The month of October has had a weird recurring pattern of events at least in the last few years. It usually starts relatively slowly; well for sure it’s slower than the mad September month full of interesting but schedule intensive conferences and business meetings. Then, towards the middle of the month suddenly the workload increases exponentially to only break after the Fall Storage Networking World conference. So I am sorry I have been away from the wires for so long – many thanks to those of you that have kindly asked me through emails and discussions to continue blogging – will do!

So what happened this last October? Well like many fellow SNIA volunteers, Storage Networking World represents a unique opportunity for SNIA and its members to demonstrate, explain and educate about the fast evolving Storage industry and its subtle intricacies. So tons of dedicated efforts went into the planning phase of this event from volunteers and sponsors (and Computerworld of course). Kudos to my HDS colleagues that have once again done a fantastic job at ensuring that our solutions and expertise were well represented and visible, and in particular Christophe Bertrand, Rudy Castillo, John Cook, Don Fautt, Derek Gascon, Jeff Harris, Steve Quinn, Francisco Salinas and Kevin Sampson.

For this Fall event I wanted to continue the effort started at SNW-Fall’05 about Grid and Storage. With the help of the SNIA Grid Taskforce Team, we proposed to have a discussion panel with real Grid users and representatives of the relevant industry groups to discuss the position of Enterprise Storage in Grid environments. I was pleased to be joined on this panel by very eminent participants including, Paul Strong (Distinguished Research Scientist, eBay – Open Grid Forum At-Large Board Member), John S. Hurley (Sr Manager Distributed Systems and Software Integration, Group Head – Grid Evaluation and Implementation, The Boeing Company), Chris Lionetti (SAN Specialists, Microsoft Labs) and Alan Yoder (Senior Technical Staff, NetApp – Vice-Chair SNIA Technical Council – Co-Chair OGF Storage Networking Community Group). This was an interactive panel where several important points were made about the relevance of Grid for the Enterprise. Once passed the not-yet-fully-answered questions about definitions, the panel described some of the misconceptions around Grid. Paul Strong insisted on the fact that there are many forms of Grid, not only focused on performance computing. Different organizations will see their Grid’d infrastructure differently: as one big Grid, as a collection of isolated Grids or as the conjunction of multiple (virtual) organizations possibly spanning across several business boundaries. The latter form is what John Hurley told us Boeing is looking at since this company deals with data exchange and movement requirements that go beyond the Boeing firewalls. Grid was described as complicated and hard to deploy and manage. Still all panel participants agreed that Grid helps with adapting services to demand in a common context to manage most IT resources, including data and storage, in a service-oriented fashion. Simplification and standardization were both requested by all Grid users, with a warning that some businesses won’t be able to wait for standards. Take a look at the almost live report from Byte&Switch.

SNW once again took us by storm with the breadth and depth of its agenda. This Fall SNW had up to 8 parallel tracks covering diverse topics such as Data Management, ILM, Regulatory Compliance, Virtualization & Tiered Storage, Grid, Data Protection and Security, End-Users Case Studies, SMB, Industry Analysts perspectives plus the numerous and unique SNIA rich tutorials and the Hands-On-Lab. Two interesting piece of news were gathered whilst I was on the main stage of SNW for quick audience surveys: 21% of surveyed attendees declared that the integration of their storage management tools with other management platforms is their greatest storage management need. This is an interesting feedback for SNIA at it embarks into a new development direction with the launch of the Management Framework Technical Workgroup. This other interesting point was regarding the rating of the security of the storage networking infrastructure by the SNW audience. The answers were very similar to the last conference’s results: two thirds of the surveyed attendees confirmed that their SN infrastructure is somehow at risk from both hacking and/or physical threats. This is yet another acknowledgement that further efforts (e.g. education, standards deployments) have yet to be made to allow IT users to tackle the storage security challenges.

So what happened this October that did not happen before? You might have already seen it in the announcement by SNIA or in Hu Yoshida’s blog, not only I have been kindly re-elected by the SNIA members as Director of the SNIA Board of Directors for another 2-year term, following my 2 previous terms between 2001 and 2005, but I have also been privileged to be elected as Chairman of the Board for this year. This is a great honor for me to lead this prestigious industry association where many industry talents have already contributed to the advancement of the storage industry. Storage has moved up the stack and the SNIA has to proactively develop the necessary programs to continue progressing for further integration and leveraging of standardized data storage management tools inside the data centre, in support of information management requirements.

This blog won’t be an official SNIA blog, but I will continue the dialog as an active participant of this industry!

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