The 360 degree IT show to be held at London’s Earls Court on 22-23 September used to be known as StorageExpo but on the occasion of what would have been its tenth anniversary it has been rebranded to better address the growing importance of other infrastructure developments, outside of traditional data storage, such as hosted services, cloud computing, SaaS, and so forth. Neil Ainger previews the new beginning

With the raft of reporting challenges facing financial institutions these days, on the back of changes being introduced after the financial crisis, such as new OTC clearing mechanisms, the Financial Services Compensation Scheme, and so forth, it is more important than ever for retail and wholesale banks, insurers and other firms to be totally in charge of
their data function. Risk reporting requirements and the need to maximise profits by cross-selling to effectively targeted consumers is also adding to the need to master your data. Good business intelligence systems, data mining solutions and data centres are all essential to meet these demands and the IT architecture deployed must be flexible enough to cope with changing demands and inconsistent volumes, whether that means relying on virtualisation, service orientated architectures or the cloud. The data function at financial institutions should also be able to scale up or down, and store, share and retrieve information simply if a good management console is installed, while at the same time delivering disaster recovery capabilities and business continuity.

Meeting these various data demands is not easy so IT professionals and facilities managers need to keep up-to-date with all the latest storage products, data de-duplication solutions, virtualised server and desktop systems. The aim of the new 360° IT show is to enable them to do this in one place, at one time. The rebranded StorageExpo event, running 22-23 September at Earls Court, London, provides a forum to discuss these technologies and shifting architectural concepts, like cloud computing.

Keynote speakers
More than 8,000 technologists from financial institutions and other sectors are expected to gather for the 360° IT show. The exhibition hall will have more than 100 stands, each displaying solutions, new products, partnerships and other developments. The comprehensive education programme running alongside the exhibition includes keynote presentations from financial services-specific speakers, such as Ian Alderton, European chief information officer (CIO), at Wachovia Bank, who will be speaking as part of the IT innovation stream on Wednesday 22/9. Michael Warren, chief technology officer (CTO), at the London Metal Exchange, will also appear on the first day, as part of the ‘Is IT a strategic weapon or survival tool’ presentation; and Carl Froggett, a senior vice president, at Citi, is part of the ‘Globalised business and IT security’ strand, on Thursday 23/9.

Other notable speakers include the director of the government cloud programme, Chris Chant, discussing this important topic during the inaugural speech on the first day and Mette Ahorlu, consulting director, IDC, who will chair the discussion panel entitled ‘Are hosted services the way forward’ later on Wednesday 22nd at 1.45-2.45pm. Adam Thilthorpe, director of the Professionalism programme at the BCS computer society trade body, will take part in a panel the next day at 12.30-1.30pm looking at CIOs: The evolution of the species, where best practice will be shared and how to progress technologists into the boardroom, turning CIOs into CEOs, will be debated.

There is also a seminar programme consisting of a solutions centre with whitepaper and case study lectures, plus interactive workshops and roundtable talks, alongside TechLab sessions where software, servers and systems can be seen live in demonstrations. For more information please visit: www.360itevent.com. FST will be at the show on Stand G92; do come and visit us.

Exhibitors
The following is a selection of vendors exhibiting at this year’s show:

Samsung Semiconductor, Stand: G70 Samsung specialises in Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) and Flash memory technology and takes a keen interest in green IT, which it hopes to prove at the 360° IT show by displaying a range of its latest green memory solutions. Low power, high performance DDR3 and SSD systems for energy-efficient data centres will also be on display.

3Par, Stand: F50 Utility storage vendor, 3Par, allows organisations to create virtualised IT infrastructures for flexible workload consolidation. Its tightly clustered, and dynamically tiered storage platform, seeks to provide firms with an agile, resilient infrastructure that reduces running costs. This will be on display at the show and the vendor will also endeavour to show how its Utility Storage offering can meet the demands of open systems consolidation, integrated data lifecycle management, and performance-intensive applications.

Oracle Corporation UK, Stand: D60 Oracle’s product strategy tries to ensure flexibility and choice to its customers from 145 countries around the globe, across their entire IT infrastructure. Now with the Sun server, storage, operating-system, and virtualisation technology ranges, Oracle is positioning itself as a vendor able to offer a complete technology stack in which every layer is integrated to work together as a single system. A number of white papers can also be perused at the stand, including Sustainability Matters and Information Secured: Managing the end-to-end User Identity Lifecycle.

Hewlett Packard, Stand: E60 The world’s largest technology company, HP, now of course including EDS and its outsourcing operations, brings together a portfolio that spans printing, personal computing, software, services and, crucially for this show, IT infrastructure solutions. It intends to display a full range of the latter solutions at 360 degree IT and will be involved in presenting a number of whitepapers at the show,
such as infrastructure convergence; Greater efficiency with virtualisation;
Increasing resiliency and flexibility with virtualisation; and HP P4000 SAN storage.

Acronis, Stand: E41 The backup and recovery firm will be giving presentations and showing a number of its products at the show, especially its patented disk imaging and management technology. David Blackman, general manager, northern Europe, will give a presentation entitled Backup & recovery in a hybrid world – physical, virtual, cloud, which will focus on how to handle multiple disaster recovery strategies across a standard or virtualised server estate. The findings of the vendor’s latest survey will also be unveiled, which it says show that many of the companies it questioned, would take a day or more to recover in the event of downtime – not an acceptable timeframe in today’s fast-paced business world.

Avocent, Stand: B15 A division of Emerson Network Power, Avocent, is a provider of IT operations management and performance solutions that seek to help customers better manage IT complexity from the desktop to the data centre, providing improved control, energy consumption rates and costs. At Earls Court it will show live demos of its data centre management software, DSView 3, which consolidates functionality onto a single, secure browser-based interface, delivering remote access control over physical or virtual server environments. A range of IP KVM, serial ACS, intelligent power distribution units, and service processor managers will also be on display, which could possibly be of interest to financial services professionals as potential tools to comply with the government’s CRC ‘carbon tax’ scheme.

Iron Mountain, Stand: E90 The information management and shredding firm will be exhibiting solutions that enable banks, insurers and other financial institutions to know exactly what data they have stored, where. The offerings can operate in information silos, a common problem for the sector, or at the edge of bank networks. A new UK product for e-discovery purposes is also promised and can be viewed on stand.

Sepaton, Stand: D95 At this year’s 360ºIT show, Sepaton will be featuring its S2100 back up appliance and demonstrating the latest DeltaView software, which both fit into its range of storage appliances designed to protect data in traditional and cloud-based computing environments. Users can achieve secure, auditable and compliant data erasure to the Nist standards. Other offerings that enable enterprises to back up, deduplicate, replicate, and restore petabytes of data at wire-speed without disruption to existing infrastructure, will also be on display.

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