Storage Networking Times

Issue 10, February 2009

Regional Committee Update: Middle East
Mahesh Vaidya, SNIA Europe Middle East Committee Chair, chair-mideast@snia.org

The past few weeks have been very exciting for the SNIA Europe Middle East committee; after its formation in September 2008 the committee has actively been recruiting local members and working to bring you the SNIA Europe Academy in Dubai, which took place earlier this month.

Held at the Mina A’Salam hotel and for the 3rd year running, the association brought the series of one-day events to Dubai. The presentations, based on the SNIA extensive tutorial program and coupled with local market expertise, covered a range of hot topics such as virtualisation, FCoE and data deduplication, and were very well received by the 100+ attending delegates. Juergen Arnold, SNIA Europe Chair,delivered the tutorial keynote ‘Green Storage Technologies for the Data Centre’ featuring insights into solid state storage and SAS. Other sessions included ‘The Business Value of Data Deduplication’ and ‘Trends in Data Protection and Restoration Technologies’.

‘The presentations covered all the key technologies I need to be on top of at the moment, and the one-day format allowed me to get all the updates I required, in just one day. A very worthwhile use of my time,’ said Bassem Aboukhater, regional IT director for MENA at the Leo Burnett Group.

The Middle East Committee also provided a guest speaker for the ‘Green Data Centre’ event held in Dubai in October by one of the member companies of SNIA Europe, where we presented a tutorial on solid state storage, a very hot topic here in the Middle East like in the rest of the world.

In the coming months, we will be focusing on activities including further speaking engagements at local datacentre and storage events, and the recruitment of regional channel partners. Our objective is to become the central point of contact for IT end users, resellers and data storage solutions vendors in the Middle East region by delivering educational programs and providing information on the latest developments in our industry.

Currently, the committee leadership team includes myself, Shaik Asif, end user facilitator (mideast-euf@snia.org) and Irfaan Harris, channel liaison (mideast-channel@snia.org). To find our more information about the SNIA Europe Middle East Committee please visit www.snia-europe.org/mid_east/index.html and in Arabic www.snia-europe.org/mid_east/index-ar.htm.

We look forward to seeing you at an event and getting your feedback!

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