* StorageWorld Boston
About half the high-tech trade shows turn out to be boondoggles for attendees and vendors alike. They are a good opportunity to see old friends and to cadge a few free drinks, but in most cases – unless you assign lots of value to a suitcase full of vendor literature and a stomach full of sweet and sour shrimp – most people don’t come back with too much of real value.
Some shows however do offer good value for your money and time. One of my favorites is StorageWorld Conference (SWC), an annual meeting held each spring in Long Beach, Calif. I like this one because in contrast to what I see at many other shows, the attendees here are, for the most part, real people. In other words, the people walking around on the show floor are people who actually work in IT rather than the people we usually see at these things – sales reps who want to sell to people who work in IT.
For the most part, I like this show for two reasons. First, the presentations seem pretty well grounded in the day-to-day realities of IT, offering tutorials and instructive panels that directly apply to what IT managers really do, and there is generally plenty of time for questions and answers after each presentation. My guess is this is the case at least in part because the show is run by the Association of Storage Networking Professionals – a group, I am told, that has a no-vendors-allowed policy when it comes to membership.
I also like the show for a second really good reason: attendance is free!
OK I admit it, I’m frugal (my wife has a different word for it), but the thousand dollars or more that some shows charge for attendance is well beyond my personal pain threshold.
Travel to trade shows and conventions on an IT budget tends to be a much more restrained affair than it does when you’re traveling on a vendor’s marketing dollars. Alas, the Long Beach facility is fine for attendees in the western part of the United States, but is decidedly less so for those who live on the east coast. And of course, it is not all convenient for our offshore colleagues.
This September we get a second SWC, this time in Boston.
If you are within a few hundred miles of Beantown this September, why not drop in on StorageWorld from Sept. 19-21. There are instructional tracks focusing on basic technology, storage management, business continuance and a number of other key areas. The agenda indicates lots of attention is being given to information lifecycle management, and to using a number of fundamental technologies such as Fibre Channel, iSCSI, SAS and SATA.
At 11 a.m. on Thursday, Sept. 21, I’ll be leading a tutorial on “super grids”, during which we’ll look at what’s going on in MIT’s Media Lab (an effort we’ve discussed in this column before) where researchers are building a 1.3-petabyte storage grid out of commonly available components. Stop by and say hello.
For info on StorageWorld Boston, go here.
