It’s that time of year – storage conference season seems to be in full swing. I’ll be attending Storage Networking World next week with the Dell Storage team.  Here’s a quick overview of what we have planned:

Monday, April 4th

9:40-10:25 AM: VDI Solution Spotlight by Will Urban (of Whiteboarding with Will fame). Learn how Dell architects storage solutions in virtual desktop environments to deliver cost-effective, scalable solutions.

Tuesday, April 4th

Dell is sponsoring a welcome reception from 5:30 – 7:30, and of course we’ll all be coming to #storagebeers, which is at Faultline Brewing from 7:00 – 10:00.

Wednesday, April 5th

10:00- 10:30: How to Manage Data Growth for Greater Efficiency, Agility and Innovation. Join this session to examine the storage landscape and learn how you can achieve greater IT success through automation, virtualization and intelligence.

10:45 – 11:30 AM: Evaluator Group panel with David Davies, CIO, Flight Options. The panel will discuss how the data center is transforming from a SLA orientation to a highly flexible service organization, and the impact this shift will have on businesses.

11:40 AM – 12:25: David Davies, CIO, Flight Options “Unplanned Disaster Leads to Storage Freedom.” Hear how an unexpected disaster forced Flight Options to change the storage foundation, achieve 100 percent data center virtualization and reduce management time to 15 minutes per week.

Hands-on labs

We will be hosting several hands-on labs that will run during the entire conference:

• Data deduplication
• Storage implications for server virtualization
• Unified storage – IP solutions
• Enterprise content management

We’re also rooting for Dell Compellent customer Greg Folsom of Arnold Worldwide. He’s a finalist in the SNW Best Practices awards program.

I’ll be reporting live from the event…so let me know if you want me to try and capture something for you.

The best part of this SNW will be reconnecting with lots of old friends from EMC, Wikibon, and other companies. And hopefully meeting some of the storage twitter folks I’ve never met in real life (like the Infosmak crew!). Let the conference season commence!