Gartner Data Center Conference

Welcome and Introduction

Keynote Session: Top 10 Trends and How They Will Impact Data Centers and IT

Strategic Planners have long realized that efficient planning must be accomplished by looking from the outside in. Internal, market and societal trends are rapidly converging and will have have dramatic effects on both data center and infrastructure and operations planning. Will virtualization and big data continue to be the key focal areas of IT, or will new mobile platforms, tablets and context aware applications take front stage? And what will be the impact of social networks and the growing voice of the collective on new employees, and how will that impact IT? How will cloud computing, fabric-based systems and the relentless drive for density and power efficiency affect data centers? This presentation highlights these and other crucial trends to watch during the next five years.

Keynote Session: Partnering with the Business: How To Get Your CFO’s Support For Infrastructure and Operations Strategy and Funding

An effective relationship between IT and CFO is necessary to prioritize and deliver successful, cost effective and value-add IT investments. And as a data center executive you are tasked with providing the CFO the necessary detail to help justify these expenses – yet you may find yourself challenged on how best to deliver the message of the business value to the CFO. In a unique interview format, Joseph Baylock asks Gartner's own CFO Chris Lafond what he looks for when discussing data center expenses and data center business value and when approving IT projects.

Keynote Session: Driving Innovation to Achieve Dramatic Improvements in IT Infrastructure & Operations

IT infrastructure & operations typically represents the largest people and monetary investment an IT organization makes. This session discusses techniques you can leverage to exploit innovation that can result in significant benefits in quality of service, agility and efficiency.

Keynote Session: Facebook: Efficient Infrastructure at a Massive Scale

While many of us take our visits to Facebook for granted, consider that with more than 750 million users to support, Facebook's infrastructure requirements are unprecedented. Each day on Facebook more than 250 million photos are uploaded, and each month more than 30 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) are shared. This session will explore the novel approaches the company is taking to satisfying its computing requirements. Over the last few years, Facebook has built its own servers, its own power supplies, and a custom data center to help it better manage the site's growth. It's also published its server and data center designs up -- following the model traditionally associated with open source software projects — to help drive further innovation and a greater focus on efficiency in the space. In this interview, we will learn how Facebook is addressing the challenges it faces and how the lessons they've learned can be applicable for other organizations.

Keynote Session: Wells Fargo: Data Center Lessons Learned from the Wachovia Acquisition

In 2008, Wells Fargo acquired Wachovia in the largest acquisition in banking history. It created a financial service organization with $1.3 trillion in assets, 70 million customers and 275,000 employees. The resulting technology integration encompassed 80 lines of business and over 4,000 application bundles. In this session, we will look at the challenges that Wells Fargo faced in integrating Wachovia’s data center technology and architecture and the lessons learned that are applicable to large and small data centers.

Keynote Session: Funny Business: A Satirical Look at Business and Technology

Self-proclaimed “cybersatirst” Bob Hirschfeld initially made his mark with a popular humor website that was awarded a prestigious Top 100 by PC Magazine. Bob’s humor has appeared on the Op Ed pages of The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and USA Today. For several years he was a contributing writer to Jay Leno for “The Tonight Show.” In fact, Jay calls Bob “one of the top satirists in the country."

Keynote Session: A Data Center Perspective on MegaVendors: Why Everything You Thought You Knew About the Vendors and Market is Wrong

Market consolidation continues. New alliances have formed, old pacts are shattered, and existing providers have jumped into new categories. What’s more, many of the tacit rules under which these providers once operated have been discarded. The implications are significant. Here’s a critical overview of the seismic changes that have occurred in the market, designed to help you fine-tune your vendor strategy so that you can mitigate risk and maximize value.

Keynote Session: Interactive Polling Results

A critical benefit of the Gartner Data Center conference experience is learning from and about your peers. Helping to deliver on that is our interactive audience polling — a key component of each analyst-led track session. This keynote presentation sorts through the hundreds of polling questions asked during the conference’s three-and-a-half days, and highlights the most interesting and significant findings in near real-time. The results should be part of every attendee’s trip report.

Please note registraton is closed for this session. Workshop: Full Extension: The Presence of a Leader (Pre-registration required. End users only.)

This session is based on the premise that a leader’s primary role is to create an environment where others choose to give their best possible effort for the benefit of the organization and its clientele. Focusing on leadership communication, this workshop introduces the VOICE model and lead activities based on each of the five concepts that comprise the VOICE acronym: Vision, Optimization, Inclusion, Courage, and Energy. Participants will be challenged to examine themselves and consider their own behavior, ideally resulting in commitment to improving their own leadership behaviors.

Please note registration for this session is currently closed. Workshop: Full Extension: The Presence of a Leader (Pre-registration required. End users only.)

This session is based on the premise that a leader’s primary role is to create an environment where others choose to give their best possible effort for the benefit of the organization and its clientele. Focusing on leadership communication, this workshop introduces the VOICE model and lead activities based on each of the five concepts that comprise the VOICE acronym: Vision, Optimization, Inclusion, Courage, and Energy. Participants will be challenged to examine themselves and consider their own behavior, ideally resulting in commitment to improving their own leadership behaviors.

