Data remains the most important asset an organization has. Access to that data in a real-time, reliable and efficient manner is critical to decision-making, customer service and organizational success. But distributed computing and widely separated users make data and storage accessibility and management more difficult and costly. How can you make the data connections you need?

The Tolly Group estimates a single network outage costs $140,000 in the retail industry and over $450,000 in the securities sector. Can you afford NOT to have a reliable storage network?

Storage Area Network (SAN) technology is rapidly becoming the solution of choice. By interconnecting servers and storage at extremely high speed, SANs provide the reliability, scalability, performance, fault tolerance, load balancing, mirroring and other services you need to maximize the benefits of your data and the applications that use it.

The Yankee Group predicts storage spending will account for 75 cents of every hardware dollar by businesses through the year 2000. The SAN Summit is where you can learn how to spend that money wisely.

The SAN Summit Conference is designed specifically to get you up to speed on what SANs are, how they work, what they can do for you, how they fit into your systems environment, and what the industry is doing to provide solution-based products. In two intensive days, the Summit provides all the information you need to make decisions and design technology solutions to your business problems. Donít miss your best opportunity to learn whatís new and how to use it, so you can stay ahead of your data and storage needs!

Day One: SAN Strategy: You need to understand what SANs are and how they can fit into your existing systems and applications fabric. Day One focuses on the decision issues, as well as providing a comprehensive look at the SAN concept and its supporting technologies. The sessions to be offered are:

Moderator: Peter Gibbs

Marketing Director

CLARiiON

Speaker: Jeff Corbett

SAN Marketing Manager

ATL Products, a Quantum Company

This session will educate the audience on one of the hottest acronyms in the industry today -- SAN (Storage Area Networking). It will explore what a SAN is and why they are becoming an important element of the new enterprise computing environment. Additionally, this presentation will describe the business benefits of SANs and how they can enhance access to critical information, provide improved data availability, better system performance, and lower cost of ownership.

Moderator: Alan Fedder

President

UniForum

At the core of all SANs, as in other IT infrastructures, is the operating system. SAN implementation is traditionally based on Unix, but is being challenged by Linus and Microsoft. This session will provide an in-depth overview of the capabilities, strengths and weaknesses of the various alternatives, to help you better determine the OS best for your implementation.

Co- Presenter: Michael Jenson

Chief Technical Officer

Artecon

Co- Presenter: Eric Herzog

Vice President

Mylex

There are both hardware and software components crucial to practical and successful implementation of SANs. This session will address some of the obvious and not-so-obvious capabilities from both that are necessary for functional and powerful SANs. Software features include LUN exclusion and management, intelligent data pathing, data load balancing, smart caching, local and remote replication, server failover, event reporting, global management, and efficient backup over the SAN. Hardware challenges include bandwidth required by Web-based, i.e. multimedia and warehouse applications, latency and predictability required by time-sensitive applications, e.g. video conferencing, and the performance and resiliency required by mission critical applications, e.g. OLTP.

Presenter: Dirk Van Dall

Principal Consultant, Digital Video

SHOWTIME Networks, INC.

SHOWTIME Networks has implemented a storage area network (SAN) enabled by Mercury Computer Systems' shared-SAN software. SHOWTIME's shared SAN is the basis for the automated assembly of interstitial clips for six broadcast television channels, soon to be expanded to eight. The configuration consists of seven Macintosh systems connected through two Fibre Channel switches to a terabyte of hardware RAID storage. The Macintosh workstations are located throughout the facility and are tied to the Fibre Channel switches via fiber-optic cable. This session will outline the original work-flow model and reveal how the shared SAN was designed and implemented. In addition, we will discuss how the shared SAN enables an entirely new work flow for the production and airing of promos, menus, and behind-the-scenes as well as the plans for future expansion.

Presenter: Christopher Stakutis

Director of Engineering

Mercury Computer

SANs offer the promise of increased efficiency and centralized control to enterprise computing environments, by exploiting a common storage-side communication infrastructure. Often, todayís focus is on amortizing the cost of physical storage systems across multiple servers, rather than sharing the data of different systems. But there are approaches to solving the shared-data aspect of a SAN that are viable NOW. This session examines what you can implement today, and how you can be ready for new developments as they come tomorrow.

