The sixth annual Server Blade Summit, "Blades and Virtualization: The Perfect Marriage," will feature major keynote addresses from top industry experts at the forefront of these hot technologies with the potential to deliver significant results in improved IT operations and reduced costs. This industry conference addressing these solutions is set for May 1-3, 2007 at the Anaheim Marriott in Anaheim, CA.
Keynote speakers from IBM, Microsoft Corp., VMware, Countrywide Financial and IMEX Research will offer their expert perspectives on the current and future state of server, desktop, and application virtualization and blade systems; the impact of these technologies; and the real-world considerations for successful implementation in the corporate enterprise and small-to-medium business (SMB) environments.
Keynote presentations will include:
IBM - Blades and Virtualization: The Perfect Marriage
- Doug Balog, vice president, IBM BladeCenter; Chairman, Blade.org
- Kevin Leahy, director, IBM Virtualization Strategy
This keynote presentation from IBM, given jointly by Doug Balog and Kevin Leahy representing blade systems and virtualization strategy respectively will address the central theme of the conference and discuss these two technologies as foundational building blocks for the future.
Balog and Leahy will explore how innovation, collaboration and integration are the key building blocks for next generation infrastructure. IBM has a long history of data center innovation and is driving a new industry agenda for dynamic infrastructure by reinventing how businesses use emerging technology such as blades and virtualization. In addition to discussing customer successes in these areas, Balog and Leahy will offer insights on how the combination of virtualization and blade servers can help clients shrink their footprint and extend their boundaries. They will discuss how virtualization is the foundational technology for the next generation data center as well as address the role that blades will play as the future platform for the data center.
Balog is responsible for IBMÆs BladeCenter business and strategy, including the technical direction and development of BladeCenter. He is also chairman of Blade.org, a collaborative organization and developer of community focused on accelerating the expansion of blade solutions and the IBM and Intel blade ecosystem. The organization is intended to create new solutions for customers, maximizing the value of the blade platform. Leahy is responsible for driving the strategy for virtualization across IBM software, systems and services to enable customers to reduce costs while increasing the utilization, flexibility and business resiliency of their infrastructures.
Microsoft - Blades and Virtualization: Match Making
- Mike Neil, general manager of virtualization strategy, Windows Server Division, Microsoft
Forecasts indicate that about 20 percent of servers that ship in 2011 will be in a blade form-factor. And virtualization technology, which has been used for decades as part of operating systems, is taking hold and growing in the x86 server market. In his keynote, Neil will address some of the top operational and technology opportunities that can drive broader business value and solutions for customers. He will offer attendees MicrosoftÆs view of the IT landscape and a vision for making IT dynamic.
Neil is focused on the delivery of Windows virtualization technology, including the Windows Server virtualization, as part of Windows Server ôLonghornö and Virtual PC 2007. He also directs the technical enablement of MicrosoftÆs broader vision for virtualization to include virtualization management tools. He has been responsible for MicrosoftÆs server and PC virtualization efforts since 2003.
VMware - The Growth and Development of Infrastructure Virtualization
- Jack Lo, Senior Director of R and D, VMware
VMwareÆs Jack Lo will offer insights on the growth and development of infrastructure virtualization, drawing on VMware customer experiences. Lo will discuss the successes and challenges of implementing virtualization strategies as well as the progress that has been made since the early days. He will also address the advanced management capabilities required for moving forward toward automated management of a virtualized infrastructure, and outline VMwareÆs vision for virtualization today and in the future.
Lo is senior director of R and D at VMware. He manages the VMware virtual machine group, which is responsible for the virtual hardware platform across VMware's virtualization products. Prior to joining VMware, Lo was at Transmeta Corp. for five years, where he held several engineering management positions, the most recent being director of Software Engineering. He received a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Washington, and B.S. and M.S. degrees in computer science from Stanford University.