Please note registration for this session is currently closed. Workshop: Full Extension: The Presence of a Leader (Pre-registration required. End users only.)

This session is based on the premise that a leader’s primary role is to create an environment where others choose to give their best possible effort for the benefit of the organization and its clientele. Focusing on leadership communication, this workshop introduces the VOICE model and lead activities based on each of the five concepts that comprise the VOICE acronym: Vision, Optimization, Inclusion, Courage, and Energy. Participants will be challenged to examine themselves and consider their own behavior, ideally resulting in commitment to improving their own leadership behaviors.

Case Study: Cloud Will Augment, Not Replace Next-Generation Data Centers

These days, there is a lot of discussion around public, private and hybrid clouds. At Boeing, our strategy is to make cloud an integral part of our IT architecture. We have built our data centers to be optimal for business-critical applications. At the same time, we have found the cloud to be very useful for new innovative applications. We have defined an IT architecture that uses public clouds for dynamic workloads and uses a hybrid cloud model for getting the best of both. In this session, we will discuss our cloud strategy, data center architecture, lessons learned and best practice tips.

(Please Note This Session Has Been Cancelled) Biogen Case Study: Japan Crisis Response Results in Stronger Operational Resiliency and Cultural Bonds

Case Study: CMDB – Real World Success With Two Client Experiences

CMDB success is dependent upon more than the stars aligning. It takes process work, organizational alignment, tooling and automation all tied to specific business goals. While the design of a CMDB and the ability to “automagically” manage the data are key factors to building a successful CMDB, the key value to the organization is the effective use of the data to facilitate decision-making and provide a high level of process integration across the IT organization. In this presentation, see how to plan, implement and gain value from a CMDB implementation.

Case Study: Private Cloud Computing at Bank of America – One Year Later

Cloud computing has been available in many variations for several years now. However, many organizations are still unsure about the business benefit and the best way to get started. Join Bank of America to review the benefits, costs and lessons learned as they continue their journey with Enterprise Private Cloud. This session will focus less on why you should be jumping into the cloud and more on the Bank’s choice of a modular component approach to their Cloud and how that has enabled rapid maturation from Infrastructure as a Service into Platform as a Service and some insight on what the next phase (Application as a Service) should mean to everyone.

BMC Software: One Size Fits None: Build the Right Cloud for Your Business

Dozens of business units, hundreds of cloud services, thousands of users. Different workloads, different SLAs, different infrastructure – and only one cloud, automated to meet these needs. Lower costs, increase business satisfaction and ensure ongoing operations. Are you planning for the real requirements of your cloud? Learn from BMC’s experience deploying more than 50 private and public clouds – and deliver a cloud you can be proud of… A cloud that works for your business.

CA Technologies: How Cloud is Transforming IT Service Delivery

Learn how CA Technologies is helping customers transform their IT service delivery models . You’ll hear real-world examples about CA customers who are successfully achieving balance between the competing priorities of increasing IT's business value and reducing the cost of IT service delivery—by embracing virtualization, cloud technologies and unified automation solutions.

IBM: University of Rochester Medical Center Cracks Code on Data Growth

Medical Imaging is changing the dynamics of data storage with over 20% annual growth and no end in sight. The challenge for The University of Rochester Medical Center was to keep up with their data growth while containing costs. Rick will discuss how his team built a storage strategy that transformed their environment to bring savings to their bottom line without sacrificing speed, criticality and performance requirements of their imaging and EMR systems.

NetApp: Keep Your Business Edge by Building an Innovative Cloud

The right cloud architecture can facilitate growth and enable new opportunities. Join NetApp and Walz Group as we explore how a flexible cloud computing architecture enabled Walz to: • Deploy new converged infrastructure in 4 days • Provision servers/storage 94% faster and rapidly deploy applications • Achieve 99% faster RTO and meet 99.998% uptime SLAs • Move resources non-disruptively and seamlessly scale up, out, or back • Effectively manage and secure applications and environments

Panduit Corporation: A Business Model for Holistic Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM)

Learn why Silver Cross Hospital chose a data center infrastructure management (DCIM) approach to track IT assets, monitor power utilization, and manage connectivity in their new facility. Gain insight on how your organization can benefit from a solution that integrates existing workflows with automated discovery, location awareness, and capacity utilization for improved infrastructure planning.

Symantec: Three Must Haves to Build Resilient Cloud Architectures

As your business requires more agile IT and higher service levels, your budget is feeling the crunch. Attend this session to see how other organizations are achieving the benefits of the cloud while reducing costs through resource pooling, more efficient operations and the repurposing of existing assets in new cloud deployments.

VMware, Inc.: Managing Virtual and Cloud IT Environments - a Roadmap to Well-Managed ITaaS

The dynamic nature of virtualized and cloud environments pose new management challenges for IT. This session will provide an overview of, as well as a strategic roadmap for, VMware’s portfolio of virtualization and cloud management solutions across infrastructure, applications, end user computing and IT business management.

