• Five tracks with more than 40 sessions
• New track on cost optimization strategies
• New track on networking and communications
• Keynote panels and presentations
• Private analyst one-on-one sessions
• Audience polling for interactive peer feedback
• Facilitated peer-to-peer networking
• Analyst/user roundtables
• Networking breakfasts with peers
• Sponsor case studies
• Solution provider sessions

End User Experience Sessions

Deduplication and Backup - Production Experiences
Moderators Dave Russell and Sean O'Mahoney, Vice President, Technology Services, Republic Bank & Trust
James Saar, IT manager, ENGlobal Corp

Deduplication continues to be a very hot area in storage and is becoming a technology that is increasingly being evaluated and deployed in backup and recovery environments. There are an increasing number of deduplication choices - vendors, methods and places to implement deduplication. Come hear how two businesses, each utilizing a different solution, applied deduplication to their production backup environment.


Virtualization on the Front Lines: Maximizing Your Investment
Moderators Cameron Haight and Rick Vanover, Systems Administrator, Safelite Autoglass

High Availability and Disaster Recovery from the start. Virtualization beyond the hypervisor can enable this utopian configuration. Through the use of virtual IP addressing, storage grids, and hypervisor virtualization; a robust architecture for multiple datacenters can deliver results.


Driving Down Costs While Building Up People in Challenging Times
Moderators Ed Holub and John Rivard, Director of Infrastructure Services, AAA Northern California, Nevada & Utah

Infrastructure and operations organizations have always been challenged with managing technical complexity, but being successful requires more than technical competence. Learn from the experiences of one organization how to improve the maturity of financial management and enhance morale in these difficult economic times.


Journey to a 'Green' Tier 3+ Data Center
Moderator: Bill Malik and Sue Smith, Data Center Manager, United Technologies

Many of today's Data Centers are running into data center issues regarding power availability, space limitations and data center reliability. This situation accentuates the need to utilize natural resources and cut down on the Carbon Dioxide (CO2) footprint on the world as an organization. This project designed and implement green initiatives to not only decrease United Technologies carbon footprint on the earth, but to also provide a Tier 3 plus data center. Improved technical performance included elimination of all single point failures and installation of full redundancy, ensuring ultra-high availability, moving from Tier 1 to Tier 3 plus. The team installed 18 PureComfort micro-turbines as well as a Combined heat and Power (CHP) waste heat utilization system, reducing the CO2 by 1,090 tons and Nox by 6.4 tons annually.

Agenda Tracks

IT Operations
Today's IT infrastructure and operations management professionals face significant challenges. Expectations have only increased with added economic pressure. In addition to providing excellent service 24/7, there is now an urgent need to reduce costs and optimize investments, Meanwhile, new architectures are emerging that have the potential to drastically disrupt and alter IT processes. This track focuses on IT operations management trends and disruptions, with special attention given to short- and long-term process improvement. We will provide practical, prescriptive advice on how to achieve excellence across IT services and find ways to contribute more business value.

Virtualization
Virtualization is much more than a technology; it is a fundamental change in much of your IT thinking. Through 2012, it may be the most impactful development in IT infrastructure and operations, affecting how organizations plan, buy, deploy, manage, and charge for IT services. Virtualization is not one thing; it is many sometimes different technologies impacting storage, servers, applications, networks, and desktops. Many organizations have moved past the initial stages of an x86 virtualization strategy, so much of our tactical focus will be on what happens next. We will analyze the risk and rewards in next-generation virtualization technologies, and how to avoid creating new problems down the road. Along with examining the newest technologies, we'll look at the management challenges virtualization brings with it in areas such as operations and disaster recovery, and its impact on storage.

IT Modernization & Consolidation
Critical factors are converging to make IT modernization a high priority, including pressure to optimize costs, looming skill gaps, and the need to be more agile. Layered into this, for many organizations, is the need to reduce the environmental impact of energy-intensive aspects of I&O. Yet IT modernization is more than just the continual need to upgrade and refresh - it involves a strategic and systematic approach to an evolution supportive of business processes. Anticipated rapid technology advancements in servers and storage technologies and an aging data center facilities infrastructure will only exacerbate challenges. This track will help organizations prioritize their IT modernization projects, create a workable systemic approach, and deal with specific challenges.

