Budget

DCM01: Recession-Proof Your Data Center
Speaker Change: Richard Whitehead, Director of Solutions and Product Marketing, Novell
In the midst of a recession, IT organizations are being pressured to reduce their budgets and show higher productivity returns for the technology investments they've made. At the same time, data center capacity and performance are at an all time high. How can organizations leverage and extend their IT investments? This session will outline best practices for making prudent, recession-proofing moves that will keep IT organizations trim and ready for potentially worse economic weather while remaining competitive and prepared for sunnier days.

DCM02: Investing in Availability: A Sanity Check
Richard L. Sawyer, Senior Principal, HP Critical Facilities Services, HP
Availability is expensive by historical and benchmarking measures, with Tier IV data centers costing hundreds of millions of dollars in capital investment and tens of millions in operating expense. But is the investment worth it? Are there options to reduce costs and meet the availability demand of IT processing? Yes! By identifying the availability needs of specific systems and applications, investment can be directed where it is needed most and thus avoid the costs of overbuilding, overspending and underutilization. Right sizing, right availability and right investment lead to a sane and rational approach to delivering processing capability to meet the business need.

DCM03: Make Every Penny Count in the Data Center
Shawn Cooney, Co-founder, Director of Research, Certeon
In the past, data center managers were fortunate to have deep pockets for improving their IT efficiency without worrying about making tough tradeoffs for maximizing IT resources and optimizing user productivity. As budgets diminish, IT managers need to evaluate their technology investments based on tighter TCO and ROI metrics. However, pursuing these new cost-effective initiatives could indirectly impact the ability of remote users to effectively access critical application resources over the WAN. Today, there are technology solutions that leverage the cost savings of virtualization with high-performance application acceleration to remote users. Learn how to make smart investments that ensure lower costs and increased remote user productivity while deploying cost effective solutions for the data center…all while being easily integrated within a virtualized infrastructure.

Cloud Computing

DCM04: 7 Steps to Creating an Internal Cloud
Steven Oberlin, Chief Scientist, Cassatt Corporation
While cloud computing offers great promise in IT utilization and efficiency, many organizations are simply not ready to entrust their enterprise applications to external service providers. But with the IT resources that companies spent years building up in their data centers, they can implement a cloud-style computing environment within their own firewalls. An internal cloud delivers the same operational efficiency, fault tolerance, and energy savings promised by external clouds but without the worries over security, compliance, lack of control or the costs and delays required to change or replace their current applications. This session will walk attendees through the seven basic steps in creating a cloud-style architecture inside their existing data center. Direct customer experiences and actual ROI figures will be shared, as well as an outline of how to prepare for both potential organizational and technical gains and pitfalls.

DCM05: Cloud Computing: Finding the Silver Lining While Keeping Your Enterprise Firmly Grounded
Jack Story, Chief Technology Officer, Infocrossing, A Wipro Company
Technology is today's key business enabler. Cloud computing represents an exciting opportunity emerging from the convergence of several technologies. This collision is the perfect storm and the time for smart business enterprises to evolve into truly dynamically adaptive infrastructures. With today's competitive global marketplace, IT is being called upon to actively seek out new applications of concepts and develop approaches aimed at eliminating barriers. Learn how to move from hype to competitive advantage with cloud computing.

DCM06: Managing a Data Center in the Clouds
Sean Nicholson, Director of Product Management, Aperture Technologies, an Emerson Network Power Brand
Cloud computing, software as a service (SaaS) and virtualization are presenting data center managers with a new paradigm for managing their IT operations that reduces capital expenditures and improves reliability of IT services. But while these strategies offer compelling benefits in terms of scalability, energy efficiency and time and cost savings, they can also be disruptive to the data center. This session will cover how cloud computing, SaaS and virtualization will impact the way the data center is run over the next five years, as well as strategies for managing these increasingly complex environments to help you fully realize the promises of these new architectures.

Disaster Recovery

DCM07: Best Practices in Data Center Fire Detection
Scott Wilson, Director of Market Development, Xtralis
New methods and technologies are needed to manage fire risks in data centers. Cabinet technologies and the use of contained hot- and cold-aisle cooling methods have introduced new challenges for fire detection. Traditional building-based fire detection and suppression, and new asset- and process-specific methods will be described and compared. This session illustrates the advantages of new methods in providing business continuity. It focuses on very early warning smoke detection, sophisticated remote monitoring and integration with a variety of suppression systems.

