Focus on Data Center at the Leading Business Technology Conference
Plan for the data center of the future, while optimizing the data center of today to provide reliable, flexible and resilient IT services at an affordable cost.
Data Center Conference Sessions
Bridging The C-Suite Gap: How To Build The Business Case For Data Center Transformation While evaluating and managing technology comes naturally to IT professionals, communicating business value may not. With data center transformation at the heart of delivering on businesses demand for reliable, flexible and resilient IT services at an affordable cost, data center managers must learn to develop and articulate business cases. This session will help attendees create a successful transformation strategy by: demonstrating ROI to secure CEO support for migrating to a next-generation data center; highlighting attributes to build the business case; and identifying infrastructure features that increase efficiency and lower costs, while delivering business value.
Brooks Esser is the Worldwide Lead for HP’s CIO Agenda program. He has over ten years of experience in services, industry and solutions marketing. Prior to joining his current position, he served as a finance manager at several HP divisions, and also managed HP’s syndicated market research activities for several years. Esser holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of the Pacific, and an MBA from Santa Clara University.
Delivering Business Value With A Comprehensive Green Data Center Framework
With corporate environmental sustainability on the rise, IT departments are increasingly turning to green IT initiatives. While most organizations start on their path towards greener IT in the data center – organizations oftentimes lack a comprehensive strategy and struggle to prioritize projects. To spend time and capital wisely – ultimately delivering financial and environmental benefits – this session will help data center managers develop a comprehensive green data center framework across their server, storage, network and facilities assets.
Doug serves IT Infrastructure & Operations professionals, primarily focusing on green IT, green business, and IT leadership skills. His research helps IT executives successfully approach green IT, determine strategy, and then move from green IT awareness to action. Previously at Forrester, Doug was the global council manager and senior advisor for the Forrester Leadership Boards IT Infrastructure & Operations Council, a best practice community for senior IT executives in $1 billion-plus organizations. In this role, Doug regularly advised clients on Green IT strategy and practices. Additionally, Doug was also an advisor on the Forrester Leadership Boards Enterprise Architecture Council. Prior to Forrester, Doug was a VP of strategy and business development for Red Oxygen, a wireless communications startup, and living and working in Australia and France. In addition, Doug co-created CU Networks, a computer networking and servicing startup serving the students of the University of Colorado at Boulder. Doug holds a B.S. in finance from University of Colorado at Boulder and was awarded the Undergraduate Certificate in Entrepreneurial Excellence.
Shehzad Merchant serves as Senior Director for Strategy at Extreme Networks, where he drives the direction for data center networking. With over 17 years of industry experience, and an engineering track record highlighted by the achievement of several technology patents, Merchant is a veteran of wired and wireless Ethernet and communications. Prior to Extreme Networks, Merchant held various technology and executive management roles including CTO at Nevis Networks, a company specializing in network security. Prior to that Merchant was co-founder and VP of Engineering at Polytime Systems. Merchant earned an MS in Computer Engineering from the University of Southern California.
Tate Cantrell’s primary responsibilities include product design and development and data center operations. Mr. Cantrell has been in the mission-critical facilities business for more than 15 years and has overseen the build-out and operationalization of some the largest and most sophisticated data centers in the industry.Prior to Verne Global, Mr. Cantrell was Vice President, Data Center Technologies, at Dupont Fabros Technology, the second-largest pure-play data center REIT in the United States. He was responsible for development and execution of operational strategies critical to the start-up of the Dupont Fabros Development Wholesale Data Center business model, the first of its kind in the industry.
Robert Petrocelli founded GreenBytes® in 2007 and serves as chief executive officer. Prior to establishing GreenBytes, Petrocelli founded Heartlab, Inc. in 1994, a medical information technology company that was sold to Agfa in 2005. Petrocelli was awarded a patent on archival technology utilized for the long-term storage of patient data, including cardiology images, demographics and reports. Petrocelli received the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 2001 and has made the Inc. 500 Fastest Growing Private Companies in America list four times.