Networking & Communications
We're experiencing a massive shift in enterprise communications. This will ultimately lead to widespread convergence, which will impact all areas of I&O organization. Enterprises are implementing a growing range of communication channels that include instant messaging, presence, conferencing, and video. But with technologies, vendor offerings, and user demands constantly shifting, it can be difficult to maintain the course. And, as always, quantifying the ROI on better collaboration can be challenging. This track will provide practical insights on making the right communications choices and architecting a data center that supports and enhances them. We'll offer a much-needed refresher to the typical network management toolkit by addressing such topics as: how to identify - and resist - unnecessary technologies; saving money while improving business alignment; redesigning the data center network to maximize today's options, and delivering affordable redundancy.

Cost Optimization in Infrastructure & Operations - Thriving During Difficult Times
In an uncertain economic climate, how should you think about I&O costs? What can you do to reduce expenses and deliver more business value? If you're looking for ways to reduce (and justify) spending in 2009, you're not alone. This track will focus on the checklist of money-saving strategies every I&O organization should have close at hand. This list includes new, innovative, tried-and-true, and proactive ways to trim costs. Because cost optimization is about more than cost reduction, we will also identify ways to: squeeze more value out of new and existing processes and technologies, balance opportunities for growth with cost-cutting, and seize opportunities when the eventual economic recovery comes.

Analyst-User Roundtables

Expect a lively exchange of information and ideas at these informal sessions moderated by a Gartner analyst. Expand your perspective and make valuable connections with peers from across industries as you discuss these hot sourcing topics.

Network Management Tools of the Trade
Moderator: Deb Curtis
Tuesday 1:45 PM

Join your industry colleagues for a peer exchange on the network management tools that have helped (or hindered!) IT organizations as they attack everything from network configuration management, network discovery/topology mapping, network fault management and troubleshooting, all the way to the more proactive network performance management, capacity planning and predictive network modeling and simulation best practices.


Communicating the business value of IT infrastructure and operations
Moderator: Richard Hunter
Tuesday 1:45 PM

This interactive session will use one or more issues of current interest to participants to build case studies of approaches to communicating the business value if investments in IT I&O to non-IT management.


Virtualization in the Unix World
Moderator: John Phelps
Tuesday 4:15 PM

When discussing virtualization most focus on the x86 environment. Virtualization in the Unix environment is growing but not at the pace of the Windows environment. Unlike the x86 world where multiple vendors offer virtualization solutions for one platform (x86 architecture), each Unix hardware platform vendor offers a virtualization solution unique to their platform. Come join your peers in discussing their actual experiences and plans when it comes to Unix virtualization.


Early Experiences in Unified Communications
Bob Hafner
Wednesday 1:30 PM

Unified Communications spans Voice, Conferencing, Messaging and IM/Presence. Many organizations are in the early stages of trying to tie these siloed technologies together. Come share with peers your experiences and concerns about the challenges of achieving your Unified Communications Strategy.


IBM System z Specialty Engines
Moderators: Mike Chuba and John Phelps
Tuesday 5:30 PM

IBM introduced its first specialty engine (the Integrated Facility for Linux - IFL) in 1999. Since that time it has introduced the zAAP and zIIP specialty engines. The IFL now accounts for 15% of the installed mainframe MIPS and the zAAP and zIIP are growing at even faster rates than the IFL has. Join your peers to discuss the different ways they are using specialty engines and their successes and problem areas.


Backup/Recovery Modernization
Moderator: Dave Russell
Tuesday 5:30 PM

Come discuss with your peers how new technologies like deduplication, VTLs, CDP, snapshots and replication can be applied to your existing environment and how others are also protecting not only traditional corporate data center workloads, but new environments like virtual machines, remote offices and desktop/laptops.


Server provisioning and configuration Management the Journey to RTI
Ronni Colville & Donna Scott
Wednesday 9:15 AM

Where are you in managing the server provisioning and configuration management life cycle? Are you starting by addressing just a few specific problem areas (patching, compliance, provisioning), or are you focused on one specific area of your infrastructure to more dynamically utilize pooled resources in a real-time infrastructure. Are you worried about the impact of virtualized servers: sprawl, configuration consistency, etc. Join us at this user round table to discus with your peers where and how they are addressing efficiency and improved availability by adding automation to server provisioning and configuration and how that fits in the overall goal of a realtime infrastructure.


Green IT and the Data Center
Moderator: John Phelps
Wednesday 9:15 AM

Green IT has become a leading topic in the span of two years. It has grown from a whisper to a major theme for most vendors. While couched in an environmental coating the main thrust has been aimed at saving money along with surviving the power and cooling crunch many data centers are experiencing. IT organizations must decide on how they are going to participate and if they are going to go beyond the economics and into the environmental aspects. Join us at this user round table to discuss with your peers what steps others are taking and how they view Green IT initiatives.