Moderator: Mike Fitzpatrick

Chairman, Fibre Channel Community &

Director, Strategic Engineering, Fujitsu CPA

This session will be an interactive discussion of the current and near-term directions in storage area networks. Mr. Fitzpatrick will moderate the panel of the Day One SAN Summit speakers as they look ahead. Your opinion counts, so donít miss your opportunity to be heard.

Day Two: SAN Technology: The principle benefits of SANs include easier disaster recovery, greatly improved I/O performance, high scalability and flexibility, while delivering simplified resource and change management. But to take advantage of its any-to-any connections, you have to understand its technology platform, techniques and alternatives, so Day Two concentrates on the underlying components that implement the SAN.

Presenter: Ken Brown

Director of Federal Government Sales

F5 Labs

Growth in demand for Internet-based services has fueled the need for organizations to provide reliable and scalable infrastructures. At the heart of the Internet lies DNS, a system designed to send end users' requests to the appropriate location. In this session we will discuss how organizations can build upon the existing DNS infrastructure to deliver scalability, reliability and dynamic allocation of traffic based on real time network conditions.

Presenter: Steven Wilson

Principal Systems Architect

Amdahl Corporation

Storage area networks (SANs) are an integral part of clustered computing environments. To successfully manage a clustered computing environment, SAN management must be included in the overall management scheme. The complexity of SANs impose management challenges above and beyond those prevalent in standard storage and networking environments. The primary challenges of managing a storage area network are identified and an object-oriented storage network management model is presented as a solution to these challenges.

Presenter: Anslam Handy

Chief Technical Officer

DiaLogos

With the surge in buyers to the Internet during the holiday season of 1998, the virtual doors at sites like Buy.com, Toys R Us, eBay etc. had to be closed temporarily due to heavy shopping traffic. A bigger concern than the lost revenue from the $2+ billion that was spent online during the holidays, were the lost opportunities to acquire new customers and to build customer loyalty. Clustering technologies are an essential component of this new era of mission-critical web-based commerce. However, sole reliance on industry-standard benchmarks for selecting the right hardware can be detrimental to the architecture design. Learn how simulation techniques can be used to understand the impact of your users, networks and applications on the clustering requirements and ensure that your virtual doors are never closed.

Moderator: Jack Fegreus

Editor-in-Chief

BackOffice Magazine

This session will focus on the actual implementation of SANs by using examples of what has already been done. Exploration will be done in architecture, hardware, software and data management. The focus will be on how storage-based solutions can achieve business value as well as technical productivity.

Moderator: Mike Fitzpatrick

Chairman, Fibre Channel Community &

Director, Strategic Engineering, Fujitsu CPA

This open session will be another interactive discussion, focusing on what you can do to make SANs a reality in your environment and with your infrastructure. Mr. Fitzpatrick will moderate the panel of the Day Two SAN Summit speakers as they explore what works and what doesnít. You can not afford to miss this session where you can ask questions, voice your opinion and learn what can be done now.

9:00 - 9:50 Conference sessions

Introduction to SANs

10:00 - 10:50 Conference sessions

SAN Operating Systems

11:00 - 11:50 Conference sessions

SAN Hardware and Software

12:00 - 1:00 Lunch

1:00 - 1:50 Conference sessions

Streaming SANs in Action I: SHOWTIME Networks Case Study

2:00 - 2:50 Conference sessions

Sharing Data in a SAN

3:00 - 4:30 Conference sessions

SAN Directions

9:00 - 9:50 FOSE ë99 CIO Panel

10:00 - 10:50 Conference sessions

Building on DNS to Provide Scalability & High Availability

11:00 - 11:50 Conference sessions

Management of Storage Area Networks

12:00 - 1:00 Lunch

1:00 - 1:50 Conference sessions

Making the Web Mission Critical

2:00 - 2:50 Conference sessions

SANs in Action II

3:00 - 4:30 Conference sessions

Making SANs Work

James Lucas
Vice President, Conferences
Creative Expos & Conferences

Board Members:
John McArthur
Director
International Data Corporation

Jack Fegreus
Editor-in-Chief
BackOffice Magazine

David Simpson
Editor-in-Chief
InfoStor

Alan Alper
Senior Analyst
Gomez Consulting

Thomas Henderson
President
XtremeLabs

Alan Fedder
President
UniForum

Use the FOSE registration form to register for the Storage Area Network Summit. You must complete the entire registration form to receive your badge.

Copyright, 1999 Creative Expos and Conferences