SNIA Europe Storage User Roundtable

The third SNIA Europe Storage User Roundtable will take place at SNW Frankfurt 2010.  The 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 your business targets and make your storage infrastructure more effective and more efficient.  Questions to be discussed for each of the focus topics are:

• How does your company today address the requirements that drive these new technologies?
• Why are you using/going to use these new technologies (or not)?
• What’s your preference for implementation?
• How are you rolling this out?

The Roundtable will give you an idea how your peers in other companies address these challenges. We will do best practice sharing and will certainly identify experience that will help to avoid the pitfalls of innovations. The session will be moderated by SNIA Europe executives that can bring in a vendor perspective and will also be eager to collect and communicate your feedback giving you a chance to influence the direction of the major SNIA initiatives.

The focus topics for the Roundtable will be:

SSD
Solid State storage is still a new technology to store data. It offers tremendous speed advantages while consuming less energy and producing less heat than hard disk drives. But it has its price. Recently the variety of form factors has grown. From hard disk size to PCIe board to complete integrated storage systems solid state supports different use cases. Where does it fit and where not?

FCoE
Fibre Channel over Ethernet is the technology that will help to converge IP network and Storage network to one single enterprise network for all kind of IT and Communication. But where to start? Do we have to tear out all existing cables? Does it make sense to introduce FCoE only in specific parts of the Data Centre? Is there a real standard or do we need to wait?

Data Protection
This is the life insurance for the data in the data center and as such not replaceable. But how can we minimize spending and effort? Will new technologies like Data Deduplication help? Is Countinous Data Protection affordable and necessary? Will Snapshot/Replication replace conventional backup?

Cloud
After many jokes about a cloudy sky this technology becomes a reality – but still there are many concerns about risk, cost and security. Can those concerns be addressed with todays technology and offers? What are the areas where it makes sense to start using cloud offerings? What kind of cloud would be the right one for a specific application area?