Sessions in Detail
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So, to help your IT team succeed -- Storage Decisions now features 5 distinct session tracks. Each track is custom built to serve the information needs of each of the specific members of your storage team. Read on to find out more about each session and which track or tracks suit you best as you and your peers continue to face shared challenges and individual responsibilities.
Track 1: Backup Technologies Track 1: Backup TechnologiesData protection continues to be Job #1 for most storage managers -- a job that only gets more complex as each year companies add up to 50% more storage capacity. The good news is that newer technologies can help in this uphill battle, but you still have to determine the right tools for the job, how they will work within the context of you storage environment and whether they provide the level of protection that your company requires. Among the topics covered in this track are data deduplication, virtual tape libraries, the newly integrated backup suites, matching data protection levels to business needs and how archiving fits into a data protection scenario. Stand and Deliver: Data Protection SLAs Storage environments are increasing complex, with multiple tiers of storage often the norm. With a variety of storage delivery services supported by different types of hardware, a one-size-fits-all backup strategy is likely to be inadequate. A system of data protection service level agreements is an effective approach to tailor backup appropriately to the needs of the company’s business units. Some of the issues this session will address include: Making Virtual Backups Real Virtualized server environments are enormously efficient, make managing larger server installations far easier and can save big bucks on hardware and power costs. But they don’t necessarily help backup admins. This session will look at the major server virtualization products and describe the pros and cons of the various ways to back up and restore their data. While many of the commercial solutions are VMware specific, the session will also explain what to do if you are using something other than VMware. Some key topics of this session include: Dedupe + Disk Backups: What you need to know before taking the plunge Although disk systems are cheaper than every before, the use of disk in backup systems, including VTLs, has been very limited due to its cost. However, thousands of deduplication-based disk systems have now been deployed, and customers the world over are seeing that they can indeed take the place of tape for onsite backup storage. While many companies still copy these backups to tape for offsite storage, some companies have figured out ways to either stop shipping tapes or to stop using them altogether. This session will explore all of these possiblities. This session will explore and describe: De-dupe User Panel Data deduplication has come on to the IT scene in the last two years like a wild storm. Every data protection company either has a data deduplication product in the market or is planning on shipping one. What are the early results of users? Have they seen the kinds of data deduplication ratios that vendors were touting? How many solutions did they try before picking one? Have there been any disappointments? Are their any guidelines that could be provided by these users for those that are currently in the market for data deduplication products? What are the initial reactions to variable length, block vs. file, inline vs. post processing and other fundamental differences between products? Should IT consider data deduplication to be a strategic or a tactical decision? Are there any “gotchas” to watch out for? These and other topics will be discussed by a panel of users that have had six months (or more) of experience using one or more data deduplication products in the market. Negotiating the Backup and Recovery Maze The task of back up and recovery gets more convoluted every day with new acronyms and hot buzzwords. Users today have more hardware and software options than ever before to backup their data. During this session, Henry Johnson, Senior Team Lead for a FORTUNE 500 Healthcare Services Organization, will help users determine if the latest technical solutions will fit their environment and provide the foundations for selecting the right backup application and hardware. The first half of this session will cover hardware issues including VTL and disk-to-disk comparisons and best practices. During the second half of this hour-long session, Henry will open up the floor to attendees so it takes on a roundtable format. Attendees will able to ask questions about and discuss which products are right for their specific environments. At the end of the hour, everyone will walk away with a handy document that can be used back at the office to help with the evaluation process. Testing… One, Two, Three… It would be nice if backup was a “set it and forget it” operation, but the reality is that it’s a complex operation with dependencies and enough possible points of failure to keep a storage manager up at night. This session will delve into a range of issues related to backup testing, highlight some of the most common testing oversights, and provide a template for testing that attendees can adapt or tweak for use in their own shops. Some of the issue this session will cover include: Track 2: Disaster RecoveryDisaster recovery isn’t just about being able to resume business as quickly as possible after a catastrophic incident. It’s also about avoiding the situations that could jeopardize your company’s reputation and good standing -- like the loss of customer data. But DR isn’t a one-size-fits-all affair, with different company assets requiring varying levels of protection and recoverability. We’ll look at some of the new tools for testing DR readiness, DR issues related to specific types of data and how virtualization can affect a DR plan, among other topics.