DEEP DIVE - Why Networking Must Fundamentally Change Physical servers now support multiple Virtual Machines (VMs) that can be dynamically provisioned and moved between servers. There is just one huge problem - today the supporting network and management infrastructure is still largely static and physical. So while it is possible to move a VM between data centers in a matter of milliseconds, it can take days to get the supporting infrastructure in place. Many industry pundits believe that the way to solve this problem is both through automation and orchestration and by implementing a flat Layer 2 LAN. Potentially those are good solutions, but what do they actually mean and how do we get there? In this two-hour, rapid-paced session two groups of panelists will address those questions. The first group of panelists will discuss what has to happen to the data center LAN in order to support virtualization and what migration strategies make the most sense. The second group of panelists will discuss the data center automation and orchestration functionality that is ready for production networks today and how that may change over the next twelve months
Jim has a wide background in the IT industry. This includes being a software engineer, an engineering manager for high-speed data services for a major telco, a product manager for network hardware, a network manager at two Fortune 500 companies, and the principal of a consulting organization. In addition, Jim has created software tools for designing customer networks for a major IXC, and directed and performed market research at a major industry analyst firm.
As Vice President of Marketing Douglas Gourlay is responsible for product and solutions marketing, communications, and the strategic alliances of Arista Networks. Prior to joining Arista, Doug was the VP of Data Center Marketing at Cisco Systems where he held key roles in sales, product development, and marketing. Doug has filed or holds more than twenty patents in networking technologies. Prior to his work in the technology sector Doug served as a US Army Infantry Officer.
Manish Muthal is director of marketing for Enterprise Networking Solutions, LSI Corporation. Muthal brings deep knowledge of the enterprise networking business with focus on switching and services architecture for the enterprise and data center. Most recently he was Founder, Vice President of Hardware at Nevis Networks, where he led the architecture development and technology marketing for service aware enterprise switches. Prior to Nevis, he led networking silicon development at Juniper Networks and Amber Networks (Nokia), and high end server platform architecture at Intel. Muthal has a master's degree in Computer Engineering from the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Thomas Scheibe joined Cisco in 1998 and is currently Director for datacenter systems in Cisco’s System Architecture and Strategy Unit. During his time at Cisco he managed Cisco’s transceiver portfolio and worked with customers in the cable and Metro Ethernet service provider space. Thomas represents Cisco on the Board of Directors of the Ethernet Alliance. Prior to Cisco, Thomas worked as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company. Thomas holds a MSEE from Technical University Chemnitz (Germany) and a M.B.A. from Haas School of Business, U.C. Berkeley.
Paul Congdon is Chief Technology Officer for HP ProCurve and an HP Fellow, one of the elite HP employees recognized as pioneers in their fields. He is responsible for specifying, architecting and designing ProCurve network infrastructure and software products. In his 25 years in the networking industry, he has become widely esteemed as an inventor and leader in driving networking industry standards. Congdon is the Vice Chairman of the IEEE 802.1 committee and Technical Advisor for the IETF RADIUS Extensions Working Group, and his long-time activities with the IEEE 802 standards efforts involved him in the creation of the Ethernet LAN. He is co-inventor of the commonly used TCP checksum offloading, a program for accelerating the networking performance of TCP/IP within servers. He also architected the method of distributing ProCurve software onto multiple processors, enabling ProCurve switch software to scale between low-cost, single-chip solutions and high-end, multi-modular chassis systems. After completing internships with IBM, Congdon joined HP in 1985 as a Software Development Engineer responsible for the creation of networking protocols within HP-UX. He expanded his focus to infrastructure architecture issues and has been involved in the design of a wide range of network devices and technologies, including routers, Layer 2/3/4 switches, iSCSI storage devices, SNA, X.25, FDDI, Ethernet, wireless LANs, virtual LANs, link aggregation and access security protocols, including IEEE 802.1X. Congdon earned Bachelor of Science, magna cum laude, and Master of Science degrees in computer science from California State University, Chico. He is currently a PhD candidate at the University of California, Davis. He currently holds ten patents related to the networking industry and has several more in process.
Dhritiman Dasgupta (aka DD) is Senior Product Marketing Manager, Fabric and Switching Technologies at Juniper Networks. DD has more than 12 years of experience in the networking industry with roles in product management, corporate marketing, software engineering and customer support. Prior to joining Juniper, he was at Cisco as a Senior Product Line Manager for campus and data center switching. He started his career at Nortel Networks, Canada in the network management team. DD has a bachelor degree in Computer Architecture and an MBA in Marketing and International Business.
Planning For Server, Storage And Network Convergence
Virtualization is causing the convergence of server, storage, and network platforms. At the same time, fewer CAPEX dollars coupled with rising energy costs is promoting data center managers to incorporate energy efficient and highly utilized IT equipment in the data center. This session will help data center managers understand virtualization’s role in convergence and plan for a more efficient and highly utilized server, storage and network environment.
