Outstanding!
That’s the 1^st word that comes to mind when thinking about the week before last at SNW in San Diego.

Besides the visible HDS leadership, the whole event really gave an impression of huge business enthusiasm and momentum from both end-users and ITC sides. Of course IT budgets are still under scrutiny, storage budgets especially, but most corporations if not all have started investing in their data storage infrastructure to help with business application efficiencies and ultimately their business developments. So even if each yearly round of SNWs brings its lot of “beginners”, SNW visitors are often experienced users with concrete plans and asking hard questions to the experts they know they can meet at SNW. Here are some highlights of this event:

• For those of you that are sceptical about this kind of events, there was lots of IT professionals and end-users at SNW. Many rooms were packed with hungry attendees asking great questions.
• Expertise and qualification do matter. Ask all the participants in the SNIA Hands-On Lab (HOL) classes at SNW…demand was unexpectedly high resulting in challenging session scheduling on site. I will let SNIA the primer of announcing how many people took the certification test at SNW… but here again the demand was high.   

• I’d like to give another “A” mark to SNIA for coordinating their Solution Center and HOL in parallel with the SNW Technical Showcase. I spoke with several visitors at the show and they once again confirm that they need access to such demo-ground to touch & feel concrete technology & solutions. I’m glad HDS was there with great SMI-S, virtualization and tiered-storage demonstrations. 
•  End-users were present and had a strong voice at SNW, especially around IT solution pricing (what a surprise!)…many echoes of this have been published on the Computerworld website and others. I was quite surprised to hear and read some of the vendors’ reactions. There’s no smoke without some kind of fire… I believe the IT industry should listen to end-users instead of making statements… I mean excuses.  
• The Aperi story keeps on fuelling long debates. Unnecessarily to me for now since the full story isn’t really baked. However, as mentioned by  Hu Yoshida in his last blog and during the CTO panel at SNW, we need to keep an eye on it as it could recreate silos that we attempt to get rid of with standards. 
• Besides the products announcements (including HDS’ ), you could say that there was no amazing new news at this SNW, except the great interests of the SNW audience in Storage & Grid. If it’s true that Grid, SOA and other WebServices are becoming warmer topics for the storage industry, it also demonstrates that the areas of work & development highlighted at this event (Management, Security, ILM/DLM, Performance…) are the true areas of concerns for storage users right now. The other element corroborating this is the level of interest and expertise demonstrated by storage users during this show in each of these areas. Questions asked and user cases proved that the storage industry is becoming much more mature. Of course not all problems are solved…

I can’t wait for SNW-Fall!

Comments RSS