DCM08: Stored Diesel Fuel: The Five Keys to Successful Annual Management
Carlton Merritt, Operations Manager, Patriot Clean Fuel
Robert Leamy, Senior Project Consultant, Patriot Clean Fuel
Too often today's data center managers overlook the importance of diesel fuel management as an integral part of their critical network support program. Stored diesel fuel is the power behind the emergency backup system. Without fuel, there is no backup power. Without conditioned fuel, there is no sustaining of operations. This presentation will focus on the five keys to effectively manage stored diesel fuel: initial analysis and benchmarking of operating characteristics, implementing a conditioning program specifically designed to realign all operating characteristics within acceptable limits for stored diesel fuel, analyzing all in-bound fuel shipments for potential contamination and establishment of proper chain of custody, expanding fuel characteristic evaluation to mirror the climate, and including annual diesel fuel management as an integral part of your annual preventative management programs.

DCM09: The Threat of Space Weather to Data Centers
Eric Gallant, Data Center Consultant, Lee Technologies
Natural disasters routinely cause catastrophic structural damage, interrupt utility power, eliminate normal telecommunications services, shut down water supplies and disrupt natural gas delivery. However, the latest threat originates not in earthly weather patterns, but rather in outer space in the form of geomagnetic storms. While these storms have typically cycled with relatively little impact, the aging and overloaded North American power grids, coupled with predictions of the most powerful space weather in recorded history will likely produce a perfect storm for disaster. This session will prepare mission-critical professionals to protect their facilities against the dangers of space weather.

DCM10: Avoiding Data Center Disasters
James Nelson, President, Business Continuity Services, Inc.
As a data center manager, you spend time and energy ensuring that your center facility is protected and operating. As part of a disaster recovery program, it is likely that you participate in testing backups to ensure that your storage replication is adequate. Is your program coordinated with the overall business continuity program? Does someone from the data center participate in business continuity planning? The response of the data center professional in the first 15 minutes following an event can drastically impact the operations of an organization. Taking the time to assess, understand, manage and optimize these initial moments and then establish appropriate responses and procedures can become invaluable. There is always a lot of talk about responding to and recovering from outages and disasters. This presentation will focus on some areas where you can gain an advantage through careful consideration and a bit of common sense and provide practical suggestions on how to avoid data center disasters.

DCM11: Does Your DR Plan Work?
Dan Lamorena, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Symantec Corporation
The cold, hard truth about doing business in the Information Age is that virtually all companies are just one IT failure away from potential disaster. In fact, a recent survey indicates that in the past year, one-third of organizations have had to execute disaster recovery plans. As IT environments become more complex, it becomes more difficult, yet imperative, to ensure that disaster recovery plans will actually work when needed. But who can afford to test a DR plan if testing means downtime? Come to this session and learn about new strategies for DR testing organizations can use without negatively affecting business processes, customers, and employees.

Virtualization

DCM12: Enterprise Level Virtualization: Who's in the Driver's Seat?
David M. Lynch, VP of Marketing, Embotics
Virtualization is changing the way companies operate. It started in most data centers as a tactical effort lead by IT, and focused on the ROI associated with server consolidation. But as this technology becomes part of the data center architecture, it ceases to be tactical and becomes strategic to the enterprise, necessitating a much broader scope of control. This presentation will highlight the dangers of maintaining a tactical view as you scale your virtual server environments, and examine how this technology impacts the overall business architecture, specifically in the area of controls and governance.

DCM13: Is Virtualization the Consolidation Tool of Choice?
Lynn Lawton, Vice President, Architecture, Wipro
Consolidation through virtualization is the latest trend to improve efficiency and contain costs. But is the hype justified? There are significant pros and cons when utilizing this approach and each should be carefully examined to assure a successful project outcome. Virtualization alone may not be the best choice overall for consolidation. The right approach involves multiple methods that work together. This presentation will provide alternative and complementary approaches to meeting consolidation goals.

DCM14: Protecting and Recovering Data in a Virtualized Environment
Peter Eicher, Product Marketing Manager, FalconStor Software
While protecting data in a virtualized environment can improve business continuity and offer better data protection, it can also present some unique challenges. As data centers evolve toward integrating large-scale virtualization into existing networks, protecting and quickly recovering data in these combined environments is fast becoming a critical element of data center management. Because virtualization condenses complete systems configuration, application installation and data into a small set of files, complete protection of all these elements can be achieved with a single set of processes and tools designed specifically for virtual environments. Alternatively, the virtual infrastructure lets you use your existing backup tools and methodologies in a virtual environment. This session discusses techniques for fast and efficient virtual-to-virtual and physical-to-virtual restoration for both everyday data protection and recovery from disaster.