Doug serves IT Infrastructure & Operations professionals, primarily focusing on green IT, green business, and IT leadership skills. His research helps IT executives successfully approach green IT, determine strategy, and then move from green IT awareness to action. Previously at Forrester, Doug was the global council manager and senior advisor for the Forrester Leadership Boards IT Infrastructure & Operations Council, a best practice community for senior IT executives in $1 billion-plus organizations. In this role, Doug regularly advised clients on Green IT strategy and practices. Additionally, Doug was also an advisor on the Forrester Leadership Boards Enterprise Architecture Council. Prior to Forrester, Doug was a VP of strategy and business development for Red Oxygen, a wireless communications startup, and living and working in Australia and France. In addition, Doug co-created CU Networks, a computer networking and servicing startup serving the students of the University of Colorado at Boulder. Doug holds a B.S. in finance from University of Colorado at Boulder and was awarded the Undergraduate Certificate in Entrepreneurial Excellence.
Paul Congdon is Chief Technology Officer for HP ProCurve and an HP Fellow, one of the elite HP employees recognized as pioneers in their fields. He is responsible for specifying, architecting and designing ProCurve network infrastructure and software products. In his 25 years in the networking industry, he has become widely esteemed as an inventor and leader in driving networking industry standards. Congdon is the Vice Chairman of the IEEE 802.1 committee and Technical Advisor for the IETF RADIUS Extensions Working Group, and his long-time activities with the IEEE 802 standards efforts involved him in the creation of the Ethernet LAN. He is co-inventor of the commonly used TCP checksum offloading, a program for accelerating the networking performance of TCP/IP within servers. He also architected the method of distributing ProCurve software onto multiple processors, enabling ProCurve switch software to scale between low-cost, single-chip solutions and high-end, multi-modular chassis systems. After completing internships with IBM, Congdon joined HP in 1985 as a Software Development Engineer responsible for the creation of networking protocols within HP-UX. He expanded his focus to infrastructure architecture issues and has been involved in the design of a wide range of network devices and technologies, including routers, Layer 2/3/4 switches, iSCSI storage devices, SNA, X.25, FDDI, Ethernet, wireless LANs, virtual LANs, link aggregation and access security protocols, including IEEE 802.1X. Congdon earned Bachelor of Science, magna cum laude, and Master of Science degrees in computer science from California State University, Chico. He is currently a PhD candidate at the University of California, Davis. He currently holds ten patents related to the networking industry and has several more in process.
Jon Flower is the vice president of technology at Adaptec, responsible for developing and implementing technologies to expand the company's leadership beyond the data storage I/O market. He leads the Adaptec engineering team at several levels, ranging from product concept development and architectural design, to the development of engineering and test specifications. At Adaptec, Mr. Flower has also served as the chief technology officer (CTO), specializing in new business initiatives, as well as the CTO of the Storage Systems Division at Adaptec. Before joining Adaptec, he was the vice president of architecture at Tricord.
Thomas Scheibe joined Cisco in 1998 and is currently Director for datacenter systems in Cisco’s System Architecture and Strategy Unit. During his time at Cisco he managed Cisco’s transceiver portfolio and worked with customers in the cable and Metro Ethernet service provider space. Thomas represents Cisco on the Board of Directors of the Ethernet Alliance. Prior to Cisco, Thomas worked as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company. Thomas holds a MSEE from Technical University Chemnitz (Germany) and a M.B.A. from Haas School of Business, U.C. Berkeley.
How Data Center Managers Should Evaluate The Cloud And Cloud-Like Efficiencies
As IT is challenged to deliver services – not manage assets – could computing presents itself as an affordable, scalable strategy. And the pressure is mounting for data center managers to move their on-premise infrastructure and applications into the cloud. But security concerns, poor service-level commitments, and lack of organizational readiness – and willingness – are all valid roadblocks that stand in the way. This session will help data center managers determine if could computing is right for them – and if not, how to achieve cloud-like efficiencies in their current environment.
Doug serves IT Infrastructure & Operations professionals, primarily focusing on green IT, green business, and IT leadership skills. His research helps IT executives successfully approach green IT, determine strategy, and then move from green IT awareness to action. Previously at Forrester, Doug was the global council manager and senior advisor for the Forrester Leadership Boards IT Infrastructure & Operations Council, a best practice community for senior IT executives in $1 billion-plus organizations. In this role, Doug regularly advised clients on Green IT strategy and practices. Additionally, Doug was also an advisor on the Forrester Leadership Boards Enterprise Architecture Council. Prior to Forrester, Doug was a VP of strategy and business development for Red Oxygen, a wireless communications startup, and living and working in Australia and France. In addition, Doug co-created CU Networks, a computer networking and servicing startup serving the students of the University of Colorado at Boulder. Doug holds a B.S. in finance from University of Colorado at Boulder and was awarded the Undergraduate Certificate in Entrepreneurial Excellence.
