Sessions In Detail

DISASTER RECOVERY TRACK

Eenie, Meany, Miney, Moe, Where Should My Disaster Site Go?
Presented by James (JP) Callahan, Operations Security Executive, Customer Data Center Security, Verizon Business

Well, you've finally decided to dust off the Business Continuity Plans and get something substantial on paper. You need plans that are meaningful and valuable to the organization. You present the general plan at a staff meeting in an attempt to get management to buy in. The boss turns to you and asks, "Where?" You have an idea where you'd like it to be, and then the boss asks, "Why?" Hmmm... that is a very good question (that's why they're the boss).

Have you considered all the factors that go into where you should relocate your data center in the event of a declared emergency? This talk will examine the various factors you should consider when making this decision; such as geography, availability, power grids, staffing, cost and most importantly, business needs. This session will apply to both those just starting out in the process and those looking to validate their previous decisions.

 

Disaster Recovery and Virtualization: Advanced Data Protection Blueprints

Presented by Chris Wolf, Senior Analyst, The Burton Group

This session examines changing IT operations to incorporate virtualization into an organization's disaster recovery plans. Steps for incorporating virtualization into DR preparation and recovery are addressed, along with use cases and methodologies for implementing the following backup architectures:

  • Agent-based backups
  • Serverless backups
  • Consolidated backups
  • Continuous data protection (CDP)
  • Flat file backups and snapshot integration

This session also provides methodologies for combining and implementing backup architectures and looks at the security, storage, and network concerns that are associated with data protection. Attendees will leave the session with several backup and recovery scripts in hand.

 

Testing Your Disaster Recovery Capability

Presented by Jon Toigo, CEO and Managing Principal, Toigo Partners International LLC

About 50% of large companies have disaster recovery plans, but fewer than 50% of these actually test their plans -- which equates to having no plan at all. This session surveys the challenges to continuity plan testing, from human factors to technical impediments, and what you can do about them. 

Jon Toigo, a 25-year veteran planner who has supported over 100 companies ranging from Fortune 500s to SMEs with DR/BCP planning services, will give an in-the-trenches view of what works, what doesn't and how to make testing part of your operational processes. Toigo argues that the key rationale for testing has less than you might think to do with validating logistics than to rehearsing a cadre of people in your organization to respond rationally to the great irrationality of a disaster event.

 

What's New in Storage and Networks -- Enabling Next Generation Data Centers Today

Presented by Greg Schulz, Founder and Senior Analyst, The StorageIO Group

This information packed session takes a look at current and evolving trends along with what's new in storage and networking to address various challenges today and for the future from a vendor neutral point of view. This session will show you how various evolving techniques and technologies can be leveraged to address consolidation along with scale up and scale-out initiatives while addressing power, cooling and other challenges. Some of the topics, techniques and technologies that will be discussed include:

  • Scaling performance, capacity, resiliency and accessibility of data
  • Data footprint reduction using compression, archiving and de-duplication
  • Energy and environmental friendly effective storage and networking connectivity
  • Data protection, and security for BC, DR, compliance and other applications
  • Support for consolidation using storage, networking and I/O virtualization techniques
  • Infrastructure resource management and data protection management
  • Tiered storage, tiered access, tiered data protection and tiered disk drives
  • Speeds and feeds including tiered access and multi-protocol storage

 

VIRTUALIZATION TRACK

Processes for Choosing Virtualization Candidates in Large Scale Deployments

Presented by Chris Wolf, Senior Analyst, The Burton Group

Find out how to plan a large-scale deployment, starting with a careful analysis of existing applications, facilities, servers, networking and more. Attendees will get a detailed explanation of the processes for planning a virtualization overhaul, particularly the critically important step of choosing the right virtualization applications and servers to virtualize. Along the way, attendees will learn:

  • Specific use cases for both virtualizing and not virtualizing resources
  • Techniques for justifying virtualization projects
  • Key differentiators between popular server and OS virtualization platforms, including VMware, Microsoft, Xen, SWsoft and Sun
  • Techniques, processes, tools and scripts for collecting server and resource utilization data in order to select virtualization candidates and determine VM placement
  • New software licensing and support considerations
  • Hardware platform selection, including key differentiators that impact decisions on whether to virtualize on blade or rack mount servers
  • Planning considerations for the physical infrastructure

 

Creating Highly Available Server and Desktop Environments with Virtualization

Presented by Barb Goldworm, President and Chief Analyst, Focus Consulting

While server virtualization is typically implemented initially for consolidation, it also brings strong benefits in increasing availability for server applications. Furthermore, virtualization is moving beyond servers, and offering desktop delivery alternatives through virtual clients, application virtualization and application streaming. Moving beyond consolidation leverages your existing virtualization products, knowledge and skills to deliver better service to your end users -- through increased availability, manageability and flexibility of both server and desktop applications.

