Day 3 at SNW was very busy for me. I got started a little late (I’m blaming #storagebeers). I caught the end of the SNW best practice awards. Some of the projects sounded very interesting. You can check them out (as well as all the presentations from the conference) on the SNW site.

Next, Murli Thirumale of Dell Storage (formerly of Ocarina) gave a presentation titled “How to manage data growth for greater efficiency, agility, and innovation”. He talked about this from the lens of data deduplication, it was actually a really interesting topic. He said the goal should be to shrink data early (at the source), and keep it shrunk thru the data’s  life cycle because this shrinks amount of time needed to backup, archive the data, as well as shrinks the requirements of  datacenter bandwidth. He talked about doing object dedupe, not just file level dedup.

Murli also was a guest on Silcon Angle’s Cube.tv, where he talked more about object dedupe but also about Dell Storage and Fluid Data.

Next I attended a panel discussion “Data center transformation – the changing roles of the people and technology“. This was a great session, all of the participants talked about how data center employees are being forced to not only be SMEs in one data center function, but to be able to broadly understand other functions. Totally hit my sweet spot of eduction in technology (second time in the conference I had this experience!).

Finally, I attended a presentation by David Davies, the CIO of Flight Options, called Unplanned disaster leads to storage freedom (Flight Options uses Dell Compellent). He told the story of a disaster that made me glad I no longer carry a pager! He also told how Compellent overpromised and overdelivered to get their operations up and running again.

SNW was a great experience. It was great to be around some of the well-known folks in our small storage community. Hopefully I’ll be at the fall event in Orlando!