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Past Events

Latest Trends in Storage Networking

Thursday, November 12, 2009
9:00 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

Microsoft Corporation – Waltham
201 Jones Road
6th Floor
Waltham, MA 02451

Hottest Trends in Storage Networking

Thursday, October 29, 2009
9:00 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

Microsoft Regional Office
8800 Lyra Dr., Suite 400
Columbus, OH 04240

Next Generation Storage Networking

Thursday, August 20, 2009
9:00 a.m.–1:30 p.m.

University of North Texas
Discovery Park
3940 North Elm
Denton, TX 76207

Eliminating Backup System Bottlenecks

Wednesday, April 22, 2009
9:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m.

Schlegel 407 - Gleason Hall
224 Hutchison Road
Simon School - River Campus
Rochester, NY 14627

Next Generation Storage Networking

Thursday, April 16, 2009
9:00 a.m.–noon

Suffolk University Law School
1st Floor Function Room
120 Tremont St.
Boston, MA 02108

Digital Preservation and Data Life Cycle Management

Monday, March 9, 2009
9:00 a.m.–11:30 a.m.

Dartmouth College
Haldeman 041
North Main Street
Hanover, NH 03755

Next Generation Storage Networking

Thursday, February 5, 2009
8:30 a.m.–2:00 p.m.

Princeton University
Frist Campus Center
33 Washington Road, Room B04B
Princeton, NJ 08544

Next Generation Storage Networking

Wednesday, January 28, 2009
9:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

University of Minnesota Supercomputing Institute
Walter Library Room 402
117 Pleasant St SE
Minneapolis, MN 55455

Next Generation Storage Networking

Thursday, January 22, 2009
8:30 a.m.–1:00 p.m.

Southern New Hampshire University
Robert Frost Building
Walker Auditorium
2500 North River Road
Manchester, NH 03106

USENIX Education on the Road 2008

USENIX Education on the Road 2007

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USENIX Education on the Road

USENIX is excited to announce a new program that will bring USENIX-quality tutorials for free to a city near you.

In 2007 USENIX began to partner with leading universities, research institutions, and corporations to bring some of our most popular technical tutorials to a city near you—for free! Our purpose is to give back to long-standing USENIX members, while exposing those who are not familiar with USENIX to the quality of our conferences and educational services. What better way to do that then to send out a free sample of cutting-edge tutorial programs?

This program is offered free-of-charge to qualified IT professionals, researchers, and students.

We began this new program by offering two of our most popular tutorial titles, "Disk-to-Disk Backup and Eliminating Backup System Bottlenecks" and "Next Generation Storage Networking." On occasion, we may offer a condensed version of these two tutorials that combines the topics or areas of most interest to attendees into one event. We can be flexible in terms of exact tutorial content and will prioritize based on the issues that are of most interest to your group. Storage and backup are hot fields, rife with both innovation and confusion, so we anticipate that these topics will be relevant to a wide audience. Similarly, at past conferences these topics have appealed to people within a broad spectrum of technical experience, ranging from those who manage storage and design backup systems for a living to those who simply have curiosity.

Hottest Trends in Storage Networking

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2009, WALTHAM, MA 
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2009, COLUMBUS, OH 

Duration: The program runs from 9:00am to roughly 2:30pm, but it is broken down into 4 separate lectures with a lunch break in the middle. Feel free to leave early or arrive late. You will still get a lot out of your time investment.

Who should attend: The lecture materials are intended for a hands-on technical audience: system admins, storage admins, disaster recovery planners, data center managers, etc. We expect that you have a working knowledge of storage, backup system principles, networks, and servers. The course content is particularly useful to those who are responsible for system architecture and for general IT strategy.

Overview: This one-day event consists of four lectures addressing the latest trends in storage networking. The four lectures are taken directly from the program for Storage Day at the 23rd Large Installation System Administration Conference (LISA '09), which is being held in Baltimore, MD, November 1–6, 2009. It is the premier conference for hands-on system administrators. At LISA the presentations are delivered by industry experts (you know, the people who write the technical books and articles), not by product manufacturers. The program is offered for FREE to IT end users. There is a nominal fee to attend for those who do not work as an end user of information technology.

Digital Preservation and Data Life Cycle Management

MONDAY, MARCH 9, 2009, HANOVER, NH 

Duration: 2 and a half hours, not including Q&A

Who should attend: System administrators running day-to-day operations as well as systems architects and IT managers. This tutorial is technical in nature, but it does not address command-line syntax or the operation of specific products or technologies. Rather, the focus is on general architectures and various approaches to scaling in both performance and capacity. Since storage networking technologies tend to be costly, there is some discussion of the relative cost of different technologies and of strategies for managing cost and achieving results on a limited budget.

Overview: Long-term archiving is the next great challenge as IT departments are being forced to "keep-it-forever," but making data available forever is an expensive challenge. Tiered storage systems help to minimize costs, but run into major hurdles in their management and scalability. This course will describe the overarching trends and modern methods for storing and protecting immense amounts of precious data, without breaking the bank.

About the lecturer: Jacob Farmer is an industry-recognized expert on storage networking and data protection technologies. He has authored numerous papers and is a regular speaker at major industry events such as Storage Networking World, VMWorld, Interop, and the USENIX conferences. His no-nonsense, fast paced presentation style has won him many accolades. Farmer is a regular lecturer at many of the nation's leading colleges and universities. Inside the data storage industry, he is best known for having authored best practices for designing and optimizing enterprise backup systems and for his expertise in the marketplace for emerging storage networking technologies. He has served on the advisory boards of many of the most successful storage technology startups, and is well respected in the analyst community. Most recently, he was voted "Best Speaker" at Storage Networking World.