This session examines how to create highly available environments for both servers and desktops and how to simplify and improve provisioning and deployment, and offers alternatives for desktop and application delivery.

 

Advanced System Management

Presented by Andrew Kutz, Principal,
l o s t c r e a t i o n s

After an environment is virtualized, IT professionals are faced with managing a virtualized architecture on an enterprise scale likely for the first time in their career. This session provides insight into today's top enterprise virtualization management tools, outlining their strengths, weaknesses, and best practices for their usage. Many management tasks extend beyond management tools to scripted solutions. This session concludes by preparing attendees for several advanced management challenges, including:

  • Identifying virtualized resources in Active Directory
  • Resizing virtual hard disks
  • Auditing virtual MAC addresses
  • Managing VM failover
  • Locating and enumerating VMs on computers in an Active Directory domain

 

Moving Toward a Fully-virtual Infrastructure

Presented by Andrew Kutz, Principal,
l o s t c r e a t i o n s

This session offers granular detail and insight into physical-to-virtual (P2V), virtual-to-virtual (V2V) and virtual-to-physical (V2P) migrations in large-scale virtualization deployments. Use cases for all practical migration methods are demonstrated, along with scripts and best practices for preparing servers for migration. Attendees will leave this session with clear knowledge of the following topics:

  • Step-by-step processes for performing all common migration methods, including hot cloning, offline imaging, bare metal recovery and manual conversions
  • Insight into the key differences and features amongst all popular migration tools

 

DATA CENTER DESIGN TRACK

Sponsored by APC

The Power That Sustains Us

Presented by Robert E. McFarlane, Principal - Interport Division President, Shen, Milsom & Wilke Inc.

Backup power is unquestionably the most critical design element in the infrastructure of a high availability data center. Without this fundamental service, nothing else functions through a crisis, no matter how much you put into the robustness or redundancy of the rest of the installation. Historically, this has meant conventional UPS's and Generators. They have generally served us well, but they have also had their limitations and presented their share of design challenges. Today there is a variety of supplemental power alternatives available, as well as more conventional systems with distinctive designs and significant improvements. But what to choose, and how best to use it? Options can also make for confusion.

This session explores the major factors that determine backup power system effectiveness. You will also hear about the newest designs for conventional UPS's, alternative UPS options such as flywheels, fuel cells, thermal storage and DC technology and what affects generator dependability. These devices will be scrutinized in terms of their reliabilities, backup durations, potential life spans, maintenance requirements, installation considerations and most appropriate applications. How these choices may affect energy efficiency will also be discussed.

 

Data Center Energy and Sustainable Design

Presented by Don Beaty, Founder and President, DLB Associates Consulting Engineers

It is difficult to say which is rising faster, KW per rack or focus on energy usage and sustainable design. Data centers continue to be very costly to construct, resulting in a continued interest for minimizing construction costs. Uptime or availability also continues to be a big concern -- so where does energy and sustainable design fit amongst the other priorities? Further, how significant are the opportunities to save energy without impacting uptime or greatly increasing construction cost?

ASHRAE has been very active in the energy arena and sustainable design for many years. This presentation focuses on the use of the various ASHRAE publications to produce cost effective designs that are energy efficient and environmentally friendly.

 

Energy Efficiency in Data Center Design

Presented by Matt Stansberry, Site Editor for SearchDataCenter.com, TechTarget

Data center energy efficiency is important not only to curb runaway power consumption, but also to accommodate more data center capacity. If a company can recover capacity, it can delay spending on capital improvements. Energy efficiency isn't just about shaving kilowatt hours -- it's about avoiding a nine-figure capital expenditure. For the foreseeable future, traditional energy costs are going to rise. At the same time, demand for new application growth will continue to outstrip the processing power increases that flow from Moore 's Law. This session will discuss how "going green" in a data center can be seen as either a crises or an opportunity. It depends on whether companies plan to wave white flags in surrender to giant energy bills or proactively meet the challenge head-on. Data center managers will play a leading role in determining which option their organizations pursue. This session will help make that decision.

