I have the great pleasure to attend this week's Storage Academy in Frankfurt, Germany. I thought that I use this medium to process some of the personal learning and impressions I made today, and hope this is of interest to you.
Firstly, a couple of words about the location and event organization. The Storage Academy EMEA takes place at the Sheraton Hotel next to Frankfurt's main airport. From my hotel room, I can overlook the main terminal and the runways of the airport. This is great, I love it. The hotel is a perfect location for a conference of this size (approximately 600 Sun employees and partners are present). For attendees arriving by air, it's a short walk from the terminal. No need for a rental car. I like that. The hotel staff is clearly experienced to cater for an event this size. Top marks here for everything related to event infrastructure.
Today was packed mainly by a series of general sessions from Sun's top storage brass, and a list of Sun's key storage partners. This was a lot of stuff to digest. Some of which was new, some not, but all very interesting. Here are some highlights.
We heard again about the importance of Sun Storage to the overall business success of Sun as a systems company. Sun is organized around the 4S (four Esses)- System, Storage, Software, Service - all contributing to Sun's key mission of solving customer problems through innovation, and plenty of innovation can be found in the storage world. Just look at FISHworks, Honeycomb, Thumper and ZFS.
Within the storage "S", the huge product portfolio can be categorized as tape, disk and breakthrough. I'll blog some other time about the three categories.
A big thing in storage land, is thin provisioning. Hugh Yoshida, CTO Hitachi Data Systems, gave us an excellent insight in how the new ST9990V can use thin provisioning to increase storage utilization. Great talk, Hugh, thanks for that.
In the breakout session, I chose a presentation about a topic I knew absolutely nothing about : Sun VTL. Oversimplified, VTL is a server/storage/OS/application combo that pretends to be a tape drive. It takes backup data and stores them on disk with the option to move them to tape later. Great solution if you need to reduce you get close to exhausting your backup window.
I also managed to spend a bit of time at the partner pavillon. I got a demo of G10's IP video surveillance solution, based on Sun Fire x4500. They use the Thumper for video stream processing and for recording the streams into video files. Tons of data, tons. What a great use of the x4500. What struck me as a great feature, was the capability to do video recognition on programmable patterns. As a example, I was shown a video of an attacker raising his hand for a punch on an innocent victim. The motion of the aggressor making a fist and moving it towards the face of the victim was detected by the application and marked with a red rectangle on the screen. If you are a police officer sitting in front of a wall of surveillance screens, this could easily alert you in real time of a wrong doing. Endless other possibilities on how this can be used came to mind without having to think too hard (a hallmark of any great innovation).
That's it for now. I'm getting tired, and I want to be fully awake for another learning day at Storage Academy tomorrow. Would not want to miss a beat here.