IO: Town Hall Panel: Data Center 2.0 Transformation

Business leaders are placing a high priority on the role of Data Center 2.0, delivered through modular hardware and software technology. In this open town hall session, leaders from IO, HP, and Avnet share their perspectives on this new approach that solves the fundamental problems of traditionally constructed facilities that take too long to deploy, are too costly to scale, and poorly utilized to keep pace with IT demands.

Isilon : The Rise of Big Data & On-Demand IT

With the enterprise becoming predominantly dependent on file-based data to drive business innovation and growth, adopting cost-efficient, flexible IT strategies is critical for organizations large and small. This session will examine the IT solutions and strategies companies can deploy to ensure they stay ahead of big data growth – and the competition.

Oracle: Critical Systems and Software Considerations for Delivering Cloud Services

Oracle's cloud strategy provides customers the systems and software they need to deliver the highest performance, greatest choice and maximum business impact. This session will examine how critical capabilities like data center virtualization, consolidation, and cloud services can be delivered through integrated application-to-disk engineered systems like Oracle Exadata, Exalogic and the new SPARC SuperCluster. Learn how leading organizations are transforming their data centers based on Oracle’s engineered systems that deliver unmatched performance.

Red Hat: Unlock the Value of the Cloud

Red Hat technology powers the world’s largest and most successful clouds. We have seen first-hand how to make cloud work for businesses and government organizations. Companies are looking to cloud computing as a way to fundamentally change the economics of information technology and the agility of their enterprise. Red Hat helps transform IT service delivery, build production infrastructure and applications in the cloud where new levels of openness, interoperability and flexibility can be realized.

Schneider Electric: Tech Vault: A Case Study of Green IT in Vermont

Tech Vault’s solution to fulfilling a longstanding need for a high-availability commercial data center in Vermont has been realized. Tech Vault sought to capture this opportunity while balancing the appropriate level of investment, redundancy, efficiency, security, and capacity while not compromising their Green IT ideals. They engaged Schneider Electric & APC to assist them in guiding the development of their vision. Collectively, they achieved the goal to develop the first LEED certified data center in the region.

WIPRO: Datacenter Consolidation for Business Agility

In the current macroeconomic scenario, organizations need to extract the maximum out of their IT assets particularly the ‘huge investments gobbling’ datacenters. Wipro has helped several Fortune 1000 corporations improve the datacenter efficiency and effectiveness, in the process transforming their IT landscape and achieving business objectives. Our datacenter consolidation approach promises significant cost savings, business agility and variabilization of datacenter costs. Attend our session to learn how we consolidated customers’ datacenters and made their businesses agile!

Dell Inc.: Transforming Your Data Center to Achieve More

New trends in virtualization and cloud computing, along with the need for anytime, anywhere access to information, has put increased pressure on IT to meet growing business expectations. How can you be more effective, efficient, empowered in this reality? By creating a Data Center environment that can respond quickly to the changing needs of your business. In this session, Praveen Asthana, VP, Enterprise Solutions at Dell, will provide you with the key criteria needed to help your organization achieve more; deliver tangible results faster; and maximize the efficiency of your resources.

Brocade: Maximizing Your Cloud: How Data Centers Must Evolve

The IT industry is undergoing the most fundamental change since the computer. You may have taken your first tentative steps into virtualized IT models, but have you really thought through where you are headed and what risks might be waiting? Mr. McHugh will highlight the two benefits of the new IT model; agile deployment capabilities and new flexible financial models. More importantly, he will outline what you need to do to benefit from both.

CyrusOne: Maximizing Computer Performance Through Data Center Power Flexibility

As server technology continues to advance and applications evolve into the realm of public/private cloud architectures, the need for maximized data center performance and flexibility has never been greater. Focusing on vertical growth by adding power capacity is a common trend, however, as power demands for different equipment types vary widely, so should power availability. This presentation will discuss an emerging trend of achieving customized and scalable power within a server environment in a single data center.

Emerson Network Power - Avocent Products & Services: Case Study: Reducing Costs and Improving Performance with DCIM

Today, more businesses are beginning to adopt Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) tools to improve insight into the critical infrastructure’s performance. By bridging the gap between IT and facilities, companies are recognizing significant improvements in operational efficiency and performance. Join Emerson Network Power and a DCIM early adopter as they reveal how implementing DCIM today impacts the bottom line and what solutions will be available in the future.

F5 Networks: 2012: Year of the Dynamic Data Center

The present influx of technology options and infrastructure considerations can dilute the capabilities of what a dynamic data center is. During this panel discussion, attendees will hear ideas on the architecture required for to supporting video, HVD, “big data”, cloud management and more; learn about some of the best and worst data center practices; how to avoid common mistakes; what’s on the horizon to consider and other topics. F5’s invited experts are not only technology providers, but customers as well.

