What: Defining Software Defined Storage

When: Tuesday, Jan 28th, 2014 6:00 -- 9:00 PM

Where: Bellevue City Hall

Co-host company: Northwest Tech Academy (NWTA)

Admission: Registration required

Parking: Free (additional parking available in employee garage)

Food: Dinner provided for this event

Seattle Technical Forum and Northwest Tech Academy (NWTA) are excited to bring you a panel discussion on Software Defined Storage (SDS). Industry experts will demonstrate use cases, contrast different viewpoints and answer some of the most common questions surrounding SDS.

We are expecting 100+ people from local IT companies, organizations and startups...

Besides the world-class-expert speakers, there will be VIP guests from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Boeing, Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, Ebay, Intel, IBM, HP, AT&T, T-Mobile, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, HTC, Hulu, Oracle, SAP, CA, EMC, Expedia, Tableau, Zillow, SEOmoz, Bungie, Nintendo, Disney, Nordstrom, Costco, Alaska Airlines, Dice, Salesforce, SGI, VMWare, Citrix, UW, City University, Seattle University, Puget Sound Energy...

===Agenda =====

6:00pm - 7:00pm, Networking (come early and meet interesting tech gurus)

7:00pm - 9:00pm, Panel Discussion, Q&A

Here are the questions we will be asking the panel. If you have any questions you want us to ask them please email them to me at jasona@pnwta.co, text it to me at 206-605-7494 or tweet it to #nwtechall

1. What is your definition of software defined storage?
2. All storage is Software Defined, what is different about SDS
3. Is performance an issue with an SDS solution, particularly in a database or VDI

implementation?

4) Is SDS the same as storage hypervisor? If not how do they differ?

5) Who are the key players in the SDS space?

6) How does an IT pro get started with SDS?

7) How does SDS address problems like HIPAA compliance?

8) Are there recommended configurations for getting started with SDS?

9) All the media talks about SDS in relation to SAN infrastructure, does it go farther

than that, what about file and object storage?

10) The big storage vendors credit themselves on data reliability and availability; can

SDS solutions offer the same level of data integrity?

We will also be covering use cases for the most common uses of SDS for Media and Entertainment companies, Cloud Providers and much more.

Panelists:

Steven Umbehocker, CEO & Founder - OS Nexus

Steve has been working in the enterprise storage industry for over 15 years leading engineering teams at Veritas Software/Symantec/Citrix and now OS NEXUS on a range of products from Veritas NetBackup to Citrix XenServer. Today Steve is CEO and Head of Engineering for OS NEXUS, now a leading Software Defined Storage platform vendor with their QuantaStor product which is offered by a growing network of channel resellers like PogoLinux and cloud providers like IBM/Softlayer.

Paul Bibaud, Solutions Architect - Pogo Linux/Pogo Storage

Paul is recognized as a subject matter expert on Software Defined Storage and has over 600 deployments in field with some very insightful use cases to talk about.

Moderator:

Scott Gorcester, CEO - VirtualQube

Scott has been working on Storage for over 20 years and is a recognized leader in the IT industry, architecting infrastructure and data hosting solutions built on Microsoft and Citrix technology.