CMGA 2004 25 - 27th August 2004 Melbourne Business School, MELBOURNE

Program Details

Jon Toigo is the advocate of the technology consumer and a fanatic for IT products and architecture that deliver on their fundamental business value proposition. His columns inform and entertain more than 500,000 readers monthly. His presentations are always well attended and well received.

Jon William Toigo is CEO and Managing Principal of Toigo Partners International LLC, an independent consultancy and technical research & analysis firm focused on providing actionable guidance to IT decision makers, and chairman of The Data Management Institute LLC, a professional development organization for those who design, plan, manage and administer storage infrastructure and data assets.

He is a 20-year IT veteran who has worked both as an operative within corporate information systems departments and as a senior consultant with two international systems integrators. He is also a prolific writer with 15 books and over 1000 articles in the technology trade press to his credit. His technology columns in popular print and on-line media garner a loyal readership of more than 500,000 per month.

In May 2003, Toigo founded Toigo Partners International as an alternative to current IT research & analyst practices that focus on “supply side” trends and largely fail to provide IT consumers with information they need to make informed and intelligent choices.

Toigo also founded the Data Management Institute to encourage a greater sense of identity and community among IT professionals responsible for storage infrastructure management and data administration. DMI offers training and certification in storage management and data protection planning.

Jon has published over 1000 articles in the computer trade press for publications worldwide ranging from Computerworld, Network Computing, Scientific American, and Washington Technology to Enterprise Systems, SearchStorage, SNWOnline, and Storage Pipeline.

He has also written fifteen books, including The Holy Grail of Network Storage Management (Prentice Hall PTR: 2003), Disaster Recovery Planning 3rd Edition: Preparing for the Unthinkable (Prentice Hall PTR: 2002), The Holy Grail of Data Storage Management (Prentice Hall: 2000), and The Essential Guide to ASPs (Prentice Hall: 2001). Forthcoming titles include Cost-Containment: Evaluating and Implementing Business-Savvy IT Strategy, due in 2004.

In addition to his work in print, Toigo provides consulting and analysis services to a broad range of international clients, ranging from technology vendors to consumers. Past clients have included Adaptec, AT&T, BMC Software, Brocade Communications Systems, Cisco Systems, Compaq Computer Corporation, Computer Associates, EMC Corporation, Hewlett-Packard Company, IBM, Tek-Tools, and many others.

The Holy Grail of Effective Data Management: Fixing Our Broken Storage Model Before It Fixes Us

Presented by Jon William Toigo
CEO, Toigo Partners International LLC
Chairman, The Data Management Institute LLC

Between the deafening roar of vendor hype, a dearth of product performance metrics, a ceaseless flood of data, complete disregard for management technology, and a near-total absence of savvy about the business-IT nexus, a crisis is looming within the IT departments of many Companies.

The stakes are high: financial solvency, job security, and perhaps even the future of commerce itself. The solution is data management.

In this presentation, Jon William Toigo, author of 15 books including the forthcoming Cost Containment: Assessing and Implementing Enterprise Computing Strategies, will discuss the key issues confronting both the CIO and CEO and will outline his own techniques for developing sensible data centric strategies for meeting the challenge of cost containment in corporate IT head on.

Toigo, a 20-year IT veteran, consultant and independent analyst, is widely regarded as the leading consumer advocate in information technology. His monthly columns and articles in leading technology trade press publications enjoy a readership of over a half-million IT and business professionals worldwide.

He has spoken before many groups and at many forums, including the 2002 and 2003 CMG International Conferences, where his commonsensical (and sometimes “irreverent”) views resonate with consumers – often to the dismay of vendors. In Australia, Toigo has become a familiar voice through his participation in the Terrapinn StorageWorld Conference for the past three years.

Real World Workload Characterization and Modeling
Ron Kaminski, Safeway Inc. (USA)

Modeling in the real world is a combination of technology and craft. Whether you use vendor products or “home grown” tools to collect, analyze and build queuing theory-based models of your distributed business computing systems, there are many techniques, tricks and illustrative war stories that experienced analysts have collected over time that can help. Take the vendor classes to learn where their product’s buttons are, take this seminar to learn how to focus your management’s questions, design meaningful experiments to sample, build realistic models of potential future resource consumption and help your management efficiently interpret your work.

Via example studies derived from real data and situations, we’ll cover how to combine workload-characterized views of collected data and business volume data to quickly analyze classic questions like: “What’s wrong on this machine?” “What size machine will this development system need in production?” and “What do we need to buy if we grow our production workloads by XX%?”

We’ll also cover the answers to unasked yet ever-present questions that always need to be answered in effective reports. Speaking of being effective, we’ll also cover the political realities that modelers will face, how to help your firm make great decisions, and yet minimize problems that can arise when model results conflict with existing plans. Learn how to avoid common pitfalls, reduce the number of study and reporting cycles and build the trust and cooperation that yields the greatest accuracy.

Ron Kaminski has been a capacity planner and performance analyst since the mid 1980s, on probably every platform you can name besides a mainframe. A dedicated workload characterization junkie, Ron enjoys using multiple vendor and “home-grown” tools to collect, reduce, analyze, display and manage large-scale performance and capacity planning, as well as sharing ideas with fellow capacity planners and performance analysts.

Ron was honored to receive both a Best Paper and The Mullen Award at CMG2003 in Dallas TX.

Register for this seminar.

AFTERNOON SESSION

Disaster Recovery and Continuous Availability Workshop
Brad Bruhahn (Sandpiper Data Systems)

This workshop is for IT professionals whether Network, Systems, Storage or Management. It is intended to cover the process and methodologies used to provide continuous availability for your IT computer systems and networks. The focus of the workshop is to highlight the vulnerabilities within your current IT recovery and mirroring processes, before it’s too late.

Systems, Network and Storage personnel who need to know how to configure and automate the Continuity process IT consultants who want to learn more about Disaster Recovery and Continuous Availability tools and techniques IT Managers who want to finally run an ‘un-announced’ DR test or need to ensure they can recover even if their technical experts are not available in the event of an actual disaster

Register for this seminar.