Storage Networking Times

Issue 8, May 2008

Letter from the Chair
Juergen Arnold, Chair, SNIA Europe, eurochair@snia.org

Welcome to our eighth issue of Storage Networking Times. It has now been two years since we started publishing this newsletter and I hope you are finding it a useful resource of impartial information about the latest developments in the data storage industry.

This issue is certainly packed with articles about exciting upcoming technologies and standards such as data deduplication and XAM. Our guest analyst also discusses an issue that is high on most of your agendas: data loss. We all know how catastrophic it can be for a business to lose vital information and we have all heard the chilling statistics about the number of organisations that never recover from losing critical data.

This is also why in our three most recent Academy appointments (Zurich, Copenhagen and Stockholm) data protection was the subject of several SNIA tutorials and sponsor presentations. From learning where the weakest points are in a storage infrastructure, to hearing about the most effective ways to address this issue and protect your company’s data, delegates came away with a deeper understanding of how the storage industry is working to make business continuity solutions as reliable and available as possible. Data protection will once again be a major focus during our Academy events in London and Paris in May. To find out more please visit www.storage-academy.com.

Another very interesting article in this issue of Storage Networking Times covers the formation of a Long-Term Digital Information Retention & Preservation Technical Working Group (LT-DIRP TWG) tasked with defining a new logical format standard and best practices for logical and physical storage migration. This group will work to develop a new application-centric standard called a Self-Describing Self-Contained Data Format (SD-SCDF) that will define a ‘preservation-oriented’ logical container consisting of the content (the data) and associated preservation metadata.

The SNIA Europe board of directors and our committee representatives have had the opportunity to meet many of you in person at our events; the feedback has mostly been positive but we know we still have a lot of ground to cover, namely in those countries where we do not yet have a regional committee. I would like to reassure you that we are doing our best to provide IT professionals across EMEA with our support and would encourage you to get in touch with any ideas or comments you might have.

Enjoy this issue!

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