Server Virtualization: The Move to Mission Critical
Moderator: Cameron Haight
Tuesday 4:15 PM

Many of us have taken significant steps down the path of virtualizing our server environments. However, many clients are still reluctant to migrate mission critical applications to this new infrastructure. In this session, we will identify the current impediments to the virtualization of these key applications and what your peers are doing to overcome them.


IT Service Catalogs
Moderators: Deb Curtis and Kris Brittain
Wednesday 1:30 PM

Join your industry colleagues for a peer exchange on IT service catalog projects. Find out who's responsible for the IT service catalog in the IT organization, how far along their projects are, and what they've included in their service catalogs (how many services, how granular, business services, technical services, etc.). Share your experiences on what aspects of your service catalog project have helped improve customer experience and IT efficiency, as well as lessons learned and pitfalls for your industry colleagues to avoid.


Best Practices in Data Center Design
Moderator: Dave Cappuccio
Wednesday 4 PM

As organizations plan for growth many have realized that their current data centers are not adequate to support their long term needs. But planning for a new data center can no longer follow the rules of the past - especially with the use of high density computing, Green initiatives and the increasing costs of energy. This session will discuss current best practices in building energy efficient, highly scalable and cost effective data centers.


CMDB - It's not too late to get it right.
Moderator: Ronni Colville
Wednesday 4 PM

CMDB is really 2 parts process, 2 part people and 1 part tool, but everyone's focus is on tools! Even though there are only about 3-5% of large enterprises actually running a CMDB and getting business value, at least 40% of enterprises, large, small and everything in between are doing something "CMDB" planning, processes, RFP, reorgs, etc. There is significant enlightenment from enterprises on what it actually takes to implement a CMDB and all of it's associated baggage- service modeling, dependency discovery, resource allocation, etc. Join us and share your experiences with your peers! You're sure to get some take-aways that will help you no matter where you are on your CMDB journey.


Cloud Computing: Managing the Next Wave
Moderator: Cameron Haight
Wednesday 5:15 PM

The movement to a virtualized infrastructure exposed issues in terms of the appropriateness of IT operations processes, skills and management technologies. Will we be able to leverage this knowledge in the cloud environment, or will new issues have to be addressed? In this roundtable, we will talk about how the cloud computing paradigm may or may not impact those of us charged with delivering appropriate service level quality.


Using the Network to Accelerate Apps
Moderator: Mark Fabbi
Wednesday 5:15 PM

As enterprises continue to consolidate servers and data centers, application performance becomes an increase challenge. The roundtable will include discussions of WAN optimization and Application Delivery solutions and focus on best practices in both technology and organization issues as well as vendor benchmarking.


ITIL Implementation Best Practices and Lessons Learned
Moderator: Ed Holub
Thursday 8 AM

Many organizations are in the process of implementing guidance from the IT Infrastructure Library and a growing number are leveraging ITIL version 3. Learn from peers what has worked for them, and perhaps more importantly what they would do differently if given the chance.


Using Virtualization Technologies in Your Disaster Recovery Strategy
Moderators: Bill Malik & Carl Claunch
Thursday 8 AM

Disaster recovery activities can benefit in many ways from virtualization technologies. This roundtable will allow attendees to share their experiences and ideas using virtualization for DR.


The Challenges of IT Modernization in the Public Sector
Moderator: Dave Cappucio
Thursday 8 AM

Like most organizations, government organizations are facing increasing pressure to modernize IT, driven by the issues of skill gaps, complexity and age of IT systems and budgetary pressure. However a complex web of stakeholders and constituencies make the challenges of overcoming the obstacles to IT Modernization even more difficult.

If you are a federal, state or local agency, come and discuss with your peers the challenges and best practices to drive successful modernization efforts.


Successful strategies for Virtualization in the Public Sector
Moderator: Carl Claunch
Thursday 10 AM

Through 2012, virtualization will change virtually everything, including how you plan, buy, deploy, manage and charge for IT services. Virtualization not only saves money, but it can also enable faster deployments, better disaster recovery, more robust accounting, holistic capacity planning, and more. But a virtualized environment can introduce unique challenges for public sector organizations. Come to this roundtable to identify those challenges and discuss how you and your peers can best address them.

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