Track Chair and Instructor:
 Barb Goldworm
President and Chief Analyst,
FOCUS

Barb Goldworm has spent 30 years in systems and storage in various senior management, marketing, sales, technical and industry analyst positions with IBM, StorageTek, Novell, Enterprise Management Associates and several successful startup ventures. A frequent speaker at industry events, she also created and chaired Interop's Network Storage Track. More recently, she was one of the top 3 ranked analyst/ knowledge expert speakers at SNW and has been a regular expert speaker for TechTarget Webcasts and Ziff-Davis Summits and E-seminars. She also chaired the 2007 Server Blade Summit on Blades and Virtualization.

Barb has published extensively since the 1990s, writing regular columns for Network World and ComputerWorld, as well as numerous business and technical white papers and articles on systems, software, storage, storage networking and enterprise management. She currently writes a regular column for TechTarget SearchServerVirtualization. In 2007, she published a book entitled "Blade Servers and Virtualization: Transforming Enterprise Computing While Cutting Costs" commissioned by Wiley, available on Amazon.com.

Barb brings a unique blend of marketing and technical depth, both strategic and tactical, with experience in product management, product marketing, sales, market research, software development, project management and education.

Instructor:
 Dennis Moreau
Senior Technologist,
RSA

Dennis Moreau is specialist in the application of leading edge technologies to the solution of complex problems in the Information Systems and Utility Computing management domains. His primary focus is in developing enterprise scale solutions to improve IT efficiency and effectiveness for service, systems, security, compliance and configuration management/optimization. He works actively with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and the Mitre Corporation on the development of security configuration policy compliance standards and serves on the Advisory Board for the Open Vulnerability and Assessment Language (OVAL), a key component of the Security Content Automation Program (SCAP).Dr. Moreau has over than 35 years of experience in evaluating, designing, and implementing complex systems and their management and security infrastructures. Prior to joining RSA’s CTO Office, he was a founder and the Chief Technology Officer for Configuresoft. He was also the Associate Vice President for IT and Chief Technology Officer for Baylor College of Medicine (BCM). He holds a doctorate in Computer Science and has held faculty positions in Computational Medicine and Computer Science (tenured in 1993). Dr. Moreau speaks regularly at IT management and security conferences worldwide.

Virtualization Management:

The Road to Private Cloud

Tuesday, October 4, 2011, 9:00am – 4:30 pm

Once an organization has completed the initial phase of server virtualization and consolidation, the next step is to optimize the virtual infrastructure to enable expansion from the typical initial 25% virtualized to a more complete fully virtualized infrastructure. Along with this expansion, the critical path to realizing the full potential of virtualization is to add the management layers to transform IT operations and deliver IT as a service. By properly managing, securing, protecting, optimizing and automating the virtual infrastructure, IT can transform itself to run as a private cloud.

In order to succeed at this transformation, IT must evaluate and implement advanced management capabilities such as dynamic policy-based workload balancing; automation of provisioning and virtual operations; high availability, automated disaster recovery; performance, capacity management and troubleshooting across and through the virtual and physical infrastructure; lifecycle management; hypervisor, guest and virtual network security and eventually management of multi-hypervisor environments. Add to this the final components of self service provisioning, and service catalogs, and you are delivering a private cloud.

All of this means that IT managers have to sift through the large and growing virtualization and cloud ecosystem and the plethora of virtualization management solutions to identify which functions are critical, which products are really ready for prime time, and which solutions best match their particular requirements. In addition, many shops with traditional Enterprise Systems Management solutions are trying to understand how their existing vendors are addressing virtualization and private cloud and how new management tools integrate with/utilize what they already have. As all organizations travel the road to private cloud, those who get there faster and more smoothly will have a key competitive advantage over those still operating in the slow-to-respond, IT model of the past.

Attendees of this workshop will gain:

• Insight into the impact that the new virtual infrastructure and the road to private cloud have on IT, and the challenges that all this creates
• An understanding of what it takes to grow from basic server virtualization to a well-managed virtual infrastructure to a private cloud. How virtualization and advanced management capabilities are the steps to private cloud computing – how do you get there from here?
• An understanding of the management functions that come from virtualization vendors as well as the add-on tools available from startups and long time management players
• An understanding of the requirements, options and best practices for managing all the aspects of the virtual infrastructure/private cloud including
  • Optimized data protection, backup, disaster recovery and storage management
  • Performance management from the application through the virtual and physical layers
  • Capacity management across the virtual and physical infrastructure
  • Troubleshooting, root cause analysis and fault monitoring and management
  • Virtual machine lifecycle management, VM image management, and automated provisioning (IT and self-service based)
  • Securing the virtual environment, from guest VMs to switches to trust zones to hypervisor integrated security
  • New cloud capabilities and how they relate to the rest of the management capabilities
• An independent look at the vendor landscape including different approaches, and virtualization and cloud management solutions
• Considerations for choosing and implementing virtualization and private cloud management solutions
• An update on the recent changes and future of virtualization and private cloud management
• A discussion of various vendor alternatives and experiences moving beyond consolidation to advanced virtualization management to private cloud computing

Who Should Attend:
This workshop targets IT managers and administrators who are looking to fulfill the full promise of virtualization and the move to private cloud computing, especially around improving operational efficiencies, optimization, automation, and IT agility – delivering IT as a service or private cloud, while reducing costs.

You Will Learn:
During this workshop, industry analysts and virtualization experts from FOCUS and key virtualization players will discuss the challenges that come with the new virtual infrastructure and the move to private cloud computing, and how to prioritize, evaluate and implement the necessary solutions for virtualization management, optimization, automation and delivery as a private cloud.

Registration packages with access to this workshop:

• Flex Pass
• Virtualization Days
• Private Clouds Package