Miscellaneous

DCM15: Bringing Peace of Mind to your IT Asset Retirement
Vito Arminio, V.P., Business Development, LifeSpan Technology Recycling
This presentation will discuss how to bring peace of mind to your IT asset retirement by reducing your environmental and data privacy liabilities and protecting your company's reputation. Learn how companies are reducing costs while navigating the pitfalls of universal waste disposal that comes with decommissioning old equipment as we refresh technology.

DCM16: Best Data Center Practices
Mark Levin, Senior Partner, Metrics Based Assessments LLC
What are world-class data centers doing to operate mainframes and servers (Windows, UNIX, and Linux) more efficiently and cost effectively than their peers? This session will present a description of best practices for all areas of the data center. Included will be a discussion of how a data center’s size, technical configuration and workload affect achievement of best practices. Mega data centers are able to capitalize on their size to streamline operations using the latest technologies. Surprisingly, even some very small data centers have learned how to operate so efficiently that outsourcing vendors cannot touch them. Session attendees can readily adopt many of the best practices discussed during the session.

DCM17: Align IT and Business by Creating a Strategic Architecture
Scott Dennull, Director, Enterprise Architecture, Dayton Power & Light
This presentation will demonstrate how to create a strategic architecture concept to aligning IT to the business. Topics include how to negotiate technical requirements and avoid discussions about products high on the hype cycle. Attendees will learn how to formulate technical strategies for all infrastructure services and the tactical implementation of these strategies.

DCM18: Automated Asset Awareness: The End of the Physical Asset Dilemma
Mitch Medford, CEO, RF Code
While data center managers technically own their physical assets, accounting, legal, facilities and others in the corporate food chain have their claims. Such groups demand timely, specific asset information for auditing, compliance, security, energy and budget management. Thus, data center managers must constantly count and account for their inventory and inventory whereabouts. With resources at a premium, can data centers continue to scramble to meet the asset needs of different corporate silos without sacrificing their own? This session will look at how adopting an automated asset awareness approach can help to reduce the CAPEX and OPEX involved in satisfying a company's asset-related demands, including those of the data center itself. It will examine the tangible benefits of such an approach, the asset management processes that can now be automated, the pros and cons of available technologies that make that possible, and a blueprint for choosing the most effective solution for your data center.

DCM19: Data Center Infrastructure Monitoring Best Practices
Michael Orlich, President, CEO, RLE Technologies
Matthew Lane, Vice President, Operations, RLE Technologies
This session includes concepts and examples regarding design, development, and deployment of critical infrastructure monitoring systems. In today's world, downtime can be extremely costly. This presentation will help you to mitigate downtime by describing best practices for implementing the right monitoring and alarming tools set.

DCM20: Unified Monitoring From the Data Center to the Cloud-SESSION CANCELLED

DCM21: Managing I/O and Today's Data Center
Jon Flower, Vice President of Technology, Adaptec
In today's global data center, the increasing number of data center applications combined with growing 24x7 customer demands has made the relationship between data systems and data storage closer than ever. Yet system I/O, the process of moving data from systems and into storage, may be one of the most challenging issues data center managers face today. This presentation will provide data center managers with an overview of how intelligent storage controllers are being used to eliminate I/O bottlenecks, increase system/storage performance and maximize data protection. It will also provide real-world insight into how new intelligent storage controller technology can significantly reduce data center operating costs and minimize the need for new capital spending.

DCM22: Managing Physical Assets in the Data Center in a Software World
Jon Lorton, Data Center Management Specialists, Avocent
Data center asset management is changing rapidly and becoming increasingly more difficult as the result of virtualization technologies and software application deployments. To complicate data center management even more, many organizations manage physical and software assets in entirely different systems, which are managed by different teams. The future of data center management requires a philosophical change in data ownership and integration into frameworks such as ITIL. This session dives into how data center managers can design systems that allow physical, virtual, and software management systems to integrate and work as one entity.

DCM23: Vital Signs: Top Five Security Metrics To Look For In Logs
Trent Heisler, Director, Sales Engineering, Logrhythm Inc.
If you could only choose five log-based metrics to assess the health of your network security, what would they be? This session will describe the five metrics that together are a reliable indicator of overall network security