Originally posted by: TonyPearson

I have arrived safely in Las Vegas for the IBM System Storage and Storage Networking Symposium. This eventis held once every year. The gold sponsors were: Brocade, Cisco, Finisar, Servergraph, and VMware. Our silversponsor was Qlogic.

Barry Rudolph was the keynote speaker with "Storage for the Green Data Center", similar to his presentationfor Storage Networking World in April, but with new and improved slides.

I myself had a busy day. Here's a quick recap:

IBM System Storage - Strategy and Overview

I presented IBM's System Storage strategy and an overview of our product line. For those who missed it,our strategy is focused on helping customers in four key areas:

• Optimize IT - to simplify and automate your IT operations and optimize performance and functionality, through server/storage synergies, storage virtualization, and intergrated storage infrastructure management.
• Leverage Information - to enable a single view of trusted business information through data sharing, and to get the most value from information through Information Lifecycle Management (ILM).
• Mitigate Risk - to comply with security and regulatory requirements, and keep your business running with a complete set of business continuity solutions. IBM offers a range of non-erasable, non-rewriteable storage, encryption on disk and tape, and support for IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) service management disciplines.
• Enable Business Flexibility - to provide scalable solutions and protect your IT investment through the use of open industry standards like Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S). IBM offers scalability in three dimensions: Scale-up, Scale-out, and Scale-within.

IBM has a broad storage portfolio, in seven offering categories:

• Disk Systems, including our SAN Volume Controller, DS family, and N series.
• Tape Systems, including tape drives, libraries and virtualization.
• Storage Networking, a complete set of switches, directors and routes
• Infrastructure Management, featuring the IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center software
• Business Continuity, advanced copy services and the software to manage them
• Lifecycle and Retention, our non-erasable, non-rewriteable storage including DR550, N series with SnapLock, and WORM tape support, Grid Archive Manager and our Grid Medical Archive Solution (GMAS)
• Storage Services, everything from consulting, design and deployment to outsourcing and hosting.

I could talk all day on this, but given that the room was packed, every seat taken and the rest of the audience standing along the walls, I had to keep it down to one hour.

SAN Volume Controller Overview

I presented an overview of the IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC), IBM's flagship disk virtualizationproduct. Rather than giving a long laundry list of features and benefits,I focused on the five that matter most:

• Reduces the cost and complexity of managing storage, especially for mixed storage environments
• Simplifies Business Continuity through non-disruptive data migration and advanced copy services
• Improves storage utilization, getting more value from the storage hardware you already have
• Enhances personnel productivity, empowering storage administrators to get their job done
• Delivers high availability and performance

SAN Volume Controller - Customer Success Stories

A good part of this conference are presented by non-IBMers, which include Business Partners and clientssharing their experiences. In this session, we had two speakers share their experiences with SVC.

• David Snyder keeps over 80 web sites online and available. His digital media technologiesteam uses SVC to make their storage administration easier, and ensure high availability for web site content creation and publishing.
• Mark Prybylski manages storage at his company, a financial bank. His storage management team uses SVC Global Mirror which provides asynchronous disk mirroring between different types of disk, as part oftheir Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery plan.

The last session I attended was "Storage .. to Optimize your ECM depoloyments" by Jerry Bower, now working for IBM as part of our recent acquisition of the Filenet company. ECM stands for Enterprise Content Management, and IBM is the market leader in this space. Jerry gave a great overview of IBM Content Manager software suite, our newly acquired Filenet portfolio, and the storage supported.

After the sessions was a reception at the Solution Center with dozens of exhibitor booths. For example,Optica Technologies had their PRIZM productswhich are able to connect FICON servers to ESCON storage devices.

technorati tags: IBM, storage, networking, symposium, Brocade, Cisco, Finisar, Servergraph, VMware, Qlogic, Barry Rudolph, green, datacenter, strategy, ILM, ITIL, SNIA, SMI-S, offering, disk, tape, software, SAN Volume Controller, SVC, David Snyder, Mark Prybylski, Jerry Bower, Filenet, ECM, Optica, FICON, ESCON