Intel: The IT Data Center in a Cloud Based World

Many IT organizations are currently going through massive changes as they transition from owning and managing traditional data center infrastructure to providing a more services led set of deliverables to their customers. Boyd Davis will discuss the evolution of the traditional data center to a more cloud-like delivery environment, including: new vendors in the market offering alternate platforms and services, consolidation of compute and storage, and new efficiencies in managing and delivering workload.

SGI: High Throughput, Large Scale Inline Transactional Analytics Using SGI Clusters and InfiniteStorage

Every financial transaction for PayPal has important metadata associated with it. Faced with the challenge of analyzing massive amounts of real-time transactional data, PapPal began using SGI solutions to improve its business operations and provide quick access to this important data. The system maintains fresh, accurate data in a schema which supports heavy and varied analysis for real-time inline fraud analytics, transaction and campaign analysis.

HP: The Business Value of a Converged Infrastructure: Accelerate IT While Reducing Costs!

Infrastructure convergence helps accelerate the provisioning of applications, increase uptime and drastically lower IT labor costs. Learn more about 22 IT organizations who have achieved concrete business benefits by moving towards cloud leveraging HP’s Converged Infrastructure Maturity Model.

Cisco: Cisco Data Center Solutions - Innovation for the Services-Led IT Model

The pace of business continues to place strains on IT departments. David Yen, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Server Access Virtualization Technology Group will discuss how Cisco’s unified data center solutions bring together computing, networking, storage, and management resources to deliver a more cost-effective, secure, and efficient IT operating environment. Learn how Cisco IT and Cisco customers use Cisco’s unified data center solutions to help achieve IT success.

Dell Storage: 5 Ways Fluid Data Grows My Business

Data has become the new currency in the boardroom. As the wealth of data-intensive devices and speed of decision making increases, CIOs are challenged to find new ways to approach IT infrastructure. Thousands of them have opted for Fluid Data technology from Dell to automate and optimize business growth– delivering the efficiency, agility and resiliency businesses require from their core storage platform in the data center and the cloud.

Legrand | Ortronics : Preparing for the Future - A Customer's Experience

The explosive growth of data storage requires a strategy that expands capacity, while still aligning with your organization’s cost containment goals. Join us to learn how one of our customers was able to maximize space in his data center by implementing an end-to-end solution from Legrand | Ortronics. You will walk away from this session with an understanding of flexibility, scalability and airflow management to effectively prepare your data center for the future.

Nimsoft, Inc.: Best Practices For Private Cloud and Virtualization Monitoring

Organizations are now rolling out deployments of mission critical applications and services within their private cloud and virtualization environments. Given the highly variable, dynamic and self-service orientation of these solutions, and the dense nature of the infrastructure they are deployed on, keeping critical business services running smoothly within these environments requires changes in approach to monitoring and service management. In this session, we will focus on the best practices for monitoring and service management for cloud and virtualization that will allow you to set and keep SLAs for your mission critical applications and services within these vital infrastructure solutions.

Radware Inc. : Data Center Shaping in a Virtual Instant

The ability to dynamically morph data center resources to satisfy transient user demands – whether the business is a large enterprise or a cloud service provider – is no longer the stuff of science fiction. Hear about technologies that are bringing fluidity to Application Delivery and Security fabric. When virtualizing network and server resources, gain an appreciation for the steps that should be taken to optimize the agility and resilience of cloud-enabled data center infrastructure.

SunGard Availability Services: Overcoming Top Root Cause Problems that Undermine Enterprise Recovery

Organizations are often surprised to learn of significant gaps in recovery procedures, such as outdated scripts, missing patches, and missing data. These gaps can delay and fail applications recovery. In this session, SunGard Availability Services will provide insight and customer lessons learned into root cause problems which threaten recovery for many enterprise organizations. SunGard will also describe how its Managed Recovery Program service is designed to address these root cause problems and close the gaps.

TeamQuest Corporation: Verizon Wireless Achieves Business Success with Problem-free iPhone 4 Launch

Verizon Wireless sold more phones in the first two hours of the Apple iPhone 4 launch than any other single previous day in Verizon Wireless history…with zero performance issues. How did we do it? We did our homework and planned ahead. In the end, all systems performed as anticipated, enabling customers to purchase the Verizon-iPhone problem-free. All of this was made possible using TeamQuest software, an integral part of our day-to-day existence at Verizon Wireless.

IBM: CIOs and Storage -- Strategies and Solutions

In 2010 and 2011, IBM storage consultants conducted a series of analyses on enterprise storage environments around the world. These efforts uncovered interesting trends in storage management strategies, shared challenges, as well as design trends that yielded positive results in controlling costs and improving usage efficiency in storage environments. Come learn about what challenges CIOs face with regard to storage management, and IBM's blueprint for taking the next steps towards a smart storage infrastructure.

Cisco: Cisco Unified Computing: The Preferred Platform for Virtualization and Cloud

Fabric computing is a fixture on the radar screen of many IT groups, driven by the increased penetration of virtualization and prospects for cloud computing. Cisco will explain how the Unified Compute System (UCS) offers the preferred platform for fabric computing, virtualization and cloud.

