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Due to various reasons, the invitation for this is going out late. So in an effort to drum up some attendance, I'm posting the invite on the blog.

Please note that the event is sponsored by EMC, so if you work for A.N.Other vendor you might not be 100% welcome. However if you work for an end-user and you don't use EMC kit but you still think the agenda sounds interesting or just want a chance to network with an interesting bunch of people, you'd be welcome and we can always do with a different perspective.

^{23rd October 2008}

^{Holiday Inn Kensington Forum
97 Cromwell Road
London
SW7 4DN}

09:30 Introductions / Welcome and Message from the Chairman
^{09:45 Emulex: Fibre Channel over Ethernet
10:45 Coffee
11:00 Symmetrix Manager and Symmetrix Management Console Integration: ControlCenter 6.1 and beyond
12:15 ControlCenter User Community Communication
12:45 Lunch
13:45 Exanet: Multimedia Storage
14:45 Coffee
15:00 ControlCenter Update and Panel Session
16:00 Future Topics / Agenda for Next Meeting
16:30 Close}

Register here

I look forward to seeing you there!

One of the interesting things which is going to fall out of the Banking Crisis is the merger of Lloyds and HBOS; why interesting? Well I know a little bit about both environments; we all talk and we all compare estates, I don't think any of this is 'secret', one of the environments is a large HDS environment and the other is large IBM environment, both have made fairly significant investments in Storage Virtualisation and it will be interesting to see long-term which wins. I don't see both surviving. I guess it depends how aggressive the merger proceeds; the Lloyds-TSB merger fairly plodded.

If there is a silver-lining to the current cloud, we are going to see a fair amount of work I guess migrating and consolidating environments in the Finance Sector; those vendors which have good migration enabling tools might have a bright future.

Alex McDonald is suggesting a measure for the effectiveness of storage capacity here; he has come up the term Effective Load Factor which he shortens to ELF and then accompanies with which is either a picture of a dwarf or a gnome, it’s certainly not an Elf! BTW I am surprised that EMC have not picked on this blatant error!

I am going to suggest another measure, the Megabytes Per Gigabyte; to be known as the MPG! Per Gigabyte of disk, how much data can I store? In the UK, cars often have their MPGs quoted for different types of driving, so we have the Urban (City) Cycle which generally has really terrible MPGs and Motorway Cycle which has much better MPGs. So for storage, we could have the VMware MPG, the OLTP MPG, the streaming video MPG; perhaps all quoted at a standard IOP with a known read/write profile.