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STORAGE MANAGEMENT INITIATIVE Storage Management Initiative
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CERTIFICATION TRAINING IP Storage Initiative

Storage Networking Times

Issue 8, May 2008


   

Regional Committee Update: Switzerland
Matthias Werner, member of the Board of Directors, SNIA Europe and Laurent Piguet, Swiss Committee Chair, switzerlandchair@snia.org

The second SNIA Europe Academy held in Zurich did not only take place in a bigger venue (the "Kongresshaus") than it had in 2007, but thanks to the Swiss Committee, under the guidance of chair Laurent Piguet, also enjoyed an agenda focussed entirely on two hot areas: archiving and data retention practices. Over 150 IT professionals attended this educational event and the overall feedback was very positive and some people requested more detailed and in-depth information in addition to the presentations. As a result the local committee has already started discussing how to meet this demand in the next Academy in Zurich.


The one-day event gave the delegates the opportunity to choose from a set of six different SNIA tutorials as well as vendor breakout sessions throughout the day. SNIA tutorials are vendor-neutral presentations approved by a team of experts from various vendor companies to guarantee the impartiality of the messages. The breakout sessions are delivered by the event’s sponsors and in Zurich they once again complemented the tutorials by providing information on available solutions and real-world product implementations.

Juergen Arnold, SNIA Europe’s Chairman started the day with some opening remarks about SNIA's most recent activities around the world such as the upcoming XAM (extensible access method) standard, a method to store and access metadata for unstructured files, and key initiatives around green IT.

This was followed by a presentation given by Daniel Gerber of KPMG, who highlighted some less-known facts related to legal responsibilities around data retention and archiving in Swiss law, such as what information to store, where, and how long for. Later in the day other sessions focussed on the technologies and architectures necessary for data retention, including implementations of various networking topologies like IP and Fibre Channel-based fabrics.

The session with the highest rating for content however was the "Storage Consolidation" tutorial which seems to indicate that despite the pressure from governments and corporate legal departments to focus on compliance, users are still far more concerned about the daily running of their IT infrastructure and finding ways to simplify their data centres and consolidating storage.

The SNIA Europe Academy will be back in Zurich at the same venue next year: mark your calendars and come along for more independent educational information on 27 January 2009!

 

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