IBM: Cloud Computing – What's Real vs. Virtual

Are you fighting a battle of growing resource management costs and shrinking budgets and being asked to move to the cloud? Drive more virtualization than ever before using best practices from virtualizing over 130,000 images in our own data centers. Learn which three advances in technology and software will help you achieve a breakthrough in IT effectiveness, resiliency and security. While positioning your company to be able to move faster into the cloud.

Microsoft: Cloud Computing: From Operational Efficiency to Business Agility

Corporate datacenters are rapidly changing and so is the conversation about moving beyond virtualization to true IT as a Service. With System Center 2012, Microsoft simplifies deployment of private cloud infrastructure and gives unique tools to focus on the true value in your organization.

Dell Inc.: Agile, Open Networking In The Virtual Era

The networking infrastructure is an important consideration when transforming data centers to meet new demands in the virtual era. Business and IT leaders seek networking solutions that preserve and extend their legacy infrastructures while enabling transformation across a diverse set of requirements. In this session, Dario Zamarian, VP/GM of Networking at Dell, discusses how Dell customers have deployed an open framework for data center, campus, and branch networking while avoiding closed, complex, and costly approaches.

HP: Customer Case Study – Migrating to HP Scale-Up X86 Platform

In this session, Texas Instruments discusses deployment of the HP ProLiant DL980 G7 server as the back-end database for a Solaris/Oracle/SAP environment. TI will share the best practices for deploying on the HP ProLiant DL980 server which has a maximum capacity of 80 Intel® Xeon® cores and 4TB of memory. Come to this session to learn about TI's approach, performance testing results, lessons learned, and best practices from running this environment in production.

Adaptive Computing: Maximizing the Cloud – Best Practices for Intelligent Cloud Implementations

While clouds get a lot of hype, what are the best practices? In this session, Adaptive will present lessons learned from some of the largest private cloud implementations in the world. These real-world case studies span multiple industries, from financial services to government to entertainment. In this session, you will learn how to implement an intelligent cloud that self-optimizes, saving you time and money.

ASG Software Solutions: Managing IT Complexity as You Transition to Cloud Technologies

Managing a corporation-wide evolution to the cloud can be a complex and difficult task. These new complex IT infrastructures require robust end-user experience (EUE) and application performance management (APM) solutions to ensure delivery of high-quality business services. In this session, ASG will discuss how organizations can get the flexibility, visibility and proper analytics needed to effectively manage IT complexity, deliver high-quality business services, and enable a smooth transition to virtual infrastructures and cloud technologies.

CiRBA Inc.: Why Your Cloud Stack Needs a Brain for Intelligent Control

Join CiRBA CTO & Co-Founder Andrew Hillier to learn how to gain intelligent control over virtual and cloud infrastructure. Mr. Hillier will discuss how leveraging a “brain” that understands your policies, technical requirements, utilization, future workload demands, and environment changes will give you the kind of visibility and control required to safely increase densities, reduce risk and performance issues, and ultimately, automate processes for greater efficiency.

CommVault: Traditional Backup is Dead: Modernizing Data Protection for Tomorrow’s Datacenter

Server virtualization and datacenter consolidation projects are causing traditional backup and recovery to break under the weight of massive data growth. IT teams are being challenged to: Increase uptime, reduce complexity and meet compliance requirements while operating under strained budgets.Denver Health, with CommVault, will detail how they modernized their data protection to: -Provide global reporting to predict future spending -Migrate from tape to disk to improve backup and recovery times -Reduce data management costs

EMC: IT Management for Virtualized Data Centers and Cloud Environments

The dynamic nature of virtualized data centers and cloud environments require management solutions that align effective and efficient operations with business needs and service delivery. Hear EMC’s VP of Product Management & Strategic Business Operations discuss the key parts of an efficient cloud IT model, including automated management.

Riverbed: Improving Data Replication, Backup and Storage - With the Cloud & Without

For Psomas, eliminating tape and leveraging cloud based backup and recovery are an IT priority. Learn how they deployed Riverbed Whitewater cloud storage appliance and Cloud Steelhead optimization technology to move to a hybrid cloud model for CAD computing that best serves its highly mobile and distributed workforce. For James Hardie, data protection and Disaster Recovery are paramount. Learn how they deployed WAN optimization from Riverbed to reduce RPO, slash backup times, and improve bandwidth utilization.

CommScope, Inc.: How Can IT Infrastructure Keep Pace With Your Business?

Data center IT space continues to evolve as new technologies and architectures are introduced. Enterprises are challenged with the rapid growth of their facilities, while maximizing the utilization of their resources. Informed design decisions can save time, labor, and installation costs today while facilitating future expansion. We give examples and examine approaches that can be used to support current high performance physical IT infrastructure needs while easing migration to higher speeds and newer architectures.

Extreme Networks, Inc.: New Requirements for Cloud Grade Data Center Fabrics

As virtualization and cloud computing technologies change the requirements of the data center, the data center network needs to also evolve to maximize those investments. Find out why the evolution of the data center network becomes a fabric and better understand the benefits of an open fabric.