Tiered Disaster Recovery: DR SLAs That Work Not all enterprise applications are of equal importance to the ongoing operations of the corporation. Still, many DR plans tend to treat all applications in the same manner. But applying the same safeguards to all apps equally in a DR plan is likely to result in over protecting the less critical apps while not providing enough assurance for the ones that critical to the business continuity. By treating all applications equally, the recovery process is burdened by having to restore all applications simultaneously—an unlikely event even in smaller organizations. A tiered DR plan helps to address this problem by creating different levels of protection that can be applied to different applications and systems, with associated recovery requirements designed to stagger restoration efforts. This session will cover: DR Testing Programs—How Useful Are They? Over the past couple of years, a new DR product category has emerged—disaster recovery testing tools. These applications can scan your storage environment and alert you to any potential gaps in your recovery plan. Sound too good to be true? This session will take a close look at the handful of products in this category and reveal: Virtual DR: Disaster Recovery Planning for Virtualized Environments Server virtualization is being touted as a near panacea for DR by making it easier than ever to recover servers to a secondary site. But, just as virtual servers complicate backup procedures, server virtualization has an impact on storage infrastructures and may require tweaking disaster recovery plans for storage systems. This session will address these and other issues: Track 3: Data Retention and RetrievalCall it regulatory compliance, legal vigilance, good disk management or just plain common sense -- regardless of your company’s motivation, a sound system for retaining and disposing of data is one of the modern requirements of storage management. Developing a consistent, repeatable and practical set of data retention policies is the first step in the process. Tools such as data classification applications can help automate the process of sorting through the reams of structured and unstructured data to determine its appropriate disposition. While storage managers may consider this a business unit function, as keepers of company’s data they are very much in the mix. And, as such, they need to know about the legal implications, the types of systems best suited for retained data and how encryption can help ensure that data is kept intact in its original form. Storage and the Law: Backup, Recovery and Depositions This will be a discussion with very few slides as ESG interviews a former litigation support specialist who has served as an expert witness in the discovery, preservation and production of electronic evidence. As the keepers of the corporate data, storage managers can play a pivotal role in ensuring that their companies not only toe the line when it comes to regulatory compliance, but also ensuring that their companies can respond effectively to any legal issues. In this session, you’ll learn what every storage pro needs to know about how new legal requirements regarding electronically stored information affect the storage systems they manage. Some of the issues discussed in this session include: Deep Dive into Email Archiving Products Email archiving is almost a no-brainer for most storage shops. It can significantly trim email data stores and improve the performance of the email application, and it is also likely to play a key role in any compliance effort. While many shops have already implemented email archiving, many others are still on the sidelines, parsing their ways through the features of the various email archiving offerings and considering the impact that an archiving app will have on the management of their storage systems. In this session, we will take an in-depth look of some of the most popular email archiving products available today, including: Everything You Need to Know About Data Classification Data classification—attaching meta data to files that goes beyond the rudimentary file descriptors file systems provide—is at the core of many modern storage management practices. Storage tiering, archiving, regulatory compliance—among other technologies and processes—will all be more effectively if the data to be moved or discarded is appropriately identified. An effective data classification can ultimately reap sizable savings as data is more appropriately placed on lower cost disk or tape systems, the concepts of data classification are generally well understood, but the actual process and its impact on overall management often isn’t. In this session, we’ll take a close look at data classification by comparing some of the major classification products: Track 4: Storage/Capacity ManagementWith spiraling capacities the norm, managing storage systems has become a challenging task. Traditional SRM tools are often adept on keeping tabs on the state of your storage infrastructure, but more focused applications are becoming increasingly available. Storage virtualization also promises to ease storage management and improve disk usage, but there are inherent issues that need to be fully understood before embarking on a virtualization project. Traditional methods of operational data protection such as RAID tend to be complex and difficult to configure and manage, but some storage vendors are offering compelling alternatives. In this track, we’ll also examine power conservation for storage systems, a new requisite for most storage shops struggling to balance increased capacity and soaring energy costs. Green Storage: Practical Ways to Reduce Power Consumption Green is in—and every storage vendor out there has a green story to tell. The need to reduce power consumption in the data center is compelling and