Opening Executive Keynote Address - Storage 2012: Time of the InfrastrugglePresenter With budgets still tight and storage capacity demands accelerating, storage has become the front lines of an all-out "Infrastruggle" that may very well determine the future of business automation…and the career prospects of IT practitioners. In this session, Jon Toigo, CEO of Toigo Partners International and Chairman of the Data Management Institute, will examine the state of storage today, emphasizing the drivers of mounting capacity and performance requirements, and the contest that is being waged for your storage budget in the vendor marketplace, the press, the analyst echo chamber…and in the Front Office. Toigo will offer six ideas that smart technology planners would be wise to consider before the Infrastruggle reaches their data centers – if it hasn't done so already.
As always, Toigo mixes conceptual ideas with real world illustrations – and a bit of humor – to make his points. He promises not to scream…much. |
How vSphere 5 Changes Storage Configuration, Maintenance and ManagementPresenter Over the past few releases of vSphere, VMware has been constantly adding storage management functionality to the product, allowing virtualization administrators to more directly control the storage resources that support their systems. Continuing that trend, vSphere 5 offers new storage tools and services that can help ease the burden of maintaining storage in a virtual server environment. In this session, independent expert Howard Marks will cover the key new features-tools that you can use or that storage vendors will take advantage of-describing what they are and how you can use them to improve your storage operations. |
Getting the Most Out of the Storage You Have: Avoiding the Expensive Headaches of ‘Rip and Replace'Presenter Put the pedal to the metal with these tips, tools and tricks designed to get the most performance, capacity, utilization, and longevity out of your storage systems. Some of the discussed techniques will require some amount of additional investment, but many do not. In addition, attendees will learn the disadvantages of each technique and tip. Attendees will learn about useful techniques that leverage common storage system capabilities - and the disadvantages of each technique and tip. These include:
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New (Old) Tools for DR: Can Cloud, Virtualization, or Other Nascent Technologies Contribute to Business Continuity Success?Presenter Jon Toigo, author of 5 books on DR planning and veteran developer of continuity plans for more than 100 companies, will explore the current marketing claims around hot button technology concepts - such as server and storage virtualization and clouds - to discover the potential value they can offer in the design of business continuity services. Attendees can expect a fact-based analysis illustrated by real world examples that uncovers the virtues - and the foibles - of these technology memes. Toigo will argue that there are no silver bullets for data protection, application re-hosting or user reconnection - the core requirements for recovery - and there is no substitute for up-front business process-centric recovery planning. But, planners would be foolish not to add whatever tools they might find useful to their kit for improving the chances of recovery and to minimize the likelihood of preventable disasters. Don't be surprised if you are humming the tune, "Everything Old is New Again" by the end of the session. |
Building a Hybrid Cloud Storage InfrastructurePresenter Cloud storage service providers solve some very important and difficult data center storage problems, including long-term repository for passive or infrequently accessed data and files, backed up data, and collaboration or workflow sharing. But cloud storage located outside your data center is not a panacea. It is not very good at high frequency data access, high performance, and low latency requirements-at least not until the bandwidth cost and performance metrics improve meaningfully. In the meantime, an effective way to take advantage of cloud storage is the hybrid approach that links on-premise storage systems to cloud storage services seamlessly. In this session, featuring independent expert Marc Staimer, attendees will learn how to:
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Innovations in Storage Networking: Next-Gen Storage Networks for Next-Gen Data CentersPresenter With 10GigE about to proliferate in data centers, and storage technologies such as scale-out and grid architectures adding stress to storage networks, it's time to rethink your storage network infrastructures–whether they're Ethernet or FC based. In this session, attendees will learn about converged networks, FCoE, CNAs, network virtualization, 10/40/100 Gbps Ethernet, 16 Gbps FC and InfiniBand alternatives. Topics will also include:
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Sponsored Session: A New Paradigm for Big Data StoragePresenter(s) Session Description TBD |
The Emerging Solid-State Storage Software EcosystemPresenters Solid State Storage requires more than NAND flash. Software, whether it is caching software, tiering software or I/O instrumentation software are all required to ensure that solid state storage performance is maximized. In this session, we review the available types of software, where they are implemented and look at use cases for each of these types of software. |
Integrating On-Premise Backup with Cloud Backup ServicesPresenter Creating a successful hybrid backup strategy requires more than signing up for a cloud backup service. What are the success factors that you need to consider? What about bandwidth? How do you measure the ROI? What is the TCO of a hybrid backup strategy? What about timely restores? This session aims to answer these and other questions. |