Phil Fritz a manager in IBM Tivoli's Strategy and Product Management group. In this role, Phil leads a multi-disciplinary team that works with clients to define solutions, drive product strategy and bring key technologies, including Green, Virtualization, Cloud Computing, SOA and Software-as-a-Service to the marketplace. Phil's team has been driving the strategy and product management behind key initiatives for IBM Tivoli , starting with IBM's Green Data Center launch in 2007 and, more recently, IBM Tivoli's new foray into Cloud Computing with Service Management Center for Cloud. Previously, Phil was a senior program director in the area of SOA management since 2002, helping define and drive the management capabilities in IBM’s SOA Foundation, focusing on security and management. Phil is a frequent speaker at trade, analyst and customer events. Phil has an MBA in Information Technology from the University of Texas – Austin and a BA from the University of Virginia.
Dhritiman Dasgupta (aka DD) is Senior Product Marketing Manager, Fabric and Switching Technologies at Juniper Networks. DD has more than 12 years of experience in the networking industry with roles in product management, corporate marketing, software engineering and customer support. Prior to joining Juniper, he was at Cisco as a Senior Product Line Manager for campus and data center switching. He started his career at Nortel Networks, Canada in the network management team. DD has a bachelor degree in Computer Architecture and an MBA in Marketing and International Business.
Kirsten Wolberg is Chief Information Officer at Salesforce.com, leading the Information Technology organization responsible for building and maintaining the global technology infrastructure and business applications for all Salesforce.com employees and business units. Wolberg joined Salesforce.com in May, 2008 from Charles Schwab & Co., Inc. where she led the organization responsible for corporate technology, offshore development and technology education & leadership development. She was a key member of the executive team that led Schwab’s turnaround and return to profitability. For the past seven years Wolberg has served in leadership roles with The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society and the San Francisco Light the Night Walk.
Converged and Virtual I/O – Networking the 21st Century Data Center
By adopting server virtualization we’ve reduced the number of physical servers in the data center but the proliferation of separate storage, data, management and VMotion networks has made the back of our server racks look like an explosion in a spaghetti factory. Now that 10Gigabit Ethernet is widely available several solutions have arisen to consolidate network and storage I/O onto a smaller number of higher bandwidth connections. With consolidated networking users can stop playing the game of one cable, two cable, orange cable, blue cable.
This session will explore the solutions available to server and storage administrators for reducing cable clutter and consolidating network and storage I/O. Ranging from Fibre Channel NPIV and using vLANs to segregate data traffic to cutting edge technologies including Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and PCIe extension, We’ll look at the technologies, the players, the politics and how users can integrate new technologies into their short and long term planning.
Topics include:
· I/O virtualization for management and security
· The state of FCoE
· End of Row vs. Top of Rack configurations
· External I/O virtualization solutions
· 10Gig Ethernet, CEE, DCB, DCE – Ethernet for the Data Center
Howard Marks is the Founder and Chief Scientist at Networks Are Our Lives, Inc! a Hoboken NJ based networking consultancy. In over 25 years of consulting he has designed and implemented networks, management systems and Internet strategies at organizations including American Express, JP Morgan, Borden Foods, US Tobacco, BBDO Worldwide and Foxwoods Resort Casino. Mr. Marks has been a speaker at industry conferences including Comnet, PC Expo, Neworld+Interop and Microsoft’s TechEd since 1990 on topics including LAN and WAN infrastructure, systems management and web hosting. He is the author of Networking Windows and co-author of Windows NT Unleashed (Sams) along with over 100 articles in publications including PC Magazine, Network Computing and Network World. He is currently the "Backup and Business Continuity" blogger at InformationWeek.com
Securing the Virtualized Data Center
As data centers move become more virtualized, companies are still determining how to secure these environments. This session will examine the inner workings of the virtual data center, including where the security weak spots are and what can be done to ensure protection of critical data being stored there.
Paul Arceneaux has more than 12 years of network and system management experience. Prior to TippingPoint, he was vice president of systems management for 3Com Corporation. He was responsible for the engineering and product management of the company’s management software. Previously, Arceneaux was vice president and general manager for Siemens network and service management software solutions. In addition, he has worked as a project engineer dealing with security, time management and network management.
