I’m off to beautiful Toronto, Ontario, Canada for tomorrow’s storage virtualization seminar. It will be very interesting to learn if there are differences between the two countries in terms of technologies employed or (more likely) business objectives served by server and storage virtualization technology. As I noted after my date with Charlotte, American companies are increasingly interested in next-generation data center topics like FCoE and VMware Virtual Data Center, as well as improving their retention and information lifecycle policies and getting better statistics from their systems.
Although I doubt Canada is much different from the US in terms of adoption of particular technologies, I am sure that the different governmental and litigation drivers will affect certain infrastructure and organizational practices. Here in lawsuit-happy USA, for example, it is easy to justify the cost of advanced archiving and e-discovery infrastructure to reduce the risk and impact of legal action. But Canada has a very different corporate environment, and information privacy is much more the focus.
I’ll report back on what I find after the trip. In the mean time, if you can get to Toronto tomorrow, there are still spots for qualified attendees! We’ll be at the Westin Harbour Castle, a beautiful location right on the water. I’ll also be in Louisville, Kentucky this week, and would be happy to meet any fellow Pack Rats in the land of bluegrass, bourbon, and thoroughbreds!