Countrywide Financial - Virtualization and Blades: The Realities of Living Together
- Omer Simeon, executive vice president, Content and Imaging Systems, Countrywide Financial
Omer Simeon will share his perspective as an end user on perpetual rise and fall of virtualization over the past 40 yearsùfrom IBM's VM to Microsoft's Virtual 2007. He will address the fundamental question, ôAre blade servers the final ingredient in the æsecret sauceÆ that will enable at least one aspect of virtualization to live up to expectations?ö And, if so, how large companies might be able to take advantage of this powerful combination.
Prior to his present position, Simeon served as a executive vice president for central IT services, chief technology officer of the international Technology Solutions division, executive vice president of Banking and Insurance Systems, and a manager in the Server and Desktop Infrastructure division. His background also includes consulting on proactive change management for Fortune 500 companies in a wide range of industries.
State of the Server Blade and Virtualization Industries
- Anil Vasudeva, president and principal analyst, IMEX Research and Consulting
As an analyst specializing in next generation data-center computing, Anil Vasudeva will address the paradigm shift driven by the volume economics of blades combined with the adoption of virtualization in data centersùwith increases in efficiency and reductions in total cost of ownership of up to 45 percent. He will discuss consolidation through integration of industry standard servers, storage, and network elements with virtualization and autonomic management. His talk will present the status of open standards, how vendors are differentiating products, and the concept of server-enabled local area grids (LAGs) and wide area grids (WAGs).
IMEX specializes in next generation data-center computing infrastructures, blade servers, virtualization, high-performance computing, network storage, high-availability, and the end-to-end, IP-based convergence of computer and telecom technologies. Vasudeva has also served as director of Planning and Marketing at Fujitsu, director of Sales and Marketing at Ricoh, and in executive marketing and engineering management positions at Amdahl, BusLogic, and Memorex/Burroughs as well as a business, marketing and product planning advisor to several start-ups, Fortune 500 companies, and Wall Street investment banking companies.
In addition to these keynote addresses, the Server Blade Summit program will assemble an unprecedented range of experts in server, desktop, and application virtualization, blade server systems, server consolidation, storage, networking, systems management, and power and cooling. Sessions will be given by industry leaders from AMD, APC, Avocent, Broadcom, Brocade, Cisco, Citrix, DMTF, Eaton, Emulex, Ethernet Alliance, Hitachi, Intel, Liebert, LSI Logic, QLogic, Sun Microsystems, Symantec, VMware, XenSource among others.
The three-day Summit program will be filled with informative sessions in three tracks: IT strategy and business, IT technical implementation, and vendor technical. A special virtualization and blades ROI planning lab sponsored by IBM Tivoli and AVNET will feature tools designed to demonstrate, measure, track and calculate ROI and TCO benefits. There also will be open sessions on topics including the latest market research on blades and virtualization, an ôask-the-expertsö panel with TechTarget experts, an issues roundtable on managing virtualization and blades, and a shoot-out debate on whether and how blades and virtualization are transforming enterprise computing.
Premier sponsors for the 2007 Server Blade Summit include Key Information Systems, Ethernet Alliance, and Tehuti Networks. Media Sponsors include TechTarget (SearchDataCenter, SearchServerVirtualization, and SearchWinComputing), Grid Today, HPC Wire, Data Center Journal, Database Trends and Applications and Virtual-Strategy.com. Newswire sponsor is MarketWire. Analyst sponsors are Coughlin Associates and Focus Consulting.
For further Summit details and registration, visit Server Blade Summit.
About Server Blade Summit
The 6th Annual Server Blade Summit is focused exclusively on blades and virtualization. It features one-hour and half-day tutorials, business strategy and technical sessions, vendor technical sessions, panel discussions, keynotes, and exhibits. Subjects include server, desktop, and application virtualization, blade server and virtualization implementation, blade and virtualization management, power and cooling issues, server consolidation, networking, storage, standards, best practices, and market research. The Summit will take place May 1-3 at the Anaheim Marriott, Anaheim, CA.
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