Presenter:
Stephen Foskett,Independent Consultant and Community Organizer, Gestalt IT
Depending on which industry study you read, most companies are wasting anywhere from 30% to 50% of their installed disk capacity, which translates into thousands of dollars spent with no effective return on investment. Storage vendors are beginning to provide tools that can help storage managers make the most of the disk they have installed. For example, data reduction for primary storage borrows data deduplication technology developed for backup and classic compression algorithms to help squeeze the air out of nearline and primary data and reduce its footprint. This session's topics will include an overview of data reduction technologies and where they will have the greatest impact, what key storage vendors are offering in data reduction and an update on the major players, and the consequences of using primary data dedupe along with dedupe for backups. We'll also look at the potential for vendor lock-in and consider why we’re reducing data in the first place.
Topics include:
Presenter:
Stephen Foskett,Independent Consultant and Community Organizer, Gestalt IT
Storage virtualization has been around for decades and, although research indicates that 70% of companies have already virtualized at least some of their installed block or file storage, most remain unaware of this technology. Grandiose schemes for comprehensive virtual SANs have given way to more practical host- and array-based virtualization technologies, and server virtualization has created a new opportunity to create a pool of storage. This session will look at the current state of storage virtualization, how to quantify its benefits and describe which approaches are best for particular environments, and also cover how storage virtualization compares to private storage clouds.
Topics include:
Presenter:
Dennis Martin, Founder and President, Demartek
Everybody knows that solid-state storage runs fast and cool, and uses far less power than hard disk alternatives. And, everybody knows that solid state is darned expensive, too. In this session, we'll see where SSD can have the most impact in a storage environment, including looking at the various implementation alternatives. We will discuss the device choices and data placement choices you need to make when considering SSD deployments. We'll also crunch the numbers with a financial breakdown of SSD implementation and help you determine if solid state is cost-effective for your company, taking into account newer technologies such as automated tiering that make solid state a more viable alternative in some cases.
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Dennis Martin, Founder and President, Demartek
First there was HSM, and then came ILM. But, this time around, automated tiering—without a catching acronym to hang on it—is getting much more serious consideration. Shrinking storage budgets and escalating capacity requirements have made it clear that storage must be managed better. One of the basics of good management is ensuring that data is kept on the most appropriate storage according to its usefulness and importance to the organization. Automated storage tiering represents a bold step in that direction and most major storage vendors have jumped on the tiering bandwagon. In this session, we’ll cover everything you need to know about automated storage tiering, including the key differences in how they tier and some software alternatives to consider as well.
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Shahid N. Shah, Analyst and Blogger, HealthcareITGuy.com
Recent social, regulatory and policy changes mean that the healthcare industry will face unprecedented growth in the use of electronic health records (EHRs) and increase of health information exchanges (HIEs). This, coupled with the mandate for providers to become all electronic, means that healthcare IT will be under tremendous pressure at least for the next decade in storing and managing increasing amounts of secure data. Learn how IT can manage tiered retention of data while benefiting from the mega trends occurring in the industry today, including cloud, virtualization and mobility.
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Marc Staimer, Founder and CDS, Dragon Slayer Consulting
Public, private, hybrid—cloud storage is a hot topic, but as more and more vendors hustle to hop on the cloud storage bandwagon, the amount of confusion about cloud storage grows proportionally. The definition of cloud has gotten broader and become less precise, adding to the already considerable confusion. In this session we’ll define the various incarnations of cloud storage—and also spell out what it isn’t. We’ll cut through the marketing and hype and clearly describe the capabilities and benefits of cloud storage services.In addition to defining the various implementations of cloud storage technologies, we’ll provide answers to these questions:
This session will also provide tips for evaluating the available services and service providers, describe how to determine TCO and suggest some best fits.
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Marc Staimer, Founder and CDS, Dragon Slayer Consulting
The exponential growth in unstructured data continues unabated adding stress and strain to storage systems—and to the staff managing those systems. Storage scaling has become an urgent issue for storage administrators as they attempt to get their hands around managing unstructured data. Keeping in mind that “scale” can mean growing capacity, performance or other operational parameters, we’ll examine the different scalable storage technologies, such as enterprise SAN storage, scale-out SAN, scale-out NAS, global namespace NAS and object storage. The session will provide insight related to the players in this space, along with analysis of how well their products scale in each area and how cost-effective their approaches are.
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Jon Toigo, CEO and Managing Principal, Toigo Partners International, and Chairman of the Data Management Institute
Survey after survey shows that the server virtualization revolution has stalled: Companies are calling a halt to programs when they are less than 20% of the way to completion. The most frequently cited problem is storage. Inflexible fabrics, complex capacity allocation methods, ineffective mirroring schemes, and hard to manage heterogeneity have long been the bane of enterprise storage. Consolidation and virtualization has simply underscored theses issues.
The debate over what to do about storage in virtual environments is being framed in predictable categories by the storage industry: We are flooded by airy debates over the relative merits of direct-attached versus network-attached versus fabric-attached.Truth be told, the real issue isn’t how we build block storage infrastructure, but rather how we “surface” storage resources for use by hypervisors and how we ensure access to data by clients that can change their locations on the fly.
Storage virtualization shows the most promise to provide a low cost/high performance solution to the Server Virtualization Stall. But, to avoid many of the same problems experienced in server virtualization, we need to pay attention to a key lesson: Hardware still counts. Important foundational issues such as ease of hardware management and administration must be addressed for storage virtualization to deliver performance, capacity and protection services in a predictable way. By itself, storage virtualization delivers nothing of any real value if the underlying hardware infrastructure is still an unmanaged junk drawer.
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Jon Toigo, CEO and Managing Principal, Toigo Partners International, and Chairman of the Data Management Institute
"Disaster Recovery is old school." "HA trumps DRP." "The best disaster recovery plan is never having a disaster in the first place." "Server virtualization eliminates the need for DR." "Cloud services make disasters a historical relic." These are just a sampling of the vendor marketecture floating around the print and on-line trade press publications today. Self serving rhetorical value aside, the assertions have little or no basis in fact. Referencing them to guide your strategy for disaster recovery and business continuity is idiotic, according to Jon Toigo, veteran planner and authority on business continuity. Yet, the pitches are effective. Business disaster preparedness continues to hover at the lowest levels seen in decades. These messages reinforce long-standing concerns about the budgetary and skill requirements to develop and maintain a disaster recovery capability that works. In some cases, IT folk are being lulled by the vendors into a false sense of security that new technology is immune to disaster. Whatever the reason, greater than 75% of large organizations have developed and tested DR plans, and the number is much larger for smaller firms where the stakes are far greater while the protection requirements are much simpler to manage.
If the epitaph, "We took our chances," isn’t one you want to see on your resume after your company fails, you may want to spend 60 minutes learning about the ten essential steps every company should be taking to prevent avoidable disasters and to increase the likelihood of recovery from disasters you can’t avoid.While there are no "experts" in the field of DR, there is considerable empirical evidence that recovery planning can work…and it doesn’t have to savage your budget in the process.
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