NGDC

Companies will have more than one approach to solving their computing needs. From virtualization in internal clouds to virtualized hosting, co-location, SaaS and external clouds. This session will look at computing solutions as a "portfolio" companies can allocate internal or external computing as their needs change. Virtualization is the lubricant that adds liquidity to computing portfolio management, making it easier to move from a data center to a collocated, hosted or cloud solution.

Cloud computing promises incredible levels of agility and operations efficiency for most enterprises. Leading edge businesses are reporting that the self-service, on-demand, at scale cloud model is enabling them to rethink not just how IT is applied to their business, but how they define their business. So, how are virtualization and cloud computing related, and how does enterprise IT leverage virtualization-aware infrastructure to more easily deliver and consume cloud computing services? Find out how existing technologies can be combined with new models to simplify your data center’s flight to the clouds.

IT and service provider organizations face increasing pressures to respond faster to business demands with reduced headcount and smaller budgets. To meet this dynamic demand, automation and virtualization should be deployed to deliver operational effectiveness and efficiency. This session provides actionable advice on key management considerations that utilize automation for private and public clouds that utilize virtualization technologies.

More than 25% of application workload is now delivered as virtual machines (VM). And the reality is that this is just the tip of the iceberg -- the rate of VM growth is accelerating, which is creating vast new costs and complexity for IT operations. New IT flexibility for one group always yields a loss of control for another. This is equally true for virtualization, which provides enhanced flexibility for application development and lines of business, but often creates anxiety for the IT operations personnel responsible for managing and maintaining these images and ensuring their compliance over time.

The speaker will discuss why many industry analysts are predicting VM sprawl to be one of the most critical IT challenges in 2009. He will offer practical insight into the steps that can be taken to mitigate the risk of uncontrolled VM sprawl, proposing an architectural approach that combines the friction-free deployment of virtualization and cloud with the scalable foundation IT organizations need to contain costs and risks in a world where an exploding volume of virtual machines are fast becoming the new unit of management.

Everyone has a different reason to love virtualization: security, configuration isolation, the list goes on. But containerization offers many of the same goodies as virtualization, alongside an efficiency and performance advantage. In this session Andy de la Lucha and Irving Popovetsky will help you ask the right questions about what's right for your environment. This talk will present a point-counterpoint argument comparing virtualization and containerization technologies. The purpose of this talk is to provide the audience, including decision makers and techies, with the real-life experience of two systems engineers who have extensively compared, evaluated and used these technologies.

The transition to the virtualized data center has the potential to reset the IT security playing field. The dynamic nature of virtual machines creates challenges not encountered in physical security. But, the virtual infrastructure also allows for an unprecedented level of security integration into the platform. By embedding security into the hypervisor, the traditional boundaries between network and host security can be overcome. Learn how next generation security technologies will allow you to move beyond the traditional security silos and build security into the fabric of the data center.

As organizations look to maximize investments in the heterogeneous data center, the issue of vendor interoperability comes to the fore. Capitalizing on multi-vendor industry standards is at the heart of any data center optimization effort. This session will address the challenges and opportunities in a multi-vendor environment, and explain how the DMTF's Virtualization Management Initiative (VMAN) and standards including the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) and the Virtualization Management Profiles will form the foundation of an interoperable end-to-end management strategy in today's distributed infrastructures.

As vendors drive the adoption of virtualization and the cloud while networks continue to grow, operating expenses will climb at an accelerating pace. Some enterprises, trapped in a stagnant economy, may be tempted to stay in manual labor mode and use the net savings from system automation and flexibility to subsidize rising (and often scattered) network ops costs as well as incur increasing outage risks. As their costs climb and their networks become increasingly inflexible they will be candidates for outsourcing or cloudsourcing.

Other enterprises will invest carefully in network automation, reduce operations expenses and free up additional capital for strategic investments. These enterprises will thrive, even in markets with high labor costs. They will likely be among the first to deliver on the promise of virtualization and cloud, including sizable reductions in opex and capex.