Eliminating Backup System Bottlenecks

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 22, 2009, ROCHESTER, NY 

Duration: 3 hours, not including 30-minute break and Q&A

Who should attend: System administrators involved in the design and management of backup systems and policy-makers responsible for protecting their organizations' data. A general familiarity with server and storage hardware is assumed. The class focuses on architectures and core technologies and is relevant regardless of what backup hardware and software you currently use.

Overview: The data protection industry is going through a mini-renaissance. In the past few years, the cost of disk media has dropped to the point where it is practical to use disk arrays in backup systems, thus minimizing and sometimes eliminating the need for tape. In the first incarnations of disk-to-disk backup—disk staging and virtual tape libraries—disk has been used as a direct replacement for tape media. While this compensates for the mechanical shortcomings of tape drives, it fails to address other critical bottlenecks in the backup system, and thus many disk-to-disk backup projects fall short of expectations. Meanwhile, many early adopters of disk-to-disk backup are discovering that the longterm costs of disk staging and virtual tape libraries are prohibitive.

The good news is that the next generation of disk-enabled data protection solutions has reached a level of maturity where they can assist—and sometimes even replace—conventional enterprise backup systems. These new D2D solutions leverage the random access properties of disk devices to use capacity much more efficiently and to obviate many of the hidden backup-system bottlenecks that are not addressed by first-generation solutions. Some of these next-generation approaches integrate with conventional backup systems; others build data protection logic into primary storage devices; others are commonly categorized as content archiving and/or life cycle management solutions.

This lecture takes two approaches. First it examines the obvious and not-so-obvious bottlenecks in conventional backup systems and describes various methods for eliminating bottlenecks and allowing the backup system to scale up. Second it looks at alternative approaches to managing and protecting data that take the burden off the conventional backup system. The overall objective is to help the backup system architect cut through the industry hype, sort out all of these new technologies, and figure out how to design and integrate a comprehensive data protection strategy.

About the lecturer: Jacob Farmer is an industry-recognized expert on storage networking and data protection technologies. He has authored numerous papers and is a regular speaker at major industry events such as Storage Networking World, VMWorld, Interop, and the USENIX conferences. His no-nonsense, fast paced presentation style has won him many accolades. Farmer is a regular lecturer at many of the nation's leading colleges and universities. Inside the data storage industry, he is best known for having authored best practices for designing and optimizing enterprise backup systems and for his expertise in the marketplace for emerging storage networking technologies. He has served on the advisory boards of many of the most successful storage technology startups, and is well respected in the analyst community. Most recently, he was voted "Best Speaker" at Storage Networking World.

Next Generation Storage Networking

THURSDAY, AUGUST 20, 2009, DENTON, TX
THURSDAY, APRIL 16, 2009, BOSTON, MA
THURSDAY, JANUARY 22, 2009, MANCHESTER, NH   
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 28, 2009, MINNEAPOLIS, MN 
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 2009, PRINCETON, NJ 

Duration: 3 hours, not including 30-minute break

Who should attend: System administrators running day-to-day operations and those who set or enforce budgets. This tutorial is technical in nature, but it does not address command-line syntax or the operation of specific products or technologies. Rather, the focus is on general architectures and various approaches to scaling in both performance and capacity. Since storage networking technologies tend to be costly, there is some discussion of the relative cost of different technologies and of strategies for managing cost and achieving results on a limited budget.

Overview: There has been tremendous innovation in the data storage industry over the past few years. Proprietary, monolithic SAN and NAS solutions are beginning to give way to open-system solutions and distributed architectures. Traditional storage interfaces such as parallel SCSI and Fibre Channel are being challenged by iSCSI (SCSI over TCP/IP), SATA (serial ATA), SAS (serial attached SCSI), and even Infiniband. New filesystem designs and alternatives to NFS and CIFS are enabling high-performance filesharing measured in gigabytes (yes, "bytes," not "bits") per second. New spindle management techniques are enabling higher-performance and lower-cost disk storage. Meanwhile, a whole new set of efficiency technologies are allowing storage protocols to flow over the WAN with unprecedented performance. This tutorial is a survey of the latest storage networking technologies, with commentary on where and when these technologies are most suitably deployed.

Topics include:

  • Fundamentals of storage virtualization: the storage I/O path
  • Shortcomings of conventional SAN and NAS architectures
  • In-band and out-of-band virtualization architectures
  • The latest storage interfaces: SATA (serial ATA), SAS (serial attached SCSI), 4Gb Fibre Channel, Infiniband, iSCSI
  • Content-Addressable Storage (CAS)
  • Information Life Cycle Management (ILM) and Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM)
  • The convergence of SAN and NAS
  • High-performance file sharing
  • Parallel file systems
  • SAN-enabled file systems
  • Wide-area file systems (WAFS)

About the lecturer: Jacob Farmer is an industry-recognized expert on storage networking and data protection technologies. He has authored numerous papers and is a regular speaker at major industry events such as Storage Networking World, VMWorld, Interop, and the USENIX conferences. His no-nonsense, fast paced presentation style has won him many accolades. Farmer is a regular lecturer at many of the nation's leading colleges and universities. Inside the data storage industry, he is best known for having authored best practices for designing and optimizing enterprise backup systems and for his expertise in the marketplace for emerging storage networking technologies. He has served on the advisory boards of many of the most successful storage technology startups, and is well respected in the analyst community. Most recently, he was voted "Best Speaker" at Storage Networking World.

 
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Last changed: 13 Nov. 2009 jp