5
SNIA
SNIA Europe Academy
comes to London EUR
OP
Delegate numbers up, as server and storage virtualisation took
E UK COMMIT
centre stage.
By Jon Tate, SNIA Europe UK Committee Chair, IBM.
The second SNIA Europe Academy held in London was a 25% growth over 2007 and double the peak traffic ever
great success. Delegate numbers were up 25% on 2008 seen on the actual night of the television broadcast,
and feedback from sponsors and delegates alike was enabling Comic Relief to take in over £19million in
TEE
extremely positive. Held at the Inmarsat Conference donations.
Centre close to the city of London, the 2009 event was
heavily themed around Server & Storage Virtualisation The conference keynote was delivered by Ken Male, CEO
but the agenda also featured sessions on Cloud of the leading research firm TheInfoPro who shared their
Computing, Solid State Storage, SAN security, and Fibre findings on adoption and implementation timeframes
Channel over Ethernet, all areas of focus for SNIA in plans of a myriad of virtualisation technologies based
2009. Delegates rated the Solid State Storage tutorial on TheInfoPro’s proprietary Technology Heat Index (tm).
session the best of the day with Fibre Channel over Based on six-monthly in-depth interviews with hundreds
Ethernet a close second. of IT decision makers within major organizations Ken’s
presentation provided fact-based data on timeframes,
Guest speakers this year included Charlotte Melen, Web costs, spending and the key business and technical
Technology Manager at Comic Relief who, along with drivers for virtualization and the motivators and
Dan Sutherland, CEO of outsourcing partner Carrenza inhibitors to adoption were also shared along with the
Hosting, presented a fascinating overview on how the benefits based on real life experience with the
two organisations worked together to create a Web- technologies.
based donations engine that would allow them to
seamlessly handle the transaction storm they would face The event sponsors were all equally positive about the
on the night of the event. The result? A truly exceptional event and its progress to date. The feedback to me
online donation platform, which coped easily with a included comments like “brilliant”, “fantastic”, “best
one day event I have ever attended”. From my point of
view I noticed that there was a “buzz” around the place
and listening in on some of the vendor/end-user
interactions, and from chatting to the vendors, I could
tell that they were extremely impressed with the quality
of the attendees, and liked the intimacy of the event. I
believe it was an outstanding success.
Some key topics that were covered:
Storage Virtualisation -What, Why, Where and How?
Storage Virtualisation continues to be one of the hot
topics in the industry, especially with the near-
ubiquitous deployment of Storage Networks. But
besides all hype, there is still a lot of confusion, too,
with companies using the term virtualization and its
WWW.SNS-UK.CO.UK JUNE 09
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