storage—accounting for an estimated 40% of data center electrical consumption—is a major target for energy conservation. Despite the vendor hyperbole about the environmental benefits of their products, there are still no standard metrics by which to measure and compare power consumption claims. This session will take a practical approach to power reduction, and include these topics: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Virtualization—In One Hour While virtualization is still a burgeoning technology for storage, the merits are many. With an understanding the benefits and drawbacks of virtualization, you can bring many new capabilities to your storage environment. This session will provide the answers to many of the virtualization questions swirling in storage today. During this session you will hear how virtualization has progressed from vaporware to actual products storage managers are using to centralize data, add flexibility, and change the economics of storage. Storage virtualization techniques to be covered include: The Hidden Storage Gotchas of Storage Virtualization Server virtualization implementations are booming. The coming together of multicore x86 processors and server virtualization has made consolidation of workloads running on underutilized servers, increasingly attractive. And while server consolidation promises to reduce floor space and power/cooling requirements, it also creates unexpected new storage challenges as well. Storage and SAN implementations that work well with physical servers often break down and do not work well at all when those servers are virtualized. Some of the issues that will be discussed include: Leveraging Capacity Optimization Technologies Against Primary Storage Data reduction technologies like data de-duplication and single instancing are really starting to take hold in the industry, with recent analyst surveys indicating strong purchase intent over the next 12 months. To date, these technologies have only addressed secondary or off-line storage (primarily backups) because they typically have not offered the performance necessary to be used against primary, on-line applications. Over the last twelve months, newer technologies have emerged that offer high performance, in-line data reduction sufficient for use with primary storage and on-line applications. The data reduction market is now splitting into “primary storage optimization” and “secondary storage optimization.” The break out session will discuss the emerging primary storage optimization technologies and the value propositions it offers to end users, indentifying the criteria necessary for primary storage optimization offerings, introduce the vendors playing in this space, and discuss the pros and cons of the different architectures and approaches to primary storage optimization. Clustered Storage--From SMB, to Scientific, to Social Networking and Web 2.0 The growth of structured and unstructured data continues at an explosive rate in most environments resulting in a constantly expanding data footprint requiring data and storage management resources. Similarly, the relative ease of use of NFS and Windows CIFS file sharing based storage, also known as Network Attached Storage (NAS), has led to a proliferation of NAS and Windows file servers which are not all that different from how the ease of use of personal computers (PCs) resulted in desktop and server sprawl. With the focus of many IT organizations today to do more with less, or, do more with what you have, clustered storage and clustered file serving have become a popular option to support modular, scalable and flexible growth. Clustered storage including clustered file serving, grid and web 2.0 based storage solutions are no longer confined to the specific high performance scientific applications they are commonly associated. Clustered storage serving is commonly being deployed to support a wide diversity of applications including commercial, entertainment or media, Web 2.0 and social networking along with grid, cloud and traditional scientific needs. This session takes a look at among other topics: Track 5: Systems and NetworkingThe core of any networked storage infrastructure is the basic hardware components: storage arrays and the fabric that links them to client servers and other services. Over the past few years, the trend has been to networks built around director-class switches -- but how those directors are used is the key to whether they’re just consolidation points to replace core-edge architectures or if they actually put more intelligence into the network. Storage systems, too, have undergone considerable change. iSCSI storage arrays have steady increased their presence in data centers and remote locations, and as iSCSI technology and implementations mature, their impact is certain to become more profound. And on the leading edge of storage are systems that eschew or greatly reduce the role of spinning disks, replacing them with solid state devices that run cool, use far less power and take up less space. In this track, we’ll look at the implications of these recent developments. Storage and the WAN—What Are the Options? Reining in remote or branch offices can help solve a number of storage problems, such as data protection, storage administration and management, and the proliferation of heterogeneous systems. There’s no shortage of solutions available, but each comes with its own risks and benefits. In this session, we take a close look at the options and suggest the best fit for certain environments. Some of the issues that will be discussed include: Integrating iSCSI and FC SANs iSCSI SANs are attractive because of their relatively low cost and familiar IP architecture, but adding an iSCSI array to an FC shop’s storage infrastructure could spawn islands of arrays. Thus, to reap the real benefits of iSCSI storage, it’s