Executive Keynote Address - The State of Storage for VDI: Why storage is still killing VDI projectsPresenter Desktop virtualization and VDI are hot technologies that promised to change the landscape of desktop computing. Yet five years later, we're barely at 5% market penetration-so what went wrong? In many cases the answer clearly points to storage. Often times, customers try to replicate the SAN or storage architecture of their virtual servers for their virtual desktops. Or perhaps they were sucked in by vendor promises of "image sharing" only to find out that their desktop users are diverse and that image sharing isn't possible for them. Of course it's not all doom-and-gloom. After all, even though the success of desktop virtualization and VDI is limited, there are still millions of users doing it today. So what are they doing right? How did they approach the storage for their projects? In this energetic session, independent industry analyst Brian Madden will dig into how customers are really using and designing storage for their VDI and desktop virtualization projects. He'll look at the promises that were unfulfilled, and more importantly, the techniques and technologies that are actually working in current production environments. He'll look at when serious money needs to be spent and when you can use the local drives built into your servers. He'll address why SSD doesn't fix the VDI storage issue. He'll examine the emerging "storage-less" and "converged" VDI trends, and discuss how dedupe and single instance technologies really work in the context of virtual desktops. Author of four books and thousands of articles about desktop virtualization, Brian Madden has been ranked the #1 speaker at VMworld, Synergy, and BriForum. Whether you agree or disagree with him, a Brian Madden keynote is not something you'll soon forget, and an hour with him can potentially save you millions of dollars as you make big decisions about the storage that powers your next generation desktop computing environment. |
IT and Storage for Big Data AnalyticsPresenter The term "big data" is a little bit all over the map, referring to voluminous quantities of files consisting of mostly unstructured data or very large files that must be streamed for processing with big data analytics. But however you define it, big data could mean big problems for information technology. There are different ways to address the impending onrush of massive amounts of data. In this session, attendees will learn what types of storage technologies can be applied for big data use cases. |
Data Backup for Virtual ServersPresenter Although traditional backup and recovery techniques tend not to work very well in virtual data centers, there are backup solutions that are ideally suited to server virtualization. This session will begin by introducing key points that must be considered with regard to backing up virtual machines, and will also discuss the challenges of protecting clustered virtualization hosts. This session will also cover:
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Sponsored Session: Infrastructure Performance ManagementPresenter Virtual Instruments, the leader in Infrastructure Performance Management for physical, virtual and cloud environments, providing real-time performance and utilization metrics from throughout the open system. |
Healthcare Lunch: Storage Strategies for the Health IT ProPresenter The HITECH Act is forcing health care organizations to implement electronic health record technology. This means that terabytes worth of patient records, prescriptions, lab test and medical images must be securely stored -- often for decades at a time, in order to meet state and federal data retention requirements. Listen to this expert discuss a variety of storage strategies and policies and an engage in a deep-dive Q&A. |
Protecting Data on Mobile DevicesPresenter Users today are no longer tethered to their desktop computers. They create valuable data on cutting-edge devices such as laptops, netbooks, tablets and smartphones. But most corporate IT departments don't include these devices in their data protection plans, calling it the user's responsibility. Of course, when the Sr. VP of HR leaves his notebook at the TSA checkpoint it quickly becomes a corporate problem. Things get even more complicated when the company embraces a BYOD (Bring your own device) model. In this session, Howard Marks will explore options for protecting data across all different user mobile devices using current backup apps, new apps built for mobility, cloud backup services and other alternatives. Attendees will learn about the special considerations for protecting data on ultra-portable devices like smartphones and tablets. |
21st Century Storage: What's New and What's ChangingPresenter Storage might seem to move slowly sometimes, but storage technologies continue to develop, offering new ways to cope with old problems. In this session, independent expert Randy Kerns will look at some of the newest storage system technologies on the market-including object-based storage, scale-out systems, solid-state usage in storage arrays, virtual storage appliances, etc.-while focusing on how IT professionals can leverage these new technologies to improve storage operations. |
A Deeper Dive: Where (and How and Why) to Implement Solid-State StoragePresenter This session will help you find the best fit for solid-state storage–in servers, in hybrid arrays, in all-flash arrays, as caching devices (server or networked based) and so forth. Independent expert Dennis Martin will describe all of the current choices, discuss the pros and cons of each, and then help you determine which approach will give your company the biggest bang for its solid-state storage buck. Topics will also include:
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Interactive Conference Workshop: Protecting the Data Asset - Creating a Practical FrameworkPresenter This two-part workshop facilitated by Jon Toigo, author of 5 books on DR planning and veteran developer of continuity plans for more than 100 companies, covers the latest techniques for building an effective data protection strategy.
Jon Toigo will then facilitate an interactive discussion in which participants will share ideas and proposals, and deconstruct the logic to then clarify the process for determining the best strategy given the real world constraints outlined in the scenario. There are no wrong answers to this exercise, except for those that ignore the practical boundaries inherent in technology and/or the pragmatic limitations imposed by the business. Upon conclusion, Jon will apply lessons learned from the day into an actual best-practice framework that attendees can take back to the office. Every participant will receive a Certificate of completion at the conclusion of the event from the Data Management Institute. |