ManageIQ, Inc.: Keys to Successfully Building and Managing Enterprise Clouds

Learn about challenges faced and the keys to successfully deploying and managing enterprise clouds. Hear how enterprises have leveraged cloud computing to increase agility, enable self-service, accelerate service delivery and optimize IT resources. From distributed enterprise clouds to private clouds and virtualized infrastructures, find out how to unify monitoring, management, analytics and automation. Topics will include self-service provisioning, service catalogs, workload management, capacity management and integration with CMDBs and other critical management systems.

NetScout: Protecting User Experience: Assuring Voice, Video and Data Service Delivery

Today there's an application for everything and virtually everything and everybody is connected, but what good is having advanced applications and services if they are not delivered reliably and efficiently? The reality is that cyberthreats, virtualization, cloud-based services, and technology convergence are testing the limits of IT infrastructure. Learn best practices for service delivery management that help protect user experience, simplify operations to reduce costs, and optimize the availability and resilience of IT infrastructure.

ServiceNow: The IT Platform: Using PaaS to Automate Data Center Management

Verisign's critical facilities team needed a system to manage power and space in their global data centers. They had been manually maintaining spreadsheets and were challenged with old, drifting data and version control. Learn how the Verisign team extended the ServiceNow Platform to visualize data center power and space information. This data is now automatically maintained as a byproduct of the workflow process and new data center infrastructure visualizations are tied to live CMDB data.

Intel: A Case Study for Deploying a Unified 10G Ethernet Network

Intel will share our view of the explosive growth of server and storage capacity which will require a highly scalable network. We will also share the advantages of Unified 10GbE Networking as the foundation for cloud computing services. An actual Yahoo Case Study on a Proof-of-concept will be reviewed comparing FCoE to FC. A second case study from NASA will detail their views and their best practices for deploying a 10GbE network.

Platform Computing: Platform Computing: Private Cloud Case Study for DuPont

Computing for R&D is a unique field in IT – it demands performance, capacity, flexibility, and security. We explored the feasibility and value of private clouds to enhance R&D computing capability. We also defined a possible model to integrate the cloud with traditional high performance computing. Finally, we shared some of our opinions that might be important to the future success of cloud computing in a R&D environment.

Sentilla: Instant Value for Data Center Optimization - A Customer Experience

See the 90-day ROI on 3 customer deployments: a Fortune 100 telecom provider saw a 72% energy load reduction and a 32% annualized ROI 30 days after deployment; a leading financial services company gained 30% in operational cost savings leveraging our data center analytics; and a top smartphone manufacturer was able to identify significant capacity risk using predictive analytics of data center performance - and consequently took preventative measures to reduce downtime.

Veeam Software: Large-Scale Server Virtualization: Lessons Learned

Over the last 6 years, Northwestern University has virtualized nearly 80% of its 1100+ servers, including most tier 1 applications. Along the way, they’ve learned a few things. What are the long-term ramifications of P2V conversions? When are templates and data migration a better alternative? Why is shared storage so important? What is the optimal cluster size? How does virtualization affect data protection strategies? Come to this session to find out.

Infinity SDC Limited: Can the Data Centre Now Truly Become Carbon Neutral?

Infinity will detail its award winning UK data centre strategy, demonstrating that 21st Century data centres can deliver a positive not negative environmental impact. In a virtuous circle working with the local farming community, "dark green energy " is generated and delivered on site directly to up to twenty 5,000 sq ft data halls in customer-dedicated buildings. Is the time now right for truly green data centres? Listen in to this fascinating approach to better understand how high efficiency, high availability facilities can still provide real choice in carbon management and generate positive environmental and social benefits as well as lower TCO without impacting operations.

SUSE: SUSE: Open Source Solutions for a Flexible Cloud Infrastructure

Enterprises around the world want to increase business agility and reduce operating costs through cloud computing. The complexity of integrating a cloud solution with existing IT resources can be daunting. SUSE Cloud powered by OpenStack is a hypervisor agnostic, operating system neutral solution that enables the development and management of a cloud environment without having to deploy a new infrastructure. Adapt to the changing IT landscape and be a chameleon in the cloud.

Analyst User Roundtable: Leading Your IT Infrastructure and Operations Staff Through the Transition to Cloud Computing (Pre-registration required. End users only.)

The integration of cloud computing as a technology option is having impacts on I&O staff ranging from skills to job security.   Share experiences, discuss implications and contribute best practices in leading your staff into an environment of cloud computing.

Analyst User Roundtable: Green IT and the Data Center (Pre-registration required. End users only.)

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.

Analyst User Roundtable: IT Infrastructure & Operations Cost Reduction (Pre-registration required. End users only.)

The economy and other factors are creating high budget pressures within many organizations. I&O is often targeted because it is 60 % of the total IT costs – and hence is a major expense. This AUR is a chance for you to learn and share best practices here.

Analyst User Roundtable: Best Practices for the IT Service Desk (Pre-registration required. End users only.)