often necessary to integrate those systems in to the FC fabric. This session will focus on the products and practices necessary to integrate iSCSI into existing FC SAN deployments. Some of the topics that will be covered include: The Right Way to Test Storage System Performance The discussion will introduce the concepts needed to interpret storage system performance claims and the tools and processes required for hands-on performance analysis. In this information-packed session, you will be introduced to the elements of storage systems that affect their performance, including storage controllers, caching, bandwidth, protocols, disk drives, backend interconnects and storage services. You'll also learn about different types of storage performance tools, and where they fit in the storage benchmark spectrum. Tools to be examined include IOMETER, SPC, SpecSFS, JetStress, LoadSimm and iozone. And finally, you will learn how to interpret storage system performance results with a focus on the metrics that matter the most to your business. Track 6: Management/ExecutiveSometimes technology alone won’t solve storage-related issues. You also need to be adept about the business of acquiring storage systems. As a storage manager, you will be called on to develop storage solutions to satisfy evolving business needs -- always with an eye on the key financial acid tests for any storage purchase: ROI and TCO. This track addresses the essential parts of the storage system procurement process, including how to craft an RFP, negotiating from a position of strength, evaluating systems and getting the support of your company’s management. Business Buy-In Whether you’re developing storage vendor selection criteria, arguing for DR dollars or trying to slash costs in your data center, you need to know how to talk to the C-level suits so they get it. Getting buy-in from business units and company executives isn’t about touting speeds and feeds. You’ll need to justify your projects and planned purchases in business terms that often go beyond simple TCO or ROI formulas. This session will guide you through the process: Managing the Four Cs – Cost Containment, Compliance, Continuity and Carbon Footprint Nearly every company today has an set of front burner issues that come down to 4 “C’s”: Cost Containment, Compliance, Continuity and Carbon Reduction. At root, every one of these issues requires a strategy for improved data management. In this presentation, Toigo will address the following topics based on his new book, Making IT Matter (currently being developed as a BLOOK by Toigo, and co-author Randy Chalfant, at MakingITMatter.com). This will include: 7 Simple Steps to Overcoming Storage Compliance Challenges An “innocent” IT professional does a routine purge of a data store that a court deems to be destruction of evidence, causing huge liability and impacting careers forever. Whether you want to admit it or not, Information Management has never been more important than it is now and it impacts IT professionals directly. Yet how do you prepare to deal with the onslaught on new governance, regulatory and compliance impacting your organization. This dynamic keynote address will give you a working blueprint to get it right. Based on the Best Selling book, Information Nation, this keynote will inspire and guide any information storage professional to take responsibility as never before. The 3rd Era of Commercial Computing: What Storage Infrastructures will Look Like Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. It may be a bad cliché, but it does apply to IT. We have moved through various computing eras and are about to embark on one that is being influenced by Google, Flickr and other Web 2.0 companies. Distributed file data is going to grow at a much faster rate than information stored within databases. New applications in this era mean changes in the entire storage infrastructure. The answer to the proverbial question, “What Impact Will It Really Have?” may lie on what happened in the earlier computing eras. The audience should expect a brief history lesson and how storage infrastructures will morph in the future. Buying Storage -- What the Vendors Don’t Want You to Know In this session, you learn the questions you should be asking of ALL of your storage vendors, and other important tips and techniques for writing an air-tight RFI or RFP (they are different!). Bill Peldzus uses real case studies and actual customer purchasing engagements as examples. Attend this session if you: What Storage Managers Are Buying-and Why Storage managers have many challenges to deal with—not the least of which is the unrelenting need to add more disk capacity. As installed capacity continues to spiral upward, beleaguered storage pros are looking for new ways to manage and administer high-capacity storage environments. In this session, we analyze and present the results of Storage magazine’s twice-yearly Purchasing Intentions survey. The results of this exclusive show key trends and the types of solutions storage managers are seeking, while revealing some of the strategic and tactical decisions they’ll be making this year. We’ll look at:
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Storage Decisions Chicago Home
Event-At-A-Glance
Track 1: Backup Technologies
Track 2: Disaster Recovery
Track 3: Data Retention and Retrieval
Track 4: Storage/
Capacity Management
Track 5: Systems and Networking
Track 6: Management/
Executive
Registration
Storage Decisions Seminars
Backup School Hits the Road with W. Curtis Preston
Disaster Recovery Planning with Jon William Toigo
E-Mail and File Archiving with Mark Diamond
Advanced SAN School
with W. Curtis Preston
Storage Virtualization with Stephen Foskett
Vendor Events
DR/Business Continuity
Planning with Jon Toigo
sponsored by CDW
Data Classification with Greg Schulz sponsored by Incentra and HP
