Virtualization proves to have many benefits for the enterprise.  IT managers can consolidate their physical infrastructures, preserve their investments in current operating systems and applications, and capitalize on hardware investments. As virtual environments grow, there can be benefits to capacity management and business continuity strategies.  However, there are pitfalls to watch out for including security challenges that will present themselves.

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Conference Program

 

8:00am - 9:00am - Registration and Continental Breakfast

 

9:00am - 10:00am

Susina

Going Green: How to Leverage Virtualization and Green IT to Drive Enterprise Efficiencies & Cost Savings
Steve Susina, Director of Marketing, Laurus Technologies

 

In the current turbulent economic environment, how technology is used becomes even more important. Companies are faced with the following challenges:

• How to cut costs

• How to use resources more efficiently

• How to cut the carbon footprint

• How to show your external customers that your organization is an environmentally conscious one

Given these challenges, how do you 'Go Green'?

 

In this session attendees will learn:

• What going green really means for your enterprise

• The interplay between virtualization and Green IT

• A sequence of steps you can take to move forward with a Green IT initiative

• How you can leverage virtualization to support your Green IT goals

• How the business can leverage Green IT to showcase its environmental consciousness

10:00am - 10:30am - Refreshment Break

 

10:30am - 11:30am 

O'Donnell

How to Design and Implement Your Virtualization Strategy
Shane O'Donnell, Vice President Engineering, BlueStripe Software

 

Virtualization has proven to have many IT and business benefits for the extended enterprise which include: maximizing resources, enablement of rapid recovery, containing server growth and consolidation to name a few.  From a business perspective costs can be reduced and new services can be launched.  However, this can be a massive undertaking.  Will all that’s involved, how should you get started?

 

In this session, attendees will learn how to identify:

 

• Key stakeholders and involve them

• Key business objectives

• Critical success factors for the project and the business

• Risk and constraints

• Different alternatives and approaches

• Where you are and what will it take to get you to where you need to be

• Costs and Benefits

 

11:30am - 12:30pm

Riddle

How to Leverage Virtualization to Deliver Quality Applications to the Enterprise
Mark Riddle, Sr. Systems Engineer, Surgient

As you make decisions about virtualizing your environment, you should also think about the ramifications virtualization will have on the way that application changes are developed and tested.

 

Areas that will be covered in this presentation include:

• Operational Challenges of Enterprise Application Change

• Getting Started with Virtualization

• Virtualization Management Approaches

• Avoiding Management Pitfalls

• A New Approach - Virtual Labs

• Architecting a Centralized Lab

Attendees will walk away with a solid grasp of ‘How to Get this Done!’

 

12:30pm - 1:30pm - Luncheon

 

1:30pm - 2:30pm 

Campbell

How to Enable Greater Efficiencies in a Disaster Recovery Environment through Virtualization
Dean Campbell, Principal Business Consultant, Hitachi Data Systems

 

Many claim that there are inherent advantages in utilizing virtualization in a disaster recovery environment.  But what are they and is there a trade-off between increased potential security threats versus a more efficient DR environment?

 

In this session attendees will learn:

• How effective a test bed environment is with the involvement of virtualization

• How frequently should a DR plan be tested

• Can money be conserved in a testing environment and does this outweigh the investment in virtualization technologies?

• Is there personnel savings of time and money in this environment?

 

2:30pm - 3:00pm - Refreshment Break

 

3:00pm - 4:00pm 

Muradian

How to Plan for Imminent and Potential Security Risks in a Virtual Environment
Sevan Muradian, Engineer, Kace and adjunct faculty for Northwestern University

 

Leading analysts argue that as more applications use virtualization, there will be increased activity in VM bug disclosures.  Analysts say that one of the biggest challenges is that virtualization creates a new environment in IT infrastructure that traditional security approaches do not address well. 

 

In this session attendees will learn:

• Approaches to take to extend current physical security policies to a virtual environment

• What the next generation of hackers may be attempting to do to your virtual environment

• How real the threats are

• Planning and actions you can take today to mitigate these potential threats

Whether you have relaxed security policies in your environment or very tight controls, this discussion with go through the variety of scenarios that exist and provide suggestions for handling the potential of increased security risks when migrating to a virtual environment.

 

4:00pm - 5:00pm

Susina Sim Katch

How to Get Business Buy-In for Your Virtualization Environment

Moderator:
Steve Susina, Director of Marketing, Laurus Technologies

Panelists include:

Jeffrey Apa, Manager Data Center and Servers, Loyola University

Jim Sim, Data Center Solutions, OSI Group IS Division, Nippon Express USA

Harry Katch, Technology Leader, GE Healthcare

and other enterprise IT professionals

 

There is clear evidence that IT support and infrastructure costs can be decreased when migrating to a virtualization environment.  But what about the benefits to the business? As many companies look to IT as an enabler of business productivity, how can IT translate this investment in concepts that business executives can understand?  What is the real value to the business in terms of employee productivity, company profitability, and new business opportunities?

 

In this session attendees will have these questions, and more, answered by a group of seasoned enterprise IT virtualization professionals.

 

 

 

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What You Will Learn

Whether you are an experienced virtualization specialist or starting down the path, this one day conference will provide you with proven strategies and tactics for:

·         Leveraging virtualization at all layers of the architecture

·         Effectively virtualizing your applications

·         Successfully virtualizing your server hardware

·         How to consolidate your storage hardware

·         Working through various security challenges in different virtualization environments

·         How to measure resource usage and cost allocations among applications across a shared infrastructure

·         How to protect against rogue toolkit hypervisors

·         How to manage the unpredictable errors that virtualization software can cause

·         How to leverage virtualization for more effective DR

·         How to show to management the ROI of virtualization

 

 

 

Conference price: $199 per person.