Storage Decisions New York 2008 Feedback

Another Storage Decisions has come and gone, and 2008’s New York show did not disappoint. TechTarget always recruits an excellent set of conferencegoers, and not even the Wall Street crisis could dampen attendance. Even Spike Lee, Richard Gere, Dian Lane, Keira Knightley, John McCain, and Sarah Palin made appearances at this year’s show! (No, seriously, they were really there!)

Although my email archiving session always attracts a smaller crowd, they are all a dedicated bunch. One pertinent suggestion from an attendee was to ingest PST files into a special separate archive in order to ensure that messages recovered from it are treated with the proper skepticism. Questions after the session focused on the trick of engaging legal and business people in the decisions around email policy, truly a challenge. I suggested that an on-site mini-seminar for the relevant folks might help to break the logjam and illustrate the issues, something that I would be happy to arrange!

My storage virtualization session was once again placed in the main room, and a much larger group attended it. I was interested to hear just how great the impact of VMware’s VDC-OS had been. In just a week, a dozen or more folks in the audience had heard, comprehended, and strategized about the concept. It’s really that big! Others were very interested in the topic of green metrics for data center usage. How does one monitor and report the real “green” savings (power, carbon, cooling, space) for a virtualized environment? Although storage greenness is debatable, the savings from a virtualized server environment are real, and these often bundle in some of the storage numbers, too.

These topics are top of mind to me as well, and I will continue to investigate (and speculate) about them in the coming year. If you missed the show (or the handouts), I will be posting them here soon! Get my email address or head to LinkedIn by clicking the links in the sidebar (at top left).

Watch this space, and consider coming to my virtualization seminar in Charlotte on October 21 or to the Storage Decisions show in San Francisco, held November 17 to 19.

See my posts on Gestalt IT for similar enterprise IT infrastructure commentary