What are the necessary steps to prepare your enterprise network for the future and be on the team that wins as new IT initiatives ripple through our organizations? Those who attend this session will get a vendor-neutral roadmap for proper planning and investment; and guidance on reaping the benefits of tomorrow's networks today. Attendees will see documented results from inside one of the world's largest companies, based on a recent insert in Network World. Come to this session and find out how to prepare for Infrastructure 2.0.

Businesses today recognize the benefits of virtualizing the data center, from creating a more flexible infrastructure to reducing costs. However, for many organizations the path to virtualization is still a new one and to avoid pitfalls and maximize the benefits, organizations must start with a strong foundation for virtualization that includes both storage and server architectures.

The Indiana Lumbermens Mutual Insurance (ILM) Group, an insurance provider to the lumber industry, recognized its costs to maintain and add servers and storage were unnecessarily high. Sam Newbury, network operations manager at ILM Group, realized he had inadequate storage resources and servers were being over-utilized, hindering performance. To properly virtualize his data center, Newberry implemented Compellent’s storage platform with VMware for server virtualization. With its enhanced virtual data center, ILM Group consolidated 65 servers down to 10 and built a data center that is truly ready for whatever innovation comes next.

This session will discuss, in a vendor neutral manner, general concepts involved in emerging data center architecture. Some of the challenges that are driving data center changes today include power and cooling, the increased complexity of the infrastructure and how to manage it efficiently and total cost of ownership. An effective next generation infrastructure must address these challenges and deliver a flexible architecture that aligns with business goals. Fundamental requirements and elements include modularity, the ability to virtualize servers, networks and I/O, integrated management and energy efficiency. Requirements for more advanced infrastructure functionality include capabilities that enable dynamic behavior, such as real-time discovery and state information, using the same tools to manage physical and virtualized systems, the ability to isolate and encapsulate functions and analysis and optimization. This session assumes basic familiarity with contempary data center architecture, servers and virtual machines.

Over the last two years, the industry has spent significant time and focus on improving data center power consumption by focusing on power distribution and cooling architectures. While these remain important, a number of organizations have started looking into the importance of data center productivity. These investigations show that decisions made by IT organizations on a day-to-day basis have an even larger effect on data center power consumption than decisions pertaining to power and cooling architectures. This presentation will cover results from modeling to date and will provide an estimate of the acheiveable gains from addressing data center productivity. It will also provide an initial look into future best practices in this area as well as placing these best practices into context through an investigation into the IT Infrastructure LIbrary (ITIL).

The sustainable data center can yield significant costs savings and IT efficiencies, while at the same time reduce the harmful environmental impacts of computing. As a reference point, Sprint’s sustainable data center initiative generated $28 million of re-deployable assets and created a $20 million reduction in operating costs. While the data center is ripe with low-hanging fruit, IT professionals should understand the full scope of the sustainable data center and its motivations to determine their entry point, prioritize projects and maximize return. To help IT professionals reduce costs while improving efficiencies with a more sustainable data center, this session will:
- Define the sustainable data center and its vast scope
- Map elements of the sustainable data center to business value
- Share examples of the sustainable data center in action
- Offer recommendations for sustainable data center success

As data center managers are challenged with increasing power densities, cooling demands and sustainability concerns, who better to share a case study of best practices than Equinix, a company that has developed some of the highest standards in the industry for premium centers and high performance. Patrick Leonard, senior manager for strategic initiatives, will share a rich visual presentation that will cover the design, physical elements and best practices, policies and procedures that create the most reliable, efficient and sustainable data center environments.

Leading utilities are engaging with data center customers in an increasingly holistic way, offering energy efficiency programs and services, siting advice, demand response programs and support for self-generation. As a recognized utility leader, PG&E is driving active engagements with data center operators in Northern California, and is sharing their knowledge base and leadership with over 35 utilities in North America through their sponsorship of the Utility IT EE Coalition.

Attendees will learn the time line required in building out data centers in metropolitan as well as suburban areas, who to contact, what information is required, and how best to negotiate financial incentives while working with your utility's engineering professionals.

As data center managers are faced with ever-increasing demands to reduce costs and quickly adapt to change, reacting to monitoring system alerts/alarms and simply gathering real-time information is no longer enough. Instead, a comprehensive, proactive approach for managing the data center is needed to help increase data center energy efficiency, boost service levels and manage costs. This session will explore processes around proactive management that will enable and enhance capacity planning, change management and service management in the data center to help you to go beyond monitoring and achieve comprehensive management of your operations.

In the next generation data center, all compute resources, storage pools and the underlying network infrastructure will reconfigure the overall compute resources and required storage pools on demand by the applications being run. These kinds of dynamic reconfigurations of data center resources are the future for optimum uses of resources on the fly based on what applications are being run at a given time. This is equally applicable in a Cloud Computing paradigm.

Attendees will learn what network automation is and how it can help in implementing a dynamic data center infrastructure which is the future of the data center.

Much of the attention in data center optimization has been focused on server virtualization as the foundation technology for reducing the number of computer systems required, thereby reducing the associated capital investments and operational expenses. While server virtualization is a valuable tool, data center operators are realizing that there are application environments that do not require all of the capabilities it offers, or where added complexity, operational expenses and performance overhead make it a less desirable approach. In such situations, IT organizations are turning to other server consolidation technologies such, as container-based workload management solutions, that are easier to deploy in existing environments, and can yield higher levels of resource utilization and lower performance overhead.

The goal of this session is to understand how to consolidate servers by running multiple business-critical applications while maintaining or even improving the service levels of those applications. The session will focus on tools and techniques to manage diverse workloads by combining predictable performance and optimal resource utilization. The session will also explore essential requirements for such tools as well as best practices in deploying these tools.

The recent economic downturn is placing pressure on IT to lower capital and operational expenses, while delivering evolutionary steps towards more computing, networking and storage capabilities. These demands are causing a significant shift in Data Center (DC) infrastructure, from a traditional compute model, which has lightly utilized servers using 1 Gbps NICs; to a Dynamic Infrastructure model, which has highly utilized, integrated servers using 10 Gbps Converged Network Adapters (CNAs) with many Virtual Servers that attach to converged fabrics. For DC networking the potential value of this new model comes from lowering capital expenses through higher utilization due to integrated, virtualized and/or converged components and lowering operational expenses through automated and integrated management that optimizes DC infrastructure. From the edge, virtual networking technologies (e.g. MPLS, VPLS) are evolving to enable network consolidation over a common infrastructure, while maintaining the security, performance and availability attributes for each group using the network.

The Internet has long since evolved beyond simple fun and games to become a vital resource for commerce, communications and collaboration. For operators of collocation data centers, the stakes become ever higher: Tenants with mission-critical applications such as CRM, e-commerce and cloud computing are now the norm - and service-level agreements have grown ever more stringent. As a result, reliability and resiliency have become more than just buzz words - they are a critical requirement for collocation data centers worldwide.

What does that mean when designing and building a network? What are the implications of the architecture, and how can you design for reliability and resiliency? This session will provide a wide-ranging discussion of the networking challenges faced by collocation data center operators, with real-world case studies that highlight key considerations in network design.

Cloud computing is supposed to solve everything: better usage of capital equipment, more agile deployments, more granular control and increased productivity. It is all great except for those who have to manage those clouds. Virtual assets are a lot harder to track and clouds present challenges beyond the current datacenter sprawl.

This session will explore what best practices and tools are available to manage clouds. Management techniques for traditional data center deployments are incomplete for cloud environments. Everything from provisioning, monitoring, inventory, and security practices has changed. This session will also cover current trends of how virtual data centers will be managed in the future.

It is important in today’s economy to optimize your storage resources with an integrated suite of capabilities, operating within a virtual environment that intelligently manages data use, protection and archiving. This approach creates a services-oriented utility model for critical data services that lets organizations create policies that enforce specific service levels for explicit or pooled data sets. Storage virtualization is no longer enough – companies are in need of solutions that not only provision storage, but also can virtualize, protect, migrate, dedupe, encrypt, replicate, recover and archive any data source in real time via IT and business policies. Attendees will learn the business value of optimizing an organization’s storage resources and specific examples of how companies can leverage their current IT infrastructure to dramatically reduce costs.

To date, many Wall Street firms have achieved successful results implementing traditional virtualization in several areas. Virtualization of servers in development and QA seem to be a well accepted deployment pattern within most firms. However, when asked about the use of virtualization in production environments, the results are less clear. Stateless types of server processing typically found on web servers and some application servers make traditional "virtual machine" approaches a viable solution in many firms. However with database servers where stateless processing is not common, there appears to be limited acceptance of traditional virtualization with the exception of small systems. This is due to the fact that large multi-user database systems are much more complex and require "application context" in order to effectively virtualize resources while still ensuring business SLAs are maintained. This session will cover technical details behind the virtualization techniques utilized in large enterprise database systems which go beyond what is available through today's virtual machine technologies.

Traditionally applications were built with little regard for the range of applied deployment scenarios. When deployed over a WAN -- where security is not guaranteed -- and in other environments, application performance can suffer. The application delivery controller (ADC) market sprouted from humble beginnings as a load balancer to assist enterprise and service providers in accelerating, securing, managing, and ensuring non-stop operations of mission-critical applications and infrastructure. The market for ADC’s continues to grow, and the ADC itself has evolved to provide a plethora of new features and functions. Over the next few years, ADC’s will provide a number of new features, including advanced virtualization functions, greater application integration, more powerful security features as well as identity management functions. This discussion will provide an overview of where the ADC market is headed and how organizations can take advantage of the business value that ADC’s offer.

“Green” Storage is about more than just reducing operational expenses (OpEx) for energy and cooling. Even if you could shut down all of your Storage devices when they are not actively doing I/O, you would still have to bear the capital expenses (CapEx) of the Storage equipment. You also have to pay for the power-hungry equipment needed to support the IT gear in your data center, including those ‘alphabet’ boxes (UPS, PDU, CRAC, and more). This stuff really matters – if you don’t pay attention, those pesky server-geeks will end up running the data center, hogging all the credit for virtualizing and consolidating their servers, and blaming your Storage gear for ruining the planet, or at least breaking the IT energy budget.

This SNIA session helps you understand the “Big Picture”: how your IT CapEx, OpEx, and engineering decisions can affect your TCO and environmental impacts. Get a quick primer on the economics of energy supply, including carbon taxes and how “cap-and-trade” will affect your IT planning. Understand why environmental regulations in Europe and Asia directly affect the IT equipment you buy, and even how you can dispose of your old gear.

We’ll leverage your IT experience to drill into best practices for data centers, with practical advice for lowering your energy overhead to less than 25% of your IT energy usage. (It’s probably close to 100% overhead right now!) By the end of this session you’ll know why it’s a really good idea to make friends with your facilities manager. You’ll even get some great suggestions for negotiating rebates and reductions of your energy bills from your friendly local utility (hint: I worked for ‘the Electric & Gas Company’ for eight years).

Storage-specific “green” examples are used throughout the talk, including proper use of various RAID levels, data reduction (snapshots, compression, and de-duplication), thin provisioning, and other useful techniques.

Data deduplication is a capacity optimization technology that is being used to dramatically improve storage efficiency.

This technical session will:
· Review various data deduplication methodologies
· Identify the factors that influence space savings
· Provide scenarios where data deduplication is used