The effectiveness of an IT Service Desk often influences end-user opinions on IT itself. That influence can be positive or negative. Participants in this AUR will discuss IT Service Desk issues from people, process, and tooling perspectives. Participants will share lessons learned and help identify best practices as a group.

Analyst User Roundtable: Virtualization and Security (Pre-registration required. End users only.)

This roundtable will discuss security considerations and best practices the securing the next-generation virtualized data center. Attendees will be asked to share their concerns and approaches to security within virtualized data centers, including the security of hosted virtualized desktops.

Analyst User Roundtable: Preparing the WAN for Cloud Communications (Pre-registration required. End users only.)

Most enterprises have sketched strategies to transform their data centers to support internal and external cloud functionality  but have not factored in the wide area network.  This roundtable will focus on user feedback around assessment, architecture and procurement to support availability ,security and scalability of the wide area network.

Analyst User Roundtable: Dealing with the Invasion of Consumer Technology (Pre-registration required. End users only.)

Everyday, Gartner takes calls from its IT clients overwhelmed by the demands of end users for what it considers consumer technology. Whether its smartphones, tablets, Facebook or Twitter, these products have not been architected to fit into the enterprise model of security and manageability. This session will discuss how these technologies are being managed within our customer base.

Analyst User Roundtable: Virtualization - What’s Next (Pre-registration required. End users only.)

Most data centers have virtualized. However when moving from 20-60% workloads virtualized, what you virtualize and when makes a real difference to the costs and savings. Come discuss what you’ve learned from your virtualization experience to date, and more importantly what your plans are for going forward.

Analyst User Roundtable: Best Practices in CMDB (Pre-registration required. End users only.)

CMDB’s continue to progress. IT organizations are taking them beyond their initial focus of impact assessment, but there are plenty that are still at the beginning of their CMDB journey. Understanding the what, when, where, and even why to do a CMDB are still the compelling questions for many IT organizations and CMDB stakeholders alike. There is significant enlightenment from enterprises on what it actually takes to implement a CMDB and all of its 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.

Analyst User Roundtable: Hosted Virtual Desktops (Pre-registration required. End users only.)

HVD implementations continue to grow.  In this roundtable organizations will share practical experiences they have garnered from experimenting, deploying, and justifying this alternative desktop strategy.  Understand why HVDs are of interest, how to best test and deploy, and gather justification for further rollouts. 

Analyst User Roundtable: IT Infrastructure & Operations Consolidation Best Practices for the Public Sector (Pre-registration required. End users only.)

Consolidating I&O remains a major focus for Data Center Managers to reduce cost, increase service levels and improve manageability. And all aspects of infrastructure are fair game here – such as data centers, servers, storage, networks and even client devices. Furthermore, consolidation is a prerequisite for virtualization. Come join your peers from other public sector organizations in discussing their actual experiences and plans when it comes to consolidation

Analyst User Roundtable: Storage Infrastructure Modernization (Pre-registration required. End users only.)

Share with your peers your experiences in deploying new storage architectures and technologies such as thin-provisioning, automated storage tiering and solid state drive (SSD), scale-out storage systems and new replication solutions. Plan on sharing pleasant surprises, disappointments and insights into vendor support capabilities.

Analyst User Roundtable: Early Cloud Storage Experiences (Pre-registration required. End users only.)

Share with your peers your experiences with using public cloud storage solutions and in designing, building, deploying and managing private and hybrid cloud storage solutions. Plan on discussing time to deployment, problems, savings realized, and your satisfaction with vendor service and support.

Analyst User Roundtable: Best Practices in Data Center Design & Retrofit (Pre-registration required. End users only.)

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 significant upgrade or 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.

Analyst User Roundtable: Managing the Next Generation of Client Computing (Pre-registration required. End users only.)

A confluence of factors is leading organizations to improve the way client computing is delivered and managed.  We've seen four distinct areas of focus in migrations to the next generation of client computing: management, security, flexibility and performance. In this roundtable, we’ll discuss the initiatives and best practices organizations have implemented to achieve these objectives.

Analyst User Roundtable: Cloud Security Concerns (Pre-registration required. End users only.)

This roundtable will discuss security considerations and best practices for the secure use of cloud-based computing resources. Attendees will be asked to share their concerns and approaches to security when using cloud services.

Analyst User Roundtable: Backup/Recovery Modernization (Pre-registration required. End users only.)

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.

Analyst User Roundtable: DevOps Journey to Release Agility (Pre-registration required. End users only.)

DevOps is an emerging philosophy based upon agile methodologies for the delivery and management of IT services.  One of the primary goals is to address the velocity mismatch between development and operations teams especially with respect to application releases.  On a more strategic level, it is a key element in Gartner’s Cloud Operating Model which looks at the build-out and support of IT infrastructures more holistically.  In this session we will discuss the key concepts behind the DevOps movement and how IT organizations can begin the journey to a more agile yet stable future.

Analyst User Roundtable: Application Performance Monitoring (Pre-registration required. End users only.)

