management in mainframe, UNIX, and Windows environments. These include a variety of large and small end-user customers, and engineering and marketing positions for storage vendors such as StorageTek.

Howard Marks Founder and Chief Scientist, DeepStorage.net

In over 25 years as an independent consultant, Howard has built and/or reengineered server and storage infrastructures and networks for organizations from Borden Foods and the State University of New York at Purchase to accounting and law firms. He started testing and reviewing products at PC Magazine in the late 80s and has written hundreds of articles and product reviews for Network World, Network Computing and InformationWeek amongst others. Howard has spoken at COMDEX, Interop, Networks Expo and developed training programs for organizations including JP Morgan and American Express. Where other analysts typically have marketing or sales backgrounds, Howard’s continuing involvement with users facing real problems brings a perspective those users find more useful. He can be found online at DeepStorage.net or follow his blog at @ NetworkComputing.com

Jon Toigo CEO and Managing Principal, Toigo Partners International, and Chairman of the Data Management Institute

Jon William Toigo is a 30-year IT veteran who has worked both as an operative within corporate information systems departments and as a senior consultant with two international systems integrators. He is also a prolific writer with 15 books and thousands of articles in the technology trade press to his credit. His technology columns in 7 popular print and on-line media garner a loyal readership of more than 500,000 per month worldwide. Jon's books include: The Holy Grail of Network Storage Management, Disaster Recovery Planning 3rd Edition: Preparing for the Unthinkable, The Holy Grail of Data Storage Management, and The Essential Guide to ASPs. In an effort to save rainforests, he is publishing his new books as “blooks” (blog plus book) online. These include Making IT Matter (at MakingITMatter.com), Disaster Recovery Planning 4th Edition (at book.drplanning.org) and The Data Democracy (with co-author Margaret Romao Toigo at datademocracy.com). When chapters are complete, they will be formatted as ebooks for download to your favorite reader. In addition to his work in print, Jon provides consulting and analysis services to a broad range of international clients.

Marc Staimer CDS, Dragon Slayer Consulting

Marc Staimer is the founder, senior analyst, and CDS of Dragon Slayer Consulting in Beaverton, OR. The consulting practice of over 12 years has focused in the areas of strategic planning, product development, and market development for technology products. With over 30 years of marketing, sales and business experience in infrastructure, storage, server, software, and virtualization, he’s considered one of the industry’s leading experts. Marc can be reached at marcstaimer@mac.com

Steve Duplessie Founder and Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group

Steve Duplessie, Founder and Senior Analyst at ESG, is an internationally recognized expert in the field of IT Infrastructure Technologies and Markets. An acclaimed speaker and author, Steve has been featured in Time Magazine, The Wall St. Journal, Business Week, The Financial Times, USA Today, China Daily, The Moscow Times, and many others. Steve remains a valued strategic advisor to many of the largest technology providers in the world, including IBM, HP, Dell, EMC, Netapp, HDS, and to IT organizations around the globe.

A much sought-after speaker at conferences and industry events worldwide, Steve is known for his “pull no punches” straight shooting style. Steve’s presentations are renowned for being educational, opinionated, thought-provoking, and entertaining, as well as a draw for “standing room only” capacity crowds.

Prior to founding ESG, Steve was the founder and CEO of Invincible Technologies Corp., a manufacturer of fault-tolerant NAS systems. Prior to founding ITC, Steve started and ran a storage peripherals business unit at Clearpoint Research, and he began his career at EMC.

Randy Kerns Senior Strategist, Evaluator Group

In his role as Senior Strategist at Evaluator Group, Randy Kerns brings expertise from virtualization everywhere to very long term archive to help end users and vendors develop strategic plans, product roadmaps and evaluate options. He draws from over 35 years in the computer industry helping storage companies design and develop storage system products for their markets as well as advising technical professionals on how to build the best storage infrastructures to streamline their business processes.

Randy Kerns spent many years in executive level product strategy and design positions. He was vice president of storage strategy and planning at Sun Microsystems; he developed disk and tape systems for mainframe attachment at IBM and StorageTek; he designed disk systems for attachment to open systems and proprietary computer platforms at Fujitsu and Tandem Computers; and he developed tape and disk systems for two start-up companies.

Prior to joining Evaluator Group, Randy served as CTO for ProStor where he brought products to market addressing long term archive for information technology and the healthcare and media / entertainment markets.

An educator and presenter, Randy Kerns has written numerous industry articles and papers and is the author of Planning a Storage Strategy, a book that offers step-by-step guidance on how to build an information storage strategy as part of a larger business process and most recently is the author of Information Archiving – Economics and Compliance, which is the first book of its kind to explore archiving of information in depth. Randy Kerns has regularly taught classes on storage technology in the US and Europe.