 

Capacity Planning for Contemporary Data Centers

Presented by Bill Peldzus, Director of Data Center and Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery Practices, GlassHouse Technologies

Data Center Managers have typically looked at capacity planning as "Do I have enough space for the servers coming in next quarter?"  But today capacity planning means so much more -- and for all the right reasons.  This session will discuss the many standard topics in this arena, including power, cooling and physical space, as well as new concepts and approaches including consolidation, virtualization, "going green" and operational/ disaster recovery.  Going from plan to reality is a significant challenge; this process as well as data center migrations will be discussed throughout this session.

 

The Economic Meltdown of Moore's Law and The Green Data Center

Presented by Kenneth (Ken) G. Brill, Executive Director, The Uptime Institute

The net economic productivity of IT is threatened because server power consumption improvement is occurring at a slower rate than the increase in compute performance. As a result, the enterprise TCO per unit of computing has not been falling nearly as rapidly as senior executives might think. Site infrastructure (power and cooling) costs which used to be round-off error (and perhaps not even charged back to IT from Corporate Real Estate) will grow to 5% to 15% of IT's budget. Enterprise data centers which used to cost $20 million are now $100 million and growing with no upper end in sight.

In this session Ken will explore this phenomenon and ways to counter this trend and restore the economic benefits of Moore 's Law at the whole-system level of the data center. In addition, Ken will present four characteristics of a truly green data center that can make an early and quantitatively substantial difference in the industry's energy-consumption future.

 

EXECUTIVE TRACK

Making the Right Server Choices

Presented by Anne Skamarock, Advisory Analyst and Author, Focus Consulting

Data Centers have always been under pressure to keep up with growing business needs while keeping costs down. Today, however, there are new pressures bearing down on the data center which affect the basic requirements list when evaluating servers. Some of these pressures include environmental issues of power and cooling, lack of physical space and application needs such as scale-up or scale-out. Furthermore, emerging technologies such as I/O, server, desktop virtualization and application virtualization, add further requirements to the list of considerations.

This session examines the forces within the data center that are effecting changes in server requirements and how servers are evolving to address those requirements. It will also provide a list of considerations to aid in making the right server choices.

 

Enterprise Data: What You Don't Know Can Hurt You

Presented by Mark Diamond, President and CEO, Contoural, Inc.

As IT professionals we are used to worrying about storing information to keep the company running. However, many organizations are finding themselves saving most data for effectively forever. Few consider the dark cloud underneath the silver lining of traditional storage management -- not knowing what data you have can hurt you. Litigation readiness, privacy, compliance and other rules are putting companies at risk for having the wrong data in the wrong place for what is now the wrong time. This session will discuss these new requirements for understanding your data, and how an effective archiving strategy can help organizations better understand what they have and take action to reduce risks and lower costs.

 

Using ITIL to Align IT and Business

Presented by Sid Finehirsh, Founder and CEO, The CMX Group

For many years IT has been admonished to run "more like a business." What this phrase meant was never clear. Some strategist envisioned “more like a business” to mean profit driven, a concept that never gained much currency for internal IT organizations. Others took it simply to mean more structured management. Whatever the phrase might have meant, the change called for represented the dissatisfaction of business departments and corporate leadership with the services provided by IT. It reflected a need to move from a crisis driven management style to an organization that has its work-flow optimized, where planning is formalized, and customer knowledge is part of its culture.

Today we can begin to describe and build a realizable organizational architecture in which "IT is a business." It does not require IT to become a profit center, but it does force its executive to respond to market-driven initiatives. It is built on the business process optimization model called for by ITIL and presents itself to its technologically savvy customers, the corporate profit centers, as a catalog of services. It uses new technologies such as the utility data center, SOA and SAAS. It is the concrete fulfillment of IT being run like a business.

 

ITIL V3: What's New and How to Use it

Presented by David Pultorak, Founder and Chief Executive, Pultorak & Associates

As interest in IT service management (ITSM) and ITIL continues to grow among IT organizations, the focus is now shifting to implementation strategies and approaches. Improvements to IT processes are not easy to realize -- an informed and field-tested approach matters. Achieving quality results from ITIL requires careful planning and execution in four dimensions: People, process, technology and governance. This session explores ITSM implementations and highlights the most important considerations in ITIL adoption, including:

  • Six steps to planning ITIL implementations
  • Individual, team and organization-level implementation considerations
  • Tooling matters
  • Key implementation concepts and techniques
  • Common implementation mistakes
  • Critical success factors

Attend this session to learn more about achieving the best results from your ITIL adoption. The session will include coverage of new version, ITIL V3, and include advice for executives on bridging from ITIL V2 to V3.