Learn more about the Conference
PUE Hype and Setting Realistic Expectations - Sponsored by APC There are two major subsystems in a data center: physical infrastructure and IT equipment. PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) indicates the proportion of power consumed by both. Companies around the globe are publishing PUE values that are close to perfection, but are these numbers achievable in a real-world production data center? This session will help attendees filter out the hype, understand the science behind PUE, and set realistic expectations for their own data centers. Beyond the basic calculations, you will examine what factors could increase or decrease your PUE and set you on track for improving your data center efficiency.
Dynamic Resource Provisioning in a Virtualized Environment - Sponsored by Enterasys Virtualization demands a new kind of network automation to effectively meet today's IT and business requirements. The nature of a virtualized data center often results in network provisioning complexity that can adversely affect critical network attributes such as Quality of Service. In this session, we’ll discuss the benefits of Virtual Network Automation, where the network can dynamically adapt to new servers and applications and maintain a high-quality end-user experience.
Gain without Pain: Ensuring Security and Reliability in Converged and Virtualized Data Centers - Sponsored by Ixia Consolidation, convergence and virtualization taking place within the enterprise network and data center promise to deliver the gains of greater operational efficiency, flexibility and manageability. However, these new technologies and architectures also bring increased complexity and introduce new vulnerabilities to the individual devices that can lead to compromised security, reliability and performance. Pre-emptive testing is necessary to validate the viability of new technologies and architecture, assesses different equipment options, and expose and resolve major issues prior to implementation. This session will discuss best practices for pre-emptive testing across multiple devices, in and surrounding the data center. We will review test requirements and methodologies that help ensure security and reliability is maintained as you evolve your enterprise network or data center, so you can move forward with confidence – and not pain.
Clouds, Open Automation and How the Network Can Help - Spoonsored by Force10 Networks Data center (DC) consolidation harkens back to the centralized glass room, enabling better control over fixed costs. Virtualization drives up utilization of server compute and storage assets, reduces sprawl and helps reduce power and cooling.
The next phase of DC evolution will help applications adjust to load. Referred to as Services Oriented Architectures (SOA) a few years ago, it is now being mixed in with cloud computing and networking. The tools are there to usher in a new way of making traditionally static networks ‘dynamic.’ The network responds automatically to requests for more or less bandwidth, provisioning network access, security and QoS, all without human intervention. This session will illustrate how existing data center assets have been repurposed to increase utilization, and improve application agility.
Everything Over 10G Ethernet: Convergence in the Data Center - Sponsored by Aquantia This panel brings together leaders in data center server and switch technologies, storage and virtualization applications to review the rise of 10 Gigabit Ethernet and LAN on Motherboard in the data center. They will debate the impact of ‘everything over 10GE’, unified networks and interconnect advances on virtualization, storage networks, cost control and performance optimization. Is this a convergence whose time has come?
Calculating the Trade-offs in Data Center Design - Sponsored by APC Throughout the early stages of the data center design/build process, complex decisions are made that greatly impact the eventual efficiency and performance of the data center. There are free tools available that can simplify this decision making process by experimenting with numerous “what if” scenarios regarding virtualization, efficiency, capital cost, and other key design issues. This presentation will review two of these tools, PUE and Capital Cost Calculator, and demonstrate each of them.
Data Center Exhibitors
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556 |
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2351 ER2826 |
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2303 |
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711 |
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1009 |
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2631 |
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1343 |
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1163 |
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533 |
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727 |
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1831 |
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2451 |
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1659 |
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879 |
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2051 |
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2530 |
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2447 |
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1859 |
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1751 |
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2431 |
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1169 |
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2411 |
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527 |
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2342 |
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1731 Surf A |
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957 |
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1275 |
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2143 |
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1643 Reef D |
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2735 |
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2430 |
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1319 |
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759 |
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620 |
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550 |
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1359 |
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433 |
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2256 |
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Surf B |
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635 |
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1121 |
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739 |
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2307 |
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551 |
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958 |
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2330 |
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2335 |
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951 |
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2025 |
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850 |
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2435 |
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806 |
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1250 |
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2160 |
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651 |
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2622 |
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1843 |
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2159 |
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1961 |
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1957 |
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2334 |
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2057 |
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2531 |
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2343 |
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2056 |
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2542 |
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2031 |
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2235 |
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911 |
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2446 |
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2619 |
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1367 |
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859 |
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2730 |
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1459 |
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Start Up City Pod #1 |
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643 |
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807 |
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531 |
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2534 |
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