Applications Performance Monitoring (APM) is a foundational component to understanding if IT infrastructure is meeting the needs of business leaders and end users. Participants in this AUR will discuss APM issues from people, process, and tooling perspectives. Participants will share lessons learned and help identify best practices as a group.

Analyst User Roundtable: Best Practices for Managing Mobile Users and Devices in the Enterprise (Pre-registration required. End users only.)

With lots of new and evolving devices and mobile OSes in the enterprise, keeping track and defining the best practices in managing these devices, services and users is complicated.  This session will share best practices for managing the ever evolving mobile device technology in the enterprise including vendor, end user segmentation and policy guidelines.

Analyst User Roundtable: Recovery-in-the-Cloud (Pre-registration required. End users only.)

Recovery-in-the- cloud services that support managed backup, restoration, testing and operations failover can become one of the future bright spots in what is otherwise a largely dormant industry.    One key reason is the “always-on” nature of the cloud, making both recovery and failover testing far more flexible and actionable than is currently the case with more traditional shared subscription services.  However, this service segment is extremely nascent and unfortunately its potential benefits are currently shrouded by far more questions than concrete answers at this point.

Analyst User Roundtable: Security Planning for Apple Mac Workstations in the Windows Enterprise (Pre-registration required. End users only.)

Apple Mac workstations are regularly found on enterprise networks, both as supported systems and as personal choices in "bring your own PC" programs. This roundtable provides attendees to share successful experiences and to utilize Gartner's recommendations.

Analyst User Roundtable: Data Center Storage & Networking Architectures (Pre-registration required. End users only.)

The hype surrounding emerging data center networking technologies continues. Virtual I/O, convergence of storage and data networking, the migration to 10G server connections and Top of rack switching are all being discussed. The round table session will explore what organizations are actually doing and where they see opportunities to use these technologies to improve their operations.

Analyst User Roundtable: Optimizing Physical Asset Management in the Data Center (Pre-registration required. End users only.)

This analyst user roundtable looks at how advancements in technology can assist IT organization to make the data center audit process faster, make records more accurate to address compliance requirements, make facilities more secure and allow the assets to perform longer. We will discuss the issues and solutions at a single location to provide security, environmental monitoring, facilitate inventory management as well as developing a taxonomy to aggregate of data from multiple sites.

Analyst User Roundtable: Business Resilience: How IT Can Jump-Start the Process (Pre-registration required. End users only.)

Organizations are pressured to become more resilient in all aspects of their business operations. The business can cross-train personnel, split operations between locations, implement multiple vendors for the supply chain. But IT is integral to making resilience happen. This AUR will focus on what technologies can be used to aid the business in achieving their resilience goals.

Analyst User Roundtable: Successful Strategies for Server Virtualization in the Public Sector (Pre-registration required. End users only.)

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 server environment can introduce unique challenges for public sector organizations. Come to this roundtable to identify those server virtualization challenges and discuss how you and your peers can best address them.

Analyst User Roundtable: Journey to Wherever You are Going: Server Provisioning & Configuration Management, Data Center Automation, Private Cloud and Real-Time Infrastructure (Pre-registration required. End users only.)

Where are you in managing the server provisioning and configuration management life cycle? Are you looking at it holistically from a data center automation perspective? 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.

Analyst User Roundtable: Big Data – Do You Have It, and What Are You Doing About It? (Pre-registration required. End users only.)

 “Big data” is a new term that describes huge volumes of data with complex and varied structure, and special requirements for access, processing, storage, protection and archiving. How are you dealing with big data – do you have it, are you treating it differently?  What are other organizations doing to address this challenge?

Analyst User Roundtable: IT Service Catalogs (Pre-registration required. End users only.)

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.

Analyst User Roundtable: Defining an Infrastructure Planning Discipline (Pre-registration required. End users only.)

Leveraging Gartner’s best practices (attend the track session with this same title before this session), what works and what doesn’t within your environment?  We’ll address questions such as these: Is Data Center planning different than planning other infrastructure areas?  Does all of an EA-centric approach to infrastructure planning make sense?  Does infrastructure planning work without input from non-infrastructure areas?

Town Hall: Dealing with Big Data

“Big data” is a popular term generally used to acknowledge the exponential growth, availability and use of information (both structured and unstructured) in the data-rich landscape of the 21st century. Business leaders are placing a high priority on the role of technology to deliver meaningful data to the organization, so that they can make better decisions based on facts, rather than assumptions, and do it in a timely manner. In this open microphone session, Gartner analysts will take your questions on the topic focusing on what I&O leaders can do to enable their organizations to better manage and utilize information.

Town Hall: The Present and Future of Fabric-Based Infrastructure

The server market has been evolving ever more radically since the dawn of server virtualization and the more recent influence of cloud computing. With the advent of fabric-based infrastructure, yet another discontinuity has emerged. But the adoption rate of virtualization, cloud and fabrics will vary according to data center culture, workload demands and the need to amortize legacy investments. This town hall presentation focuses on the following key issues: