2010 Speaker List

The last few years has seen a great growth in the deployment of virtualized servers and storage. We are now seeing the deployment of software based application delivery appliances such as WAN optimization controllers (WOCs) and application delivery controllers (ADCs). These devices hold the promise of fundamentally changing application delivery. The members of this PowerPoint-free session will discuss the pros and cons of these appliances. What kind of performance improvements will you experience with a virtualized appliance? How will these devices be managed? Do they work with all hypervisors? Are they integrated with other branch office or data center functionality? Are they certified with any major software or storage vendors? How are they priced vs. a traditional appliance?

The media is overflowing with discussions of the benefits of adopting cloud computing and enabling technologies such as virtualization. What has been missing from that discussion is an analysis of what has to happen to the network to enable it to support cloud computing. For example, a new LAN access layer has emerged that is comprised of the vSwitches embedded within the hypervisor software. However, these vSwitches typically have poor management scalability and limited traffic visibility. Today’s typical WAN can not effectively support the dynamic movement of VMs nor cloud bursting. It also is not experiencing the same type of price reductions as are computing and storage resources. In this session, Jim Metzler of Ashton, Metzler & Associates will describe in detail the set of challenges created by cloud computing and will also provide an overview of the emerging networking, optimization and management technologies that hold the potential to mitigate these challenges.

Trends such as the adoption of virtualization are fundamentally changing how IT organizations need to architect their data center LAN. For example, the introduction of server virtualization and blade servers means that the traditional three tier data center LAN is expanding to where it now has as many as five layers. These extra layers can introduce unacceptable cost, complexity and delay. While all of the LAN switching vendors are aware of the problem, they have different approaches to solving it. In this session, Mike Fratto, Editor, Network Computing and Jim Metzler of Ashton, Metzler & Associates will identify the emerging approaches to architecting a data center LAN and will discuss the pros and cons of each.

Having analyzed the emerging approaches to architecting a data center LAN it is now time to drill down into which technologies you should incorporate into your new data center LAN. In this PowerPoint free session, Mike Fratto and Jim Metzler will question LAN switching vendors about a number of topics including the pros and cons of FCoE vs. iSCSI; the viability of separating the LAN switch’s control and the data planes; the pros and cons of virtual switching and multi-chassis LAGs; the need for services such as QoS or security; as well as the alignment of each application VM with its own virtual NIC and virtual switch port.

Given the combination of the economic malaise and the sensationalism that surrounds topics such as cloud computing and server virtualization, it is possible to surmise that nothing of significance is happening in the networking space. Nothing could be further from the truth. Venture capitalists and others have been funding significant investments in a wide range of networking technologies and the results of those investments are beginning to hit the market. The panelists in this fast-paced, PowerPoint-free session will discuss some of the most promising emerging networking technologies. Attend this session to get an early look at what could be some significant networking breakthroughs.

The great growth over the last few years in the use of Web applications combined with the recent interest in cloud computing has caused IT organizations to realize that simple server load balancers can’t keep up with the emerging demands. What is needed is an application delivery controller (ADC). In addition to balancing traffic, an ADC offloads computationally intensive tasks off of a server farm. However, the ADCs that are currently available in the market differ dramatically in terms of their underlying architectures and the functions that they provide. In this fast-paced, PowerPoint-free session, leading ADC vendors will be asked questions that serve to identify the similarities and differences between their products.

Most IT organizations are taking IT resources such as servers, applications and storage out of branch offices and placing them in centralized data centers. This raises some critical questions: How can IT organizations overcome the impediments to the broad deployment of virtual desktops? Should the next generation branch office be serverless? What type of device(s) needs to still be in the branch office and how is it managed? What techniques can be used to overcome the performance issues? The speakers on this panel will answer those questions and will present alternative designs for your next generation branch office.

Physical servers now support multiple Virtual Machines (VMs) that can be provisioned and moved between servers in a matter of minutes. 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 minutes, it can take days or weeks to get the supporting infrastructure in place. The panelists on this session will discuss solutions to this problem including new standards like IF-MAP, automation of functionality such as IP address management and the deployment of a new class of management product – the orchestration engine.

The role of network management has fundamentally changed. It is no longer just about the availability of networks. In now includes managing the performance of networks and applications. In addition, the continued deployment of new functionality, such as mobility and the virtualization of just about every component of IT, is making the task of network management significantly more challenging. Thankfully there has been a lot of investment in network management and the panelists in this fast paced, PowerPoint-free session will discuss some of the most promising of the emerging network management technologies.

One impact of the movement to use more private and public cloud computing solutions is that it increases the likelihood that IT resources will be accessed over a relatively low capacity, high latency WAN. Even worse, in some cases these IT resources will be accessed over multiple WAN links. The panelists on this session will identify both the performance challenges associated with cloud computing as well as myriad technologies and services that IT organizations can use to mitigate the impact of those challenges.