Innovations in Storage

What percentage of enterprise IT departments have more than 1 TB under management, and how fast is it growing? What are the biggest concerns of storage administrators? What percentage of enterprise IT departments buy their storage from their server vendors? How many use the storage management tools supplied by their vendors, and how many use third-party tools? And what are the key projects and processes that storage managers plan to implement in the next 12 months?

Find the answers to these and many other questions at the Innovations in Storage virtual event, now less than 24 hours away. On Wednesday, March 25, Byte and Switch and InformationWeek will host a variety of industry users and experts to discuss a host of topics important to storage administrators and data center managers. Sign up now (registration required).

Steve Delahunty, a senior associate at Booz Allen Hamilton, a leading technology consulting firm, will provide answers to the questions asked in the first paragraph, based on responses to a survey conducted at the end of last year. Some of the answers will surprise you. Delahunty will be speaking on "The State of Enterprise Storage" at the virtual event at 1 p.m. EST and will answer your questions following his 30 minute presentation. Join us for an interesting and informative discussion.

Kicking off the event at 10:30 a.m. EST will be keynote speaker Kenneth Thibodeau, the director of the Electronic Records Archives at the National Archives and Records Administration. Thibodeau had the difficult challenge of having to build an electronic archive from nearly scratch to house and preserve the massive volumes of data created by the federal government during the eight years of the Bush administration, even as legal disputes over what should be stored in the archive and what should be made public worked their way through the court system. How would you preserve information so future generations of American citizens can have easy access to it? Find out what steps Thibodeau took to solve that problem.

But wait, there's more! We have two panels featuring enterprise IT managers and industry analysts to help you deal with some of your more pressing issues: compliance and virtualization.At 2:15 p.m. EST, attend a discussion on "Avoiding a Compliance Catastrophe: Storage Innovations for Surviving the Messaging Avalanche." Speakers include Drew Martin, a senior vice president and the CIO of Sony Electronics; Michael Osterman, principal analyst at Osterman Research; Betsy Lefler, deputy director of compliance at Piper Jaffray & Co.; and James Hughes, chair of the IEEE Security In Storage Workgroup and a principal at CryptoClarity LLC.

That will be followed at 4:45 p.m. EST by a panel that will discuss "Building a Real-World Case for Storage Virtualization." It will feature Merritt Jones, chairman of the IEEE Technical Committee for Mass Storage; Arcot Rajasekar, a professor in the School of Information and Library Sciences at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill; Greg Schulz, founder and senior analyst of StorageIO and author of The Green and Virtual Data Center; and Ryan Floyd, a founding member of Storm Ventures.

By attending, you also will be able to download informative research, white papers, and other resources straight to your virtual briefcase and interact with industry experts and your peers in our engaging and life-like virtual event environment through real-time chat and networking tools. That environment will let you visit vendor booths, browse through products and solutions, and join Q&A sessions. To top it off, you also can win prizes -- all from the convenience of your desktop.

And the price is right -- it is free!

So join InformationWeek and Byte and Switch on Wednesday, March 25, for the Innovations in Storage virtual event. The doors open at 10 a.m